'Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's Country Parson and Early Modern Social Discourse

Canadian Journal of History, Aug 2005 by Carlson, Eric Josef

Early Modern Britain/Début de la Grande-Bretagne moderne 'Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's Country Parson and Early Modern Social Discourse, by Ronald W. Cooley. Mental and Cultural World of Tudor and Stuart England. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004. vii, 238 pp. $53.00 US (cloth).

Now that a consensus has been reached concerning George Herbert's theology, Ronald Cooley asserts, scholars can cease being distracted by that when they read Herbert's Country Parson and pay attention instead to what it is really about: "describ[ing] the character of an emerging early-modern clerical profession" (p. 55). For Cooley, an associate professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, Herbert wrote this book with two goals in mind. One was to provide a guide to the perplexed on how to be a rural pastor in the newly emerging world of a professionalized clergy. The other was to advance his own personal professional prospects so that he would not spend the rest of his career stuck in the pokey suburban parish of Bemerton in Wiltshire.

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Cooley argues that Herbert was a Jacobean to the core when it came to his vision of the church, but conscious of the reality that in the Caroline world this could be an obstacle to advancement. He uses close readings of the text to suggest that Herbert staked out positions that were cautious and deliberate, sometimes even ambiguous, in order to have some chance of getting his book past the censors. (He died in 1633 without having made the attempt; the book was published many years later.) The book shares with Laud and his ilk an exalted view of the clergy - a "new clericalism" - while being slippery on doctrine and liturgical practice; the focus instead is on providing some help with pastoral practicalities not taught in the universities from which a growing proportion of clergy were graduating.

Cooley identifies many tensions in Herbert's writing, working as he was in a world changing on many fronts. Herbert supported the "new clericalism" while promoting a pastoral ideal that pre-supposed less distance between minister and parishioners, than there had been in the past. In addition, his support for the growing claims of the clergy as professionals was in tension with his opposition to similar claims by physicians and lawyers. Agricultural improvement met with his approval, while he also deployed a commonwealth rhetoric hostile to it and supported the traditional social order being undermined by enclosure and other improvements. Finally, he upheld patriarchy while delegating ministry and discipline even to women and children.

There are many problems with Cooley's reading, and it is possible only to give the briefest view of them. First, he presumes that Herbert intended to publish his Country Parson, but offers no evidence. There is a prefatory letter from the author to the reader, and Herbert does offer the hope that it will be of benefit to others (although he has written it to give himself "a mark to aim at"), but there is no evidence that he tried to publish in the months between its completion and his death. Nor is there any basis for believing that he had higher professional aspirations. His relationship to the earl of Pembroke could probably have secured him better than Bemerton if he had wanted it in the first place. It could well be that, given his chronic poor health, he had simply settled for a small parish with (apparently) enough of an income to be able to afford a curate to do much of his work. In fact, the great paradox behind Herbert's book is that the records from Bemerton during his years there give no evidence of actual pastoral activity on his part. In that respect, Country Parson appears to be an example of the old cliché that those who can do, while those who can't (in this case due to infirmity) teach. Perhaps the book helped him to relieve a conscience burdened by the knowledge that he was not carrying out the pastoral duties of his benefice.

Cooley also makes claims for Country Parson's originality and value that are only possible because he wrenches proof out of the context of contemporary sources (printed and manuscript) on ministry. While it is true that there were no how-to manuals for parish ministers, the need for instruction was, in fact, being filled in other ways. Cooley ignores the importance of manuscript circulation, by means of which the pastoral advice of respected figures like Richard Greenham and John Dod reached a wide audience. Visitation sermons, which the clergy were required to attend, were also important means for conveying advice. These sermons were preached regularly, and the small number printed is no measure of either their quantity or content. Had Cooley studied printed sermons from the 1570s onward, he would have seen that Herbert's ideas are often less original than he wants to believe and are part of a long-running post-Reformation conversation within clerical circles. Reading these sources has enabled scholars to debunk the notion of a "new clericalism" in the 1620s and 1630s, and to show that Elizabethan writers were making claims that easily rivaled those of preReformation priests. In addition, the notion that the minister should resolve disputes within the parish and that the courts should be used only as a last resort is a routine feature of clerical writing long before Herbert was even born. It is simply not, as Cooley would have it, a valuable contribution to an emerging discourse of professional rivalry in which the clergy were staking their claims over and against physicians and lawyers. Space limitations do not permit more examples, but suffice it to say that historians will find this a frustrating book.

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'Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's Country Parson and Early Modern Social Discourse

Canadian Journal of History, Aug 2005 by Carlson, Eric Josef

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