Heart-work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic and Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan.

Cristina Malcolmson, Heart-work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. xiii + 298 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-8047-2988-3.

R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan

Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. x + 241 pp. $75. ISBN: 0-85991-569-7.

Both Cristina Malcolmson and R. V. Young place their subjects at the beginning stage of modernity, and both argue that, contrary to the dominant critical understanding of recent decades, their subjects resisted the very developments that have come to define them for their late twentieth-century readers. This common theme is interesting in part because Malcolmson and Young come to their positions with what might well be seen as diametrically opposing assumptions: Malcolmson's approach is indebted primarily to Cultural Materialism, while Young's primary debts are to Augustine, Aquinas, and Louis Martz. The larger issues, methodological or historical, however, are not where either book is most successful. While these issues are fundamental to the authors' arguments, Malcolmson and Young are most effective in developing more circumscribed material. Taking as his subject the devotional poetry of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan, Young shows persuasively that "the same features and styles" (4) in these authors that have in recent years been attributed to Protestant poetics are found also in Catholic devotional poets (especially Spanish devotional poets) of the same era. For her part, Malcolmson shows convincingly that the Protestant doctrine of vocation led Herbert consistently to revise and extend the poetry of the Williams manuscript in order to achieve "the character of holiness" (28 ff) in the Bodleian manuscript. This goal is clarified, Malcolmson demonstrates, by the character of a parish minister laid our in The Country Parson.

Malcolmson uses the term "heart-work" in her title "to refer to the link forged by [the doctrine of vocation] between the devotional heart and labor in the world associated with one's estate or profession" (1). The former, one's inner calling, was referred to as the "general" vocation while the latter, the outer calling, was referred to as the "particular" vocation. According to Malcolmson, the overriding goal of Herbert and his family was "to preserve the connection between devotion and business in the world" (3), that is, between the general and particular callings. She points out that they shared this goal with many Protestant ministers at a time when social pressures brought about by a nascent capitalist economy were beginning to force a separation between the domestic and the public self.

In the case of Herbert, the effort to connect the general and the particular callings underwent a transformation between the early poems in the Williams manuscript and his later work. Initially, Malcolmson argues, Herbert participated in the coterie verse-making of his extended family, a family that under William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, led the anti-Spanish faction at the court of James I. In this phase of his work, Herbert wrote as if he could maintain the piety of his general calling while he also developed an external gentility appropriate to the status of his family and to his personal hopes of preferment and potential service at the court. As Pembroke and his circle lost ground to the Duke of Buckingham, Malcolmson suggests that something like becoming a country parson may well have been the sort of low status position Herbert would have begun to anticipate. As a result, he may well have started "to seek other methods of self-definition than that of family or political association" (25). In conv incing detail, Malcolmson demonstrates that what the revisions and extensions of the Williams manuscript in the Bodleian show is a transition in Herbert's understanding of his particular calling. In the later poetry as well as in The Country Parson, which Malcolmson examines carefully, Herbert's self-understanding shifts from gentility to "holiness," that is, he abandons the language of status seeking for a language that erases any distinction between interior piety and exterior vocation.

In her final chapter, Malcolmson returns to parallels between Herbert and his family by comparing Herbert's poem "Paradise" and the gardens created by his relatives. Both the poem and the gardens advertise a commitment to "principles of a static hierarchical order by dedicating growth and productivity to communal rather than individual purposes" (179). Simultaneously, both also might be said to "describe a religious and social order that sanctifies the use of force for the purpose of reproducing that order" (204). The target of this new order was for Herbert and his family the New World, where the family enterprises promised financial gain as well as an opportunity for a display of patriotism. Herbert's various efforts at self-definition and the enterprises of his family are, Malcolmson argues, evidence of "a social patriarchy in transition between feudalism and capitalism" (220). The position of the later Herbert, however, emphatically rejects any separation between inner and outer selves and seeks a "transp arent heart" (131) that opposes the modernist values of individualism and a private self. This is so, Malcolmson points our in her "Conclusion," even though "the traces of modern subjectivity" (205) many find in Herbert continue to attract readers to his work and to inform Herbert criticism.

For R. V. Young nor only the poetry of Herbert but also the poetry of Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan "recoils from the incipient emergence of the characteristic features of modernity" (218). These "characteristic features" amount to a preference "for the immediate and sensory over the spiritual, of the political over the religious, of the temporal over the eternal" (218-19). In Young's view, the two dominant critical approaches to seventeenth-century devotional poets in recent years have failed to separate their achievements adequately from the secularizing tendencies that Young sees beginning in their age and developing into the full-blown modernity of the present.

While Young values the contributions of the first dominant approach, Protestant poetics, because it has given us new insight into the influence of Christian teaching on the poets he studies, he believes it has attempted, mistakenly, to place these writers firmly on the side of emergent modernism -- in Young's view, a legacy of the Reformation. On the other hand, Young believes the second approach, postmodernist criticism, has failed to recognize how these seventeenth-century writers shared an awareness of a "slippage of being" comparable to Derrida's (160). Not surprisingly, Young claims their awareness resisted postmodern conclusions. Relying on St. Augustine, Young argues that Crashaw's poetry, for example, reveals that "the stream of our words into the abyss of oblivion -- of signifiers pursuing elusive signifieds -- veils the Being of the immutable Word of God" (161). These claims and others similar to them are likely to be either tantalizing or frustrating to readers. Large polemical arenas such as the r elationship of the Reformation to modernism or of St. Augustine to Derrida appear frequently in this book; but without a much expanded volume and a much wider subject, these cannot be addressed adequately at least from the perspective of readers who do not share Young's biases. He is, however, more thorough in developing the book's narrower argument, that the allegedly Protestant "features and styles" of the English poets were in fact shared with their Catholic contemporaries.

Citing primarily seventeenth-century Spanish writers of devotional poetry (for example, Pedro Espinosa, Lope de Vega, and Francisco de Quevedo), Young shows striking similarities in belief and practice to those of the English devotional poets of the same period. Against the claims of Barbara Lewalski and Richard Strier, and others who have argued for a distinctive Protestant poetics, Young points to very close Spanish and indisputably Catholic parallels to Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan in three areas (each heading one of the book's three chapters): "The Presence of Grace," "Meditation and Sacrament," and "Biblical Poetics." Young quotes extensively from Spanish and less so from French and Latin (translations are provided) to demonstrate convincingly that meditation practices, the uses of the Bible, and concepts of grace were notably more consistent across the Catholic-Protestant divide than has often been claimed in recent criticism. In doing so, Young is forthrightly revisiting and defending the work of Louis Martz, whom he cites frequently.

Both R. V. Young and Cristina Malcolmson have written masterful books that demonstrate, despite sharply contrasting approaches and commitments, how early seventeenth-century devotional poets are at odds with modernist and postmodernist attempts to understand their work. Although at times Young's religious polemic and Malcolmson's historical distancing of Herbert's subjectivity tend to override the poetry of their subjects, both books, in their divergent ways, are well worth reading.