Textual Introduction

Although George Herbert (1593-1633) never visited France, and lived and wrote centuries before French poststructuralism, the pervasive allusiveness of his poetry in The Temple certainly marks his work as profoundly "intertextual" avant la lettre. To enter the well-wrought stanzas of Herbert's "Church-Porch" and "The Church" is to enter not a realm of mystic solitude but of reverberating dialogue—both externally with biblical, liturgical, and lyrical traditions, and internally among his poems themselves. So Herbert's lyrics often have been compared to the varied voices in a human congregation; and so also, as in the epigraph above, their dazzling intertextuality has put interpreters in mind of astronomy, of what the poet himself calls "the conſtellations of the ſtorie" (line 4). "Surely," as Richard Strier has remarked, Herbert's description of the Bible as "[t]his book of ſtarres" (line 14) is "telling us how to read his own volume."

Herbert's astronomical imagery has special relevance to the unique purposes and, dare we say, the clarifying and magnifying powers of the present edition. For if Herbert's is a "book of ſtarres," then The Digital Temple is rather like a space telescope. The amazingly interactive search capacities of this electronic engine—including literally telescoping powers of textual magnification—bring into startling focus many of Herbert's configurations that have previously been little noticed, and allow us to see his storied constellations in deep and brilliant new ways. (Please see Versioning Machine Instructions for details about the edition's user interface.) In creating and presenting this born-digital documentary edition, we make what we believe are many fresh observations in our comments and critical notes along the way; but we also believe that in the years and decades to come this Versioning Machine will become a "visioning machine," enabling others to make discoveries that we cannot yet imagine.

We are certain that Herbert is ready, as the saying goes, for his close-up. The Temple (1633) is perhaps the finest collection of devotional verse in the language; and with Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) and the First Folio of the plays (1623), Ben Jonson's Works (1616), and Donne's Poems (1633), it is also among the most significant of early modern publications—running through eleven editions in the seventeenth century. From our vantage point in the early twenty-first century, Herbert now appears as one of the most quietly influential poets of the past 400 years. From Donne, Crashaw, Herrick, Vaughan, and Taylor; through the Wesleys, Cowper, Blake, Coleridge, Emerson, Dickinson, and Hopkins; to Eliot, Weil, Bishop, Auden, Larkin, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas, Heaney, Pinsky and Glück—Herbert's admirers and imitators demonstrate his ability, writes Jonathan F. S. Post, "to speak across many generations, … [and] a plausible case can be made that no other poet from the English Renaissance has built so substantial and longstanding a reputation on so slender a body of work." It is an Einsteinian paradox that Herbert's slender 1633 duodecimo contains such macrocosmic heights and depths, and that through this narrow portal we hear "Church-bels beyond the ſtarres" ("Prayer 1," line 13).

Yet The Digital Temple is, in technical fact, a device for microcosmic and indeed virtually microscopic exploration—in other words, for paying unusually close attention to textual artifacts. This virtual volume—grown from a partnership among Northern Michigan University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Virginia Press, with the cooperation of the Williams, Bodleian, and Folger Shakespeare Libraries—has the following objectives: to bring together the primary materials essential to the study of Herbert's poetry; to preserve the resulting database in a way that will ensure maximum flexibility, portability, and longevity; and to facilitate access through a robust user interface. The reader will find both diplomatic and modern-spelling transcriptions—linked to high-resolution direct-to-digital scans—of three artifacts: Williams MS. Jones B62 (w), Bodleian MS. Tanner 307 (b), and a copy of The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (ed1). We complement these primary-source materials with critical apparatus appropriate to the digital medium, and an interface that enables efficient navigation and queries.

No other comprehensive digital edition of Herbert's verse is available. Several electronic anthologies, such as Representative Poetry On-line, provide selections. The FIEN Group's Classictexts poetry anthology, available both on-line and as a CD-ROM, includes a transcription of the 1633 edition. Luminarium also has transcribed the 1633 Temple and there is a similar anonymous website (George Herbert and the Temple) that includes several images from a copy of the first edition. All of these, however, are strictly HTML-encoded texts—useful only for a web-browser or PDF reader—and offer only one constructed text.

Even Early English Books Online (EEBO) includes images and a transcription of the 1633 edition only. Furthermore, the images are from microfilm—of a quality considerably poorer than what is found in The Digital Temple. More importantly, EEBO's transcription and encoding, though following TEI recommendations, are intended solely for reading and large-corpora searching; nor does the code base include an interwoven modern-spelling transcription. Its scope and encoding granularity far exceeding those of EEBO's Herbert, The Digital Temple will be preferred by specialists as well as by other scholars, teachers, and students of early modern literature.

Its richly encoded transcriptions, high-resolution images, and full-text parallel display also distinguish The Digital Temple from anything currently or formerly available in print, including the Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), Di Cesare (MRTS, 1995), and Wilcox (Cambridge, 2007) editions. Though masterful, these cannot convey as can an interlinked and layered digital edition both the political and aesthetic significance of differences among the sources. Their notes and glosses, moreover, sometimes perpetuate the common view of Herbert as a retiring religious moderate, and overlook his poetic engagement with the heated theological and constitutional debates of the time. Another important objective, then, is to recover—through parallel texts, images, and apparatus—a poet fully involved in the inter-connected doctrinal, ecclesiastical, and political issues of his era.

Creation of the Herbert artifacts (roughly 1615-33) spanned one of the more fractious periods in England's religio-political history, just prior to the Civil War; they are a fascinating index of one writer's engagement with an ideologically volatile world on the verge of cultural collapse. Students and teachers of early modern literature, literary scholars, and historians of seventeenth-century politics and the English church will have access in a single resource to the evolving views of an important establishment divine, and one of English literary history's most influential poets. The high-resolution images will also serve bibliographical studies, and the richly encoded transcriptions will allow scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the database with the aid of text analysis software.

Our principal purpose in building a digital documentary edition is to combine unmediated access to the three witnesses with a critical apparatus that avoids eliding significant differences among them. We neither champion the manuscripts as finally more authoritative than the first edition, nor overlook the great value of an eclectic transcription such as those found in the Wilcox and Hutchinson volumes—even if both overtly favor the 1633 Temple. Indeed, insofar as Herbert's verse is a product of convergence between seventeenth-century manuscript and print cultures, the posthumous first edition is of as much interest as the earlier scribal documents. Yet even though a good critical print edition accounts for all variants, its single transcription cannot avoid favoring one authoritative source over another wherever they differ. On the other hand, parallel display of multiple witnesses in a digital environment foregoes the (perhaps unintentional) rhetorical illusion of an absolutely stable text in favor of an (albeit equally rhetorical) emphasis on difference and negotiations. That the manuscript scribes and Cambridge printers are ontologically inseparable from the poems conceived and composed by George Herbert resonates with Jerome McGann's social-text theory of editing. Drawing a sharp distinction "between a work's bibliographical and its linguistic codes," McGann argues that "as the process of textual transmission expands, whether vertically (i.e., over time) or horizontally (in institutional space), the signifying processes of the work become increasingly collaborative and socialized." This collaborative process includes not only readers of texts but those who produce them: authors, amanuenses, printers, publishers, compositors, book designers, etc. One need not embrace Roland Barthes's mort d'auteur—a Brechtian vision of the author "diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage" (a vision which, after all, often serves the ideological end of author-izing the critical theorist)—to acknowledge that Herbert's poems are artifacts with a history, an ontogeny that can enrich our understanding of their meaning. While Herbert's text is nowhere near as "unstable" as Crashaw's (with its repeated manuscript and print revisions), let alone Shakespeare's (for which, famously, no manuscripts exist), parallel access to the three earliest sources in their entirety allows us to see Herbert's poems not as pristine objects but rather as evolving, wordy things—and as things nevertheless yearning towards coherence and truth and beauty. The following observations, then, demonstrate why in our view a documentary edition is a much-needed alternative and complement to the eclectic print-based editions.

The greatest advantage of a digital edition is the limitless "space" available for presenting all relevant materials. Rather than consulting a textual apparatus to reconstruct actual witnesses in the abstract (or, the obverse—to deconstruct the established, edited text), the Digital Temple user can simply view the several versions side-by-side. Presenting Herbert's poems in this way is not without theoretical consequence: it assumes that difference matters and should be in the foreground. For instance, a comparison of The H. Communion in the earlier Williams manuscript with the completely different poem of the same title in the later Bodleian manuscript reveals that the former is an openly disputatious work, mocking Roman Transubstantiation, while the latter carefully avoids theological controversy, expressing agnosticism about how, precisely, the communicant encounters Christ in the Eucharist. Yet we should not conclude from this comparison that Herbert's more mature work leads him away from all debates over Divinity. Instead, Herbert's overall approach, as revealed in his many revisions, cuts, and (mainly) additions to The Temple, seems to be one of strategic, nuanced engagement with topics of controversy.

Look, for example, at the revision in the Williams manuscript (w) version of The Altar, line 15. The difference between "thy onely sacrifice" and "thy bleſsed sacrifice" is pivotal: whereas the former might be an attempt to qualify the potentially Laudian or Roman Catholic resonances of the poem's title by insisting that the Atonement is in no way replicated in the ritual, the revision softens the poem's avant-garde Protestant distinctiveness. Yet this apparent accommodation of ritual and Rome must be further contextualized by what follows: The Sacrifice, a long poem that at first adopts a voice and sensibility reminiscent of the "old religion" in order to explore—and eventually to exhaust—its possibilities by asserting in the end the utter uniqueness, indeed the "onliness," of Christ's sufferings: Never/neuer was grief/greif like mine (lines 216, 252). Then come two other poems (The Thanksgiving and The Reprisall (b, ed1) / The Second Thanksgiving (w)) that enact and assert even more baldly the failure of medieval penance and works-righteousness. Such satiric details remind us that, contrary to his reputation as a mild and uncontroversial pastor, innocent of dogmatic dispute, Herbert is minutely sensitive to and engaged in the politics of theological nuance and controversy.

We recognize and admire Hutchinson's 1941, DiCesare's 1995, and Wilcox's 2007 editions as both magisterial and indispensable. Yet in many respects, these cannot by their very nature as eclectic texts adequately represent the fascinating interrelationships among the source artifacts. Hutchinson, writing well before the flowering of the more historically nuanced scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s, tends to elide the political Herbert by assuming that the English via media was a stable mode of divinity to which the poet merely adhered as opposed to a position on the ideological spectrum which he and others sought to articulate and establish. In contrast Wilcox, with her masterful command of Herbert scholarship old and new, recognizes that this "middle way" was conflicted and contested (xxxiv); yet because she favors the 1633 edition, her transcriptions and notes sometimes de-emphasize important differences among it and the manuscripts. For instance, though noting the "Altar" emendation in her apparatus, she says little of its significance other than that the pre-emended version "reveals H.'s assumption that there is now only one sacrifice." Thus, while the revision, at least temporarily, erases that dogmatic insistence—revealing, indeed, a Herbert strategically softening his own Protestant orthodoxy as a prelude to satirizing Roman devotion—Wilcox's annotation inadvertently reinforces a common view of the poet as a settled, anti-controversial religious moderate. Similarly, our parallel apparatus highlights Herbert's intervention on contested ground in his late introduction of the Puritan-inflected To All Angels and Saints and Sion, as well as the loyally Conformist celebration of The British Church—all of which appear first in the Bodleian manuscript. Thus The Digital Temple's parallel display, textual notes, and glosses provide help to recover a Herbert immersed in the religious politics of his day—a proponent of "the middle way," yes, but one who called on his Country Parson "to keep the middle way … fully, and exactly," and "to lead his people exactly in the ways of Truth."

Also due to the necessary physical limitations of print-based editing, Wilcox, like Hutchinson before her, attempts to construct for each poem an ideal version. Moreover, both editors' favoring of the first edition attenuates the poems' material history. The digital nature of our project overcomes this limitation. Several additional examples serve to distinguish The Digital Temple in this respect from previous editions, especially Wilcox's. Look again, for example, at "The Altar," now with an image of the 1633 edition (ed1). The words HEART, ALTAR, and SACRIFICE have been rendered upper-case type, despite there being in the manuscripts no authority for doing so. We think it likely, as does Wilcox, that the actual copy text for The Temple was neither of the extant manuscripts. It is unlikely, however, that the now lost "little book" mentioned by Izaak Walton—supposedly passed from Herbert on his deathbed to a friend and probably the source from which the Bodleian manuscript was transcribed—contained these novel capitalized emphases that were then simply replicated in some other lost copy and/or in the first edition. Occam's razor suggests that the upper-case type was introduced by the Cambridge printers, Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel, or by Herbert's close friend, Nicholas Ferrar who perhaps oversaw the book's production. Like the revised "onely" to "bleſsed" phrase in the Williams manuscript discussed above, the emphasis here matters. Whereas the revision reveals the author's initial effort to mute any potentially inflammatory doctrine, the printers' renderings of HEART, ALTAR, and SACRIFICE in the first edition emphasize a convergence reconciling the poem's ceremonial and devotional imperatives. In this Buck and Daniel might be said merely to have advanced the conciliatory piety for which Herbert is often celebrated. But it is their emphasis, not his.

Two additional examples highlight further the advantages of our edition—though now the issue is more aesthetic than historical/political. The first is the poem Evensong (appearing only in the Bodleian manuscript and first edition). In the Bodleian manuscript (b), the poem is arranged into four eight-line stanzas, whereas in the first edition (ed1), there are eight four-line stanzas. Why the printers chose the shorter stanzas is uncertain. It is possible that the rhyme scheme, a four-line pattern rhyming ABBA, determined the stanzaic unit. Or perhaps their source was other than the Bodleian manuscript and included a four-line stanza they simply copied. Absent conclusive evidence, however, it is likely that Herbert would have preferred b's eight-line stanza—for the smallest repeatable metrical pattern here consists of eight lines, not four: trimeter, pentameter, tetrameter, tetrameter, trimeter, tetrameter, tetrameter, pentameter (or 3, 5, 4, 4, 3, 4, 4, 5). This pattern is repeated three times for a total of thirty-two lines. That longer eight-line stanza, reinforced visually in b, is a subtle feature of the poem's larger music. Given Herbert's significant contribution to English verse forms, it is important to highlight this visual complement to aural effect where it is warranted.

The British Church is similarly problematic, only here the issue is rhyme rather than meter. The Bodleian manuscript's six-line stanza captures the larger unit, AABCCB, whereas the first edition's three-line unit does not. Notice that consideration of meter alone supports a three-line stanza. But emphasizing rhyme in this poem and meter in the other is not inconsistent, for in both, the larger stanza captures an important aspect of the poem's aural dimension, whether rhyme or meter. The first edition neglects to represent visually this crucial aspect of Herbert's verse.

Another kind of aesthetic variation occurs in the changing of titles. Fully paralleling certain Williams-manuscript poems and their original titles with the final poems and titles in the later two witnesses can be revealing. For instance, what comes to be called "Misery" in b was originally "The Publican" in w: in Herbert's time "publican" could refer to a despised Roman tax gatherer, to an excommunicated person, or to one who keeps a "public house" or "pub." The poem's increasingly contemptuous speaker touches on all three of these meanings—humanity as miserably corrupt, apostate, and drunken—and resonates with the Pharisee's contempt for the "publican" in Jesus's parable: "Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men are" (Luke 18:11). Yet this preacherly and potentially pharisaical voice is brought up short in the final line by his own implication in human misery: "My God, I mean my ſelf/myself" (line 78). Similarly with "Affliction 4 (b, ed1) / Tentation (w)," "Jordan 2 (b, ed1) / Invention (w)," and "The Quiddity / Poetry (w)": the earlier titles and earlier versions still deeply inform the later ones, as actors often develop back-stories for their characters even though much of that preparation is communicated only through gesture or visual cues rather than explicitly. In all of these ways and many more, The Digital Temple overcomes the eclectic print edition's deficiencies and difficulties by displaying the differences, discussing their significance in the notes, and then getting out of the way.

Our systematic bringing of difference to the foreground should not, however, be misunderstood, nor should our closely related emphasis on religio-political context. If we do not privilege serene Herbertian harmony as have some interpreters in the past, neither do we privilege randomness, disorder and discord. Instead, it is our hope, and it has been our mission, to give all of these competing elements their due; and in Herbert's case the dues owed to design, order, and concord are remarkably high. Indeed, it is through the very close examination of Herbert's aesthetic roughness and struggle and discontinuity—what the Augustan age saw as his metaphysical uncouthness—that Herbert's deeper harmonies and richer designs truly chime and dazzle.

To borrow, again advisedly, from scientific technology: if The Digital Temple can be compared to a space telescope, it also can be likened to an electron microscope, the kind of device that gets us into the little room of the cell only to reveal under magnification a working infrastructure as complex as that of a small city. Our TEI-XML encoding of the three witnesses' transcriptions, like the transcriptions themselves, is diplomatic. It includes tags for deletions, additions, erasures, marginalia, forme-work features (running titles, catchwords, signatures, page and folio numbers), stanza and line divisions, page breaks, spelling variations, and all such features having to do with the artifacts' intellectual contents. And in keeping with the texts' unique identity as poetry, our encoding enables the construction of search mechanisms to track, link, and compare metrical and rhyming patterns—so that, for instance, one can search for all quatrains rhyming abac, or cinquains with the metrical pattern trimeter/tetrameter/pentameter/tetrameter/trimeter.

Of course, this talk of microscopes and cell structure may for some have more than a whiff of formaldehyde about it: one worries about murdering to dissect. So we wish to anticipate objections to the digital platform that we have constructed, and the precise observation that it promises, by stressing that we are not attempting to replace holistic and reflective codex reading with disintegrative hyper-analysis. There is no substitute for the deep and appreciative reading of poetry—in the eye, mouth, and ear, and on the pulses—and we present this latest (albeit high-powered) lens in the hope and confidence that the clearest available view of the originals will provide not just data, but knowledge, and ultimately, great pleasure. In "The Parson Preaching" in The Country Parson, Herbert warned against the hermeneutic method "of crumbling a text into small parts … [which] hath neither in it sweetnesse, nor gravity, nor variety, since the words apart are not Scripture, but a dictionary." We have no more wish to turn The Temple into a mere lexicon than we have to reduce the stars to so much flaming gas.

On the contrary, the quality that most distinguishes The Temple from other great collections of religious lyrics is the extent of its marvelous overall design. No doubt, our edition, like its predecessors, acknowledges the problem of integrating the relatively early "Church Porch" and "Church Militant" into the larger plan of The Temple; in fact, with our full parallel display of the three witnesses and the linked digital surrogates, our edition highlights the lack of a running title for each of these two poems in w and b, raising some questions about Herbert's original intent. However, there can be no serious doubt that in substance "The Church Porch" fits Herbert's architectural theme perfectly, especially when followed by "Superliminare / Perirrhanterium"; and "The Church Militant" takes a striking macrocosmic turn outward towards prophetic history after the more intimate microcosmic lyrics of "The Church."

Indeed, thinking again macrocosmically, what amazes more and more at higher and higher magnification is the sheer variety of constellations into which Herbert's lyrics fit. There are the poems of sacred time, like the liturgical hours of the day (such as "Mattens" and "Evensong"), and the main feast and fast days of the Christian year (beginning with "Good Friday" and ending—less than halfway through "The Church"—with "Lent"); there are poems about the sacraments (e.g., "H. Communion" and the two "H. Baptism" poems), about church music (e.g., "Antiphon" and "A Dialogue-Anthem"), about states of mind and soul (e.g., "Humility," "Frailty," "Constancy," "Avarice"), about Jews ("The Jews," "Self-Condemnation"), and even about poetry itself (the two "Jordan" poems, "The Quiddity," "The Flower," "The Forerunners," and "The Posy"). There are the immediately interlinked thematic sequences about spiritual justification ("The Sacrifice" through "The Reprisal"), architectural and liturgical objects ("Church Monuments" through "The Windows"), and The Four Last Things ("Death," "Doomsday," "Judgement," and "Heaven"—significantly, Hell somehow goes missing). And interspersed throughout, like small archipelagos, there are the poems that ring changes on the same or similar titles, from "Prayer" to "Employment" to "Affliction" and, finally, to "Love."

Returning, then, to the intimate infinity of those "Church-bels beyond the ſtarres," The Digital Temple telescopes with Herbert from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, "bodying forth," in Shakespeare's words, "the forms of things unknown" (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.16)—or, in Herbert's, "ſomething underſtood" ("Prayer [1]," line 14). This cosmic architecture and design unite The Temple, from its title and its "Church-Porch," through the spiritual "Altar" seen from the entrance to "The Church," to the implied communion table of "Love [3] (b, ed1) / Love [4] (w)," where the soul will eternally "ſit and eat" (line 18). And the providential outworking of holy history in "The Church Militant" makes even "Sin" (also an important player in "The Church") the unwitting servant of God's designs, converting apocalypse to millennium. That the Versioning Machine magnifies not only these graceful symmetries but also The Temple's discontinuities and dissonances will likely increase our sympathy and multiply our wonder as Herbert seeks discordia concors: integrating a psalmic variety of voices into something like a harmonious poetic congregation; modeling a workable via media for an increasingly fractile church; and above all, threading his constellations, his cunningly made little worlds, in which he invites us to read our destinies.

As we draw to a close, a final word is necessary on The Digital Temple not only as a rich and uniquely searchable electronic documentary resource with a textual apparatus, but also as a critical and interpretive commentary in its own right. As Herbert's literary reputation has arisen over the past two generations, his poetry has become the site of much debate over his place in the theological spectrum of Tudor-Stuart England, and over his relation to perennial and contemporary questions of aesthetics and literary theory. These questions acquire even greater force when we consider, as we have repeatedly, that two excellent print editions—Hutchinson's and Wilcox's—already exist, and that the latter is quite recent.

How should editors handle such controversial interpretive issues in critical notes? There seem to be three main approaches: either on the one hand studiously to avoid comment on issues of theological or interpretive disagreement and confine the notes to straightforward statements of textual, biographical, and historical fact; or on the other hand to treat the notes as a "bully pulpit" from which to pontificate; or, in a sort of via media, to bring the textual and contextual facts into contact with a brief summary of scholarly debate, drawing conclusions where warranted but avoiding polemic. The editors have, to the best of our abilities, taken this third, mediating, approach.

In doing so we are, obviously and especially, following the lead of Helen Wilcox, whose encyclopedic yet compendious knowledge of Herbert scholarship in all of its variety makes her edition the closest thing to a "Herbert Variorum" ever to be published, and a model of editorial balance, clarity, and discretion. Indeed, we not only acknowledge Wilcox's achievement; we assume it throughout, citing her hundreds of times, and frequently referring our readers to her for fuller critical detail. We have no desire to re-invent her splendid work—in fact, we hope that The Digital Temple will make it even more widely known.

Still, nobody's perfect, and at a number of points, we offer additions and occasional corrections where warranted, following, we hope, her own reasonable and judicious example.

For although it is our mission to bring the minutest facts of Herbert's texts and contexts into the sharpest possible focus, we believe that the interpretive debates surrounding certain poems belong to those contexts, and that in some select cases we owe the reader our considered judgments. If the reader does not always share our conclusions, he or she will at least find in our notes the materials from which those, and competing conclusions, are drawn. And if, in taking exception to any of our interpretations someone is moved to scan Herbert's book of stars more closely with our "visioning machine," we will be well satisfied.

"Astrologie is true," wrote Herbert in Outlandish Proverbs, "but the Astrologers cannot finde it." No one will ever fully spell all of Herbert's constellations, not even with our edition's macrocosmic microscope; but, as when scanning the greater regions of heaven, the infinity of the task should inspire rather than daunt us. We are back to the paradox of Herbert's poems as vast inner spaces, larger within than without; they are like meals that grow in the eating—"Such a Feaſt, as mends in length: / Such a Strength, as makes his gueſt" ("The Call," lines 7-8). Welcome inside Herbert's cosmos; be our guest at his inexhaustible table.