Edward and George Herbert in the European Republic of Letters

By Manchester University Press

George Herbert (1593-1633), the celebrated devotional poet, and his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), often described as the father of English deism, are rarely considered together. This collection explores connections between the full range of the brothers’ writings and activities, despite the apparent differences both in what they wrote and in how they lived their lives. More specifically, the volume demonstrates that despite these differences, each conceived of their extended republic of letters as militating against a violent and exclusive catholicity; theirs was a communion in which contention (or disputation) served to develop more dynamic forms of comprehensiveness. The literary, philosophical and musical production of the Herbert brothers appears here in its full European context, connected as they were with the Sidney clan and its investment in international Protestantism.

The disciplinary boundaries between poetry, philosophy, politics and theology in modern universities are a stark contrast to the deep interconnectedness of these pursuits in the seventeenth century. Crossing disciplinary and territorial borders, contributors discuss a variety of texts and media, including poetry, musical practices, autobiography, letters, council literature, orations, philosophy, history and nascent religious anthropology, all serving as agents of the circulation and construction of transregionally inspired and collective responses to human conflict and violence. We see as never before the profound connections, face-to-face as well as textual, linking early modern British literary culture with the continent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526164070

Book preview

Introduction: Contentious communion

Greg Miller and Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise

The two Anglo-Welsh aristocrats we consider in this collection, George Herbert (1593–1633) and Edward Herbert (1583–1648), serve as examples of a Republic of Letters well before the Siècle des Lumières: before and during the Thirty Years’ War. The study of these two brothers brings into question standard historical assumptions. The metaphor of a Republic of Letters, associated with the philosophes and European Enlightenment, is generally understood to describe the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the cataclysmic Wars of Religion and Thirty Years’ War giving birth to a new European rationalism, the early flowering of Erasmian humanism serving as a distant precursor.¹ Decades after the deaths of the Herbert brothers, at the end of the seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), the French Huguenot exiled to Rotterdam during the reign of Louis XIV, entitled his journal the Nouvelle République des Lettres, imagining his Republic as an empire where truth and reason alone might hold sway over obscurantism. In such a respublica literaria, the educated and enlightened European elites would communicate with one another in person, by manuscript, and in print, exploring ideas across frontiers of language, region, creed, religious polity, and state, constructing together a broader truth toward which each worked in what they hoped would be a common free space of the mind. Scholars such as Jürgen Habermas and Reinhart Kaselleck have drawn attention to even earlier articulations of such a public sphere.² The first use of the term respublica literaria has been attributed to Francesco Barbaro, in his letter to Poggio Bracciolini on July 6, 1417.³ Both Barbaro and Bracciolini were humanists who sought out, located, read, and discussed long-lost manuscripts of the ancients. Among those found by Bracciolini was the sole surviving manuscript of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, a key text for European advocates of free thought.⁴ Interestingly, Edward Herbert’s library included a copy of the neo-Lucretian philosopher Giulio Cesare Vanini’s De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium (On the Wonderous Mysteries of Nature, the Queen and Goddess of Mortal Beings) (Paris, 1616)⁵ – one clear indication (amid many others) that Edward – and his brother George – were among early conceptualizers of Bayle’s Republic, building on its earliest beginnings, participating in international, multilingual exchanges that initiated a robustly cosmopolitan public sphere. Hubert Bost argues that Pierre Bayle experienced his Calvinist faith, which on the surface might seem to be in conflict with his critical attitude toward religion, as consistent with the promotion of an enlightened, even libertine, philosophy; we should be more open to more nuanced and complex understandings of not only Edward Herbert, but also the poet-pastor George Herbert, in the history of a European Republic of Letters.⁶ Despite the different paths each of the two Anglo-Welsh brothers ultimately followed, their particular Protestant formative milieu moved them, as it would Pierre Bayle later, "à explorer les ressorts de l’âme humaine, à découvrir la puissance des passions et des préjugés, à rendre compte du poids de l’éducation dans l’élaboration des croyances (to explore the deepest motivations of the human soul, to uncover the force of our passions and prejudices, to realize the importance of our upbringings for the formulation of our beliefs").⁷

Edward Herbert’s gift of a large number of his books in Latin to the Jesus College library gives us an indication of the extent of his reading,⁸ and his sustained interest in these two strains of thought. Edward’s library included not only Vanini’s⁹ highly controversial text, but also Del universe et mondi (Venice, 1584) by Giordano Bruno – another philosopher who was publicly tortured and executed by the Inquisition – along with works by important French and Dutch Reformers.

The Herbert brothers’ immediate predecessors included the so-called Philippists, a cosmopolitan circle of scholars associated with Martin Luther’s close ally Philip Melanchthon which included Hubert Languet, Philippe de Mornay, and the Herbert brothers’ kinsman Philip Sidney.¹⁰ The latter’s translation (which was largely completed by his sister Mary Sidney) of the Psalms in metrical form, itself influenced by continental models and philological debates on biblical translation, contributed to George Herbert’s poetry and scope.¹¹ The Philippians believed that humanistic studies advance the cause of truth (including their ecumenical vision of faith) and that natural law necessitates both resistance to tyranny and the cultivation of peace and tolerance. Among Edward’s books in Latin, one finds Vindiciae pro religionis libertate (Freiburg, 1636), published under the pseudonym of Stephanus Junius Brutus and thought to be a collaboration between Hubert Languet and Philippe de Mornay, as was Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1580), also in Edward’s collection. One also finds eight books by Hugo Grotius, who helped conceptualize the Decretum pro pace ecclesiarum (1614), by which the Dutch state enforced only two orthodoxies: the existence of God and Divine Providence. Edward’s assertion of five notions common to all religions include the first, but not the second,¹² but is similarly fundamentalist in the Erasmian sense: stripped down to the core. Grotius, who like Edward was a frequent guest of the Duc de Montmorency, drew from Mornay’s De la verité de la religion chrétienne, translated into Latin at the urging of Languet: De Veritate Christianae (1581). Philip Sidney began a translation in English that was finished by Arthur Golding (1589). Common to all these men was the conviction that good books can move hearts, minds, and societies to virtue.

One important difference, however, with Bayle’s and the eighteenth century’s later respublica literaria is that the Herbert brothers belonged to an era that predates the rise of modern European notions of nationhood and patriotism that began to coalesce after the Treaty of Westphalia.¹³ Clearly delineated nation-states had not yet come into being. At one end of their lives stood the European Wars of Religion – which spurred the political development of reason of state (so named after the Jesuit Giovanni Botero’s Ragion di Stato, 1589) on both sides of the Channel.¹⁴ In his recent study of the late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century debate on the historiography of the earlier Wars of Religion, Christian Mühling suggests that the very notion of Wars of Religion is a revisionist one, consciously developed under Louis XIV to strengthen the emerging nation-state and legitimate centralized control and religious repression, rewriting, as it were, what had previously been experienced as a series of interrelated, local or civil confessional wars throughout European territories.¹⁵ Renaming any such conflict as Wars of Religion was geared at discrediting denominational diversity, depicting disagreement as a form of irreligion rather than an attempt to find spaces of commonality. At the other end of the Herbert brothers’ lives were the tensions leading up to the British, Irish, and Scottish civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century (which only Edward of the two lived long enough to experience first hand). These, in turn, circled back to debates on tyranny which had previously emerged during the French confessional, civil wars (notably among the Philippists and Huguenot monarchomachs) posing the question of the public sphere in the new political terms of a republican commonwealth. Living and writing between these two major religious and political crises, Edward and George Herbert can be said to embody a transitional moment in the shaping of the very understanding of the ideal of a respublica literaria.

In the Herberts’ world, bloodlines – along with religious, social, and political allegiances – often took precedence over national identities. Their envisaged Republic overlapped with aristocratic values of gentility, honor, and decorum, as well as ideals of friendship, conversation, and disinterestedness. And despite traumatic, violent divisions in western Christendom, they nevertheless inherited a long Christian tradition of universality. Each in his own way, as we shall see, conceived of their respublica as militating against a violent and exclusive catholicity; theirs was a communion in which contention (in the sense of disputation) served to develop more dynamic forms of comprehensiveness.¹⁶ Paradoxically to our own postmodern eyes, this hoped-for universal communion was in fact more far-reaching than the later Republic of Letters could ever be. The essays in the present volume argue collectively that in the Herbert brothers’ lives and works, a cosmopolitanism born of warfare and strife imagined a radical communion and openness where truth need not observe the usual frontiers. Their openness surpassed in some ways that of the European Enlightenment, which attempted to neutralize and contain all that was deemed obscure or barbarous.

Great emphasis has been laid in recent years on the study of networks and communities during the early modern period as a more congenial way of enquiring into the history of social and religious collective identities that were not limited, contained, or defined primarily by national borders. Much of this scholarship has built on the notion of practical ontology developed in the mid-1990s by such anthropologists and socio-constructivists as Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering;¹⁷ the result is a revitalization of the study of transnational intellectual and cultural phenomena.¹⁸ We now have a more interdisciplinary and dynamic approach to the understanding of Europe and its multiple and dynamic confluences and exchanges. Together with the history of print, the study of networks has helped to show the importance of specific individuals (within coteries, and socio-religious and economic groups), as well as the agency of the textual objects they produced, in the emergence of new ideas, including those of toleration, the new philosophy (what we call science), (natural) religion, and community that were of such great interest to the two Herbert brothers under study. Yet, while such approaches have helped to rehabilitate the agency of understudied religious groups and other minorities, they also run the risk of reproducing at a critical level some of the forms of more narrow communitarianism that the Herbert brothers sought to eschew and even transcend both in their ideas and their behavior.

Edward and George Herbert in the European Republic of Letters explores a variety of texts and media, including devotional poetry, love poetry, musical practices and compositions, autobiography, letters, council literature, orations, philosophical works, and nascent religious anthropology. All served as tools and are equally worthy of study. They were agents of the circulation and construction of transregionally inspired and collective responses to human conflict and violence. The notion of cultural transfer, first elaborated by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner in the 1980s and 1990s, is central today to transnational, transregional, global, and entangled or interrelated approaches to history, including early modern history, even though some historians have been wary of applying it to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because the period antedates the very existence of modern nationhood.¹⁹ The two Herbert brothers were agents of such transfer, and their works were shaped by their shared hopes for peace and their responses to religious strife in the aftermath of the European confessional wars.

As we hope to show, the Herberts went beyond the transregional cultural transfers and networks of their own time, beyond the respublica literaria whose foundations they helped extend in the wake of the early humanists, to imagine communions among individuals from multiple communities, a communion not only of letters but of people. The notion of communion, we argue, thus provides us with a useful complement, or an alternative, even, to the study of networks. It articulates the idea of a human community in the Herberts’ own historic terms and helps to suggest that the quest for forms of togetherness, mutual understanding, and converging did not imply a strict sharing of identical values or beliefs. Edward and George’s respective understandings of communion were not univocal.

The two brothers differed from one another in their understanding of what could be held in common, though each experienced real mutuality and union as beginning in struggle within himself as well as with others. The Herbert brothers’ visions of communion originated within a famously choleric Anglo-Welsh family. Lady Magdalen Danvers, the head of the Herbert clan after the death of her husband, cultivated a physical and intellectual communion that served as a model for her family and guests; one might argue that she was a precursor of the women who hosted salons in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Like her sons who followed her example, she was an agent of cultural transmission. Her Kitchin Booke records meals gathering large numbers of guests, including the Roman Catholic composer William Byrd and the composer and probable spy John Bull, her sons experiencing the dinner table as a place of sharp discourse, comity, and pleasure.²⁰ Witty language was the maternal weapon and the means to her conquests. The young John Danvers is reported to have married the widow Magdalen Herbert for love of her wit.²¹ John Drury describes her household as a salon of witty conversation.²² George represents his mother’s speech in Memoriae Matris Sacrum, Poem 2, as fettering, shackling, and binding in nets those whom she addressed (l. 31).²³ Yet in his commemorative sermon, Donne speaks of Magdalen’s family the Newports as a source from which she sucked that love of hospitality … which dwelt in her, to her end.²⁴ George Herbert’s poem The Familie stages a godly house – simultaneously the poet’s psychomachia, an imagined household, and his figural church – as a place of tremendous conflict; nevertheless, he concludes, the house and the familie are thine. None is imagined as expelled; rather, the Great Lord arrives home through the governance of harmonizing virtues, though in human time he comes not to make a constant stay. The struggle among discordant elements of the community, as well as the individual human psyche, allows for the glimpsed and longed-for eternal presence in a necessarily fleeting moment of time.

George’s emphasis was on the sacrament of Holy Eucharist, the shared communion of Christ’s body and blood, which he saw as the necessary and sufficient answer to violence. In George Herbert’s dialogue with nonconforming Protestants and Roman Catholics alike, from Andrew Melville, the Scottish Presbyterian Reformer (1545–1622) to Pope Urban VIII, he refused the terms of exclusion among fellow Christians, insisting resolutely and consistently on a contentious and nevertheless redeeming love, through what he experienced in the Eucharist as liberating atonement. In The Church Militant and elsewhere, he imagined the Christian Church as transcending any state, transregional, linguistic, temporal, or creedal body. His viewpoint was irenic: he sought peaceful Christian forbearance. Nor was his communion primarily literary, an imagined Republic of Letters. His pastoral manual, The Country Parson, for example, gives guidelines for interactions between clergy and laymen of different rank, wealth, and status, as evidenced by Kristine A. Wolberg and Lynnette St. George’s reading of the work in Chapter 8 of the present volume. In discussing The Country Parson and The Church Porch in contrast with François de Sales, Richard Strier, in Chapter 7, takes issue with the attempts of Martz, Summers, Malcolmson, and others to reconcile George Herbert’s experience of the spiritual and worldly realms, arguing that differences in doctrine have effects on people’s social and inner lives.

In his lifetime, Edward was often received by his readers as sharing his younger brother’s agenda of irenicism. However, Edward’s communion – though it was, like George’s, contentious – did not refer to the Christian sacrament but rather to commonalities with others, to mutuality, and included non-Christians. Edward focused on consensus and consent. His attempt to construct what he argued were universal truths at the core of very different religious practices and beliefs divorced each from its claim to exclusive authority; divine revelation, by implication, did not restrict itself to any one time, place, or institution. Both brothers engaged, as we shall see, in forceful ambiguities intended to transform the impulses of warfare in its many forms into a contentiousness that could be peaceful and productive.

Following different paths toward a shared goal, they responded to the beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War and to the threat and ultimately the reality of increasing violence in Britain itself. Mark Greengrass has argued that religious (or confessional) wars, the Thirty Years’ War in particular, and shared calamities led to the collapse of the idea of a shared, orderly Christendom and the acceptance of a more fluid, calamitous Europe.²⁵ Soen et al. note that early modern governments described their borders, or frontiers ("frontières), as defined by battles and combat.²⁶ As such, during the lives of the Herbert brothers, Britain’s borders were both internal and external. George’s Latin poems describe Britain as naturally defended by its status as an island: Naufragij causa est alijs mare, roboris Anglo, / Et quae corrumpit moenia, murus aqua est (The sea leads others to shipwreck, an Englishman to strength. / And water that dashes walls to pieces is Britain’s wall") (Lucus, Poem 6, On the British Peace, ll. 5–6). He also warns Scotland of the dangers of war, ending apocalyptically. Christ’s blood alone will be sufficient to save Scotland from war and fire; if they did not control their anger through communion, "Ante diem vestro mundus ab igne ruat (Before the appointed day, the world by your fire would perish") (Musae Responsoriae, Poem 35, To Scotland. An Exhortation to Peace, l. 12). Edward’s history of the reign of Henry VIII, and his actions during the Civil War, indicate a parallel striving for peace through consensus and professed impartiality.²⁷

This collection is the first to advance in a sustained manner the study of the works and thought of two brothers whose critical afterlives have hitherto been treated as either reductively oppositional or resolutely separate. The two followed different professional, social, psychological, and personal trajectories, yet they continued to entertain throughout their lives an intellectual conversation, shared several correspondents and interlocutors who had a part in shaping their views, and were members of a broad European fellowship seeking communion in peace. For the first time, we situate them firmly within their shared religious and cultural context. The comparison makes clear the importance of multifarious rather than exclusive or narrow studies of context. The brothers stood at different junction points of intertwined and overlapping networks of people and ideas, and only through close attention to these can we hope to understand their theological, historical, and poetic works. And they are examples of a broader contentious communion. Each saw strife as predicated on engagement with others that did not merely reinscribe but instead reimagined conceptual and relational frontiers.

Edward Herbert, Lord Cherbury, is often described, some argue anachronistically, as the father of English Deism.²⁸ He was deeply immersed in international, European philosophical conversations, after having himself participated in the confessional wars on the Continent. Two other Herbert brothers, Richard and William, died as young men during those wars. Despite Edward’s multiple intellectual exchanges and correspondences with important humanists and thinkers such as Casaubon, Grotius, Gassendi, and Descartes, leading him to publish his most important philosophical and anthropological works on the Continent rather than in England, he is undervalued today as a philosopher. A complex reception history has sometimes obscured the relationship between his ontological thought and his central question of religious toleration²⁹ – Anita Sherman’s chapter rehabilitates the consistency of Edward’s vision. In the literary field, critics tend to emphasize in his poetry what they see as the superficial blend of chivalry and cosmopolitanism also at work in his autobiography, turning him into the very opposite of his brother, the saintly and quintessentially English country parson.³⁰ Our study offers reappraisals not just of Edward Herbert the philosopher, but also of the poet, historian, ambassador, and political actor.

The poet and pastor George Herbert is chiefly remembered for his deeply felt devotional poems (The Temple, 1633), many of which have been set to church music so frequently that they have become part and parcel of English hymnody. They stand as one of the hallmarks of the sound of worship within the Church of England, though they were and still are appreciated by Protestants of various stripes. The assumed simplicity of his poetry distinguishes him – so it is believed – from other metaphysical poets and the supposed mannerism and vanity of his brother. Since the 1970s, there has been a significant move away from the hagiographic approach to George Herbert still present in the collective British imagination and initially encouraged by Izaac Walton’s Life (1670), which sought to celebrate the Restoration Church of England. Such seminal works as Barbara Kiefer Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics (1979), Richard Strier’s Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (1983), and Cristina Malcolmson’s Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (1999) have led to a much more thorough inquiry into the ways his poetry illuminates and enacts his theology.

This collection situates that theology within transregional conversations and beyond; it has much to add to a critical tradition that has tended to define George Herbert’s theological stance in national terms. Christopher Hodgkins’s Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way (1993), for example, seeks to clarify Herbert’s relation to the Elizabethan settlement and Calvinism in the years of the Stuart crisis in religious authority leading up to the Civil Wars. There have been notable exceptions to such predominantly national contextualizing of George Herbert’s theology, among which is Elizabeth Clarke’s Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: Divinitie, and Poesie, Met (1997). Clarke draws upon Savonarola, François de Sales, and Juan de Valdés to shed light on Herbert’s understanding of divine inspiration, but she does so with an eye to further revising assumptions about Herbert’s potentially royalist and High Church sympathies.³¹ As Gene Edward Veith, Jr. noted, George Herbert criticism has continually replayed the Wars of Religion, but primarily those that were acted out within the boundaries of the British Isles.³² While taking into account some continental antecedents and theological sources, the consensus has been that George Herbert was concerned chiefly with the fate of his own national church and that, in order to appraise his doctrinal and local specificities, debates about Reformations and Counter-Reformations on the Continent are best avoided.

However, as George’s Latin poetry and orations teach us, the poet was politically aware of European and global religious issues. And George and Edward moved in overlapping circles. George engaged in a spirited poetic dialogue with Pope Urban VIII, for example, at one point flattering him as a poet and praising poetry’s persuasiveness in comparison with religious polemics: "Quod Bellarminus nequijt, fortasse poetae / Suauiter efficient, absque rigore Scholae (What Bellarmine could not do, poets perhaps / Will more pleasantly effect, lacking polemic’s rigor") (Lucus, 28, ll. 3–4). It is quite possible that Edward’s connections facilitated that poetic dialogue, speculation supported by the fact that Edward also corresponded with Urban VIII.³³ Urban’s Poemata (Rome, 1635) is one of two books of verse (the other, in Italian, by Giovanni Battista Marino, also in residence for extended periods at the French court) to appear among Edward’s gifts to Jesus College.³⁴ Before he was elected to the papacy, Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini) had served as papal legate to the court of Henri IV.

George’s brothers’ travels on the Continent, especially those of Henry and Edward, made him particularly receptive to the importance of history, the devastating human consequences of religious strife and violence.³⁵ Though he was an ordained priest living in relative obscurity for the last three years of his life, George Herbert’s family ties, his training, his experiences as a Member of Parliament and Cambridge University Orator, and his deep learning gave him a political awareness and sense of connectedness that was not far removed from his apparently more worldly and cosmopolitan brother’s.³⁶ Edward’s quest for the foundational principles of a philosophy that might bestow a sense of being a citizen of the world, a part of one common human family, would not have been alien to George. As is made apparent in this collection, this sense of belonging could only be derived from an investment in forrainn wisdom, in which both brothers engaged: To take all that is given; whether wealth, / Or Love or language; nothing comes amiss (The Church-Porch, ll. 355–7). ³⁷

Such an investment in outlandish or forrainn wisdom responds to the brothers’ historical moment; belonging for them was not parochial or provincial. Both brothers read promiscuously, to use John Milton’s later formulation in the Areopagitica (1644), in several languages, and both wrote for an international audience. George and Edward wrote Greek and Latin verse, the languages of educated elites throughout Europe, as well as English. George admonished his younger brother Henry (bap. 1594–d. 1673), sent to Paris as a courier around 1615,³⁸ to bring back to England all good [he] saw in Frenchmen whether it be in knowledge, or in fashion, or in words. He would thus prove, and even play, a good marchant by transporting French commodities to [his] own country.³⁹ George, in other words, was asking Henry to become what would be termed, in the idiom of twenty-first-century historiography, an agent of cultural transfer, or a "passeur culturel.⁴⁰ He himself was dedicated to play[ing] a marchant by gathering and Englishing," along with Henry, a collection of Outlandish Proverbs, published in 1640 as a supplement to Witts Recreations.⁴¹ Perhaps more crucially yet for our purpose, George was committed to furthering new modes of knowledge that might rely upon universally shared experience rather than dogmatic authorities: he helped Francis Bacon reach a broad European audience through serving as a translator of the expanded Advancement of Learning into Latin.⁴² Though he never completed the task, Edward, for his part, endeavored to translate Descartes’s Discours de la méthode into English,⁴³ despite disagreements on a number of notions, such as natural instinct and universal consent.⁴⁴ Edward’s understanding may, in fact, have been drawn from Mornay’s earlier humanistic definition of knowledge as derived from ius naturae (natural law) manifest in the ius gentium (consent of humankind). Either way, the Herbert brothers clearly partook of a contentious communion that was both inward and of the world; intimate struggle and strife with oneself and others to embody the good were for them common signs of a vitally lived truth.

There are indications of real and substantive conversation and disagreement between brothers with significantly different approaches and assumptions, who nevertheless shared common concerns for the broadly human and the global. Serious exchange between the Herbert brothers is made evident in Edward’s dedication on December 15, 1622 of an early manuscript of his most radically unorthodox work, De Veritate: prout distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso (On Truth, as it is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False), to his younger brother George.⁴⁵ Edward asks George, and Edward’s secretary William Boswell, to excise anything at odds with the true catholick religion. In his autobiography, Edward argues that his brother George’s English works fall far short of his Latin, suggesting possible knowledge of more of George’s work than the little that appeared in print during either’s lifetime.⁴⁶ Critics including Cristina Malcolmson and Jeffrey Powers-Beck have argued compellingly that several of the brothers’ poems are in dialogue with one another.⁴⁷ A signaled readerly relationship between Edward and George Herbert, brothers of such widely different theologies and temperaments, serves as a familial microcosm of a greater European discursive project. Edward Herbert’s reference to the catholick in his dedication to George is distinctive, implying a cosmopolitan openness to a universally accessible truth that goes beyond any one state-sanctioned or regional church or polity.⁴⁸ Edward’s contemporary the French Minim friar and disseminator⁴⁹ of scientific knowledge Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) translated De Veritate into French, the translation published in print for a coterie of readers that included René Descartes. Edward’s donation to the Jesus College Library includes two works by Mersenne, most notably here a compendious study of sound and harmony throughout the world.⁵⁰ Mersenne’s systematic translation of Edward’s Latin Ecclesia vera catholica into the French Eglise Catholique blunts Edward’s sharply implied meaning of a Church truly universal.⁵¹ Perhaps Mersenne intended to present Edward’s idea more acceptably within a Roman Catholic context. Perhaps he could read no other possible meaning. Edward’s text, however, implied a Church transcending any given institution, a belief that supported his ability to enter into conversation with correspondents of such various political and religious allegiances. As John Drury notes, in 1617 Edward wrote to Sir Robert Harley (bap. 1579–1656), known for his later support of the Roundheads and Calvinism, asserting that God’s Church, as he put it, is all mankind.⁵² Edward’s quest and hopes were not for an overreaching ecclesiastical structure that might set the premises for a restored respublica Christiana – whose loss George Herbert bewails in his poem Church-rents and schismes.⁵³ It was a Church or communion of the mind that would emerge from the acknowledgment by lay individuals of a veritates catholicae norma, a shared, catholic rule of Truth, rather than a "Church" as usually understood. Such a truth was not a given, but one that had to be attained through an often-conflicted process of recognition, reconstruction, consent, and conformation.⁵⁴

Though few Protestants would have countenanced the idea of such a broad ecclesiology, they would nevertheless have found this concept of the unseen church congenial. English Calvinists like Harley, or like Fulke Greville, for example, contrasted the seen church with God’s invisible elect: That sensual, insatiable vast womb, / Of thy seen Church, Thy unseen Church disgraceth (Sonnet CX, ll. 15–16). But Edward makes use of this Calvinist concept of the unseen church as part of an anti-Calvinist ecclesiology; the term does not quite apply, however, since his analysis of the discovery of truth includes non-Christians, both pagans and other monotheists. He compares, for example, the fasting of Ramadan with Christian Lent and at times uses pagan terms for the godhead of Zeus to describe the Numen, or divinity. The epistemology of De Veritate posits a divine light in all people, available through inner discernment and interpersonal, transcultural, and transtemporal communion: "doctrina notiorum communium sive Ecclesia vere catholica (the general inquiry or the Church that is truly universal").⁵⁵ The adjective communium here is a cognate for the noun communio, or communion. Edward’s radical openness, clothed in language that could be understood as orthodox in both Catholic and Protestant circles, was in itself contentious; it imagined a broader group of individuals engaged in dangerous disputes and dialogue in the name of an institutionally and culturally obscured general truth.⁵⁶ Their communion contentiously ignored the accepted frontiers, whether spatial or conceptual.

The brothers’ public personae were both inflected by rank and status. Both are recorded to have had proud aristocratic temperaments bent on achieving social mastery, enticed by what the younger George called the brave (the splendid, grand, or courageous).⁵⁷ The younger brother at times appears to achieve submission to the divine, and the poems and prose map out this conflict in detail. Edward was much less interested in George’s concept of self-mastery. He nevertheless details and scrutinizes the violent self-indulgences of King Henry VIII. A key concept for him in writing history, as for his friend Francis Bacon in conducting experiments or making assertions about the nature of knowing, was the cultivation of a genteel and honorable disinterestedness, an ongoing openness not motivated by profit. For example, George refers to Francis Bacon as "Aequitatis signifier (Standard bearer of impartiality").⁵⁸ This collection suggests that there might be peaceful ends to an aristocratic search for honor, so often a source of violence.

These essays explore the brothers’ engagement with Europe writ large and the larger world, arguing cumulatively that both imagined a communion where internal, interpersonal, and inter-state conflict might articulate itself and be transformed without physical violence. George imagined individual and collective struggle as a key component of communion, at the conclusion of The Banquet enjoining himself to love the strife. Like the members of the Little Gidding Community who in their dialogues praised Holy Roman Emperors and the traditional enemies of international Protestantism for their humility,⁵⁹ Edward, in his The life and raigne of King Henry the Eighth, defied received British narratives about the beginnings of the Reformation. Edward imagined communion in his Henry the Eighth and De Veritate as taking place through common assent among disputants. At the return of Prince Charles from Spain, George argues before those assembled at Cambridge University and those who would later read in print: Let governments of the world lean mutually upon one another like slanting beams. Otherwise, the great house of the world might fall to rack and ruin.⁶⁰

The chapters that follow lean mutually upon one another like slanting beams, displaying the many facets of Edward and George’s contentions and concords in their quest for a vision to sustain the great house of the world. The first section of the book, Thinking beyond borders, addresses war and peace. Taking as her starting point the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which stood throughout Europe as the epitome of viciousness committed in God’s name, Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise demonstrates how the involvement of members of the Herbert–Sidney coterie in the confessional wars affected the forms in which Edward and George chose to write. The chapter makes a case for thinking of Edward Herbert’s historical and anthropological later writings, as well as George Herbert’s polemic epyllion The Church Militant, as alternate literary responses to a deep sense of tragic time linked to the loss of a primitive (and illusory) respublica Christiana, also manifest in such continental works such as Les Tragiques by Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552–1630), which circulated in England among Huguenot refugees, and which would have naturally been of interest to French and English admirers of the great Protestant poet Du Bartas (1544–90).⁶¹ In the second chapter, The Thirty Years’ War and George Herbert’s communion, an answer to violence, Greg Miller examines George’s transregional political thought as revealed in some of his understudied Latin works: his poetic dialogue in Latin verse with Pope Urban VIII, his early Latin poems celebrating the marriage of Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine to Princess Elizabeth Stuart, his Latin oration at the return of Prince Charles and Lord Buckingham from Spain, and his concluding Communion poems in Lucus. The chapter extends its analysis to exchanges between Buckingham and the French free-thinking poet Théophile de Viau, who found refuge in the Montmorency household in Chantilly, where Edward had sojourned some fifteen years earlier, some five miles from Merlou, where Edward was frequently in residence during Viau’s imprisonment and trial; both George and Edward participated in poetic and political networks that extended beyond Britain in the hope of promoting peace and toleration. Nancy Zaice’s contribution, ‘Being’ James I, closely examines Edward Herbert’s ambassadorships in France (1619–21, 1622–4), revising the common appraisal of the ambassador’s supposed overreach and failure that one finds in most critical and historical literature on the subject. Zaice assembles evidence that Edward provided King James I with useful, valid, and accurate information on important matters such as European ambassadors’ visits and their implications, French views on the conflict in the Palatinate, reports of Spanish and French troop movements, ultramontane Catholic influence at the French court, and the status of Protestants in France. True to his concept of truth, Cherbury insisted on the unity of the general and the personal good; as a defender of the right to individual conscience, he pursued both. In the following chapter, Michael Schoenfeldt analyzes Edward’s charting of his early years in France (1608–9) in his autobiography, a text often dismissed as both lacking self-awareness and risibly self-important. Comparing Edward’s belligerent modes of civility in the Autobiography with George’s struggles for spiritual submission in The Temple helps explain how seeking peace in the political realm also implied deep personal engagement and conflicting notions of the self. Working for universal peace implied forms of battle within oneself and, at times, with one’s local communities.

The second section of the book, Reconsidering conformity, community, and universality, reassesses assumptions about Edward’s central notion of ontological consent and conformity, as well as George Herbert’s religious conformity and adherence to what he saw as an ecclesiastical middle way, considering their political engagements. Chris Hodgkins’s analysis here complements in a more broadly European sense his own earlier study of George Herbert’s via media.⁶² Hodgkins focuses on George’s possible indebtedness to Jean Charlier de Gerson (1363–1429), a late medieval French Catholic theologian and Chancellor of the University of Paris, in his promotion of a spiritual life that might cross creedal, temporal, and national lines. If George endorsed conformity, Hodgkins suggests, it was first and foremost to a life guided by spiritual principles that could be universally shared. Anita Sherman’s Conformity and consent in Herbert of Cherbury examines Edward’s reassessment of conformity and consent in the aftermath of the historical research he undertook to write his Expedition to the Isle of Rhé and The life and raigne of King Henry the Eighth. Edward’s notion of an ontological conformity between those things that are perceived and their inmost reality provoked criticism, if not perplexity, in his own time (as now). Nevertheless, Sherman reveals how this idea functioned as a cornerstone to Edward Herbert’s thought, allowing him to build a general philosophy of consent, with aesthetic, metaphysical, rhetorical, empirical, and scientific meanings intended to enable peoples around the globe to live in a shared human community. We find common ground between Edward’s definition of basic principles shared by all religions and his brother George’s hopes for a universal middle way.

The second section of this volume explores, with particular attention to continental models, George’s understanding of the spiritual life and pastoral care. Richard Strier questions the comparison commonly made between the spiritual lives of George Herbert and St. François de Sales. Strier acknowledges that both sought to assuage or calm inner turmoil through forms of pleasure and sweetness, including the Eucharist, but he also makes clear the comparison’s serious limitations; the two writers experienced affliction differently and addressed different audiences. Unlike François de Sales, George does not address the worldly and educated alone; his emphasis is less on the sweetness of devotion than on promoting piety and inner transformation. Though Herbert’s communion is less cheerful than that of de Sales, and less world-affirmative, it nevertheless extends to include the simpler in spirit. The importance of the inner life in building up communities is the focus of the chapter by Kristine A. Wolberg and Lynnette St. George, devoted to George’s book of pastoral guidance, The Country Parson. Many studies have noted the manual’s emphasis on the outer, religious man, seeming to turn holiness into a set of external marks, or signs. Comparing Herbert’s inspiration and focus in The Country Parson with that of John Calvin’s Commentaries on the Pastoral Epistles demonstrates how it is only by linking George Herbert’s writing to continental thought and theology that we can fully understand his pastoral prospects for a broadly comprehensive Church that sustains at a local level the needs of all its members (regardless of their place in the social hierarchy). The fifth and final chapter in this second section takes discussions of love and community in a different direction, exploring the importance of intimate and natural human affections. Cristina Malcolmson discusses a work only recently discovered, Edward Herbert’s unfinished play The Amazon, written during his terms as English ambassador to France. The play, along with Edward’s contemporaneous De Veritate, seems to stem from an entirely opposite stance than that of George’s Country Parson. Edward argues against the Christian dogma of his time and in favor of divorce, arguably participating in the brothers’ common quest for a universal love, perhaps influenced by Lucretius. This chapter analyzes the final Song in The Amazon as linking human affection with the most universal natural instinct of De Veritate, a spiritual power that, for Edward, legitimizes divorce (on the grounds that too often marriage is antithetical to love), moves both animals and humans, and provides the basis for credible knowledge. Truth, universality, and cosmopolitism are always on the horizon for both Edward and George, with different trajectories and implications.

The third and last section of the book, The voices of transnational communities: From conversation to song, goes on to show how the transregional communities George and Edward promoted are actuated and embodied in their correspondence, poetry, and music. Sean McDowell argues that Edward Herbert belonged to a community of plain speakers who valued a conversational style in their correspondence and poetry; such directness is the vehicle for what a social community is meant to do and the philosophical ideals it is to sustain. More specifically, McDowell argues that many members of Edward Herbert’s English and French coterie (who in some cases also interacted with George) found in the rhetorical writings of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius welcome permission to depart from an overly wrought discourse in favor of a more gallant honesty. Their models, which included Lipsius’s published correspondence, featured conversations with Grotius, Casaubon, and Sidney. Like Sidney, Lipsius was shaped by his experience living in the tolerant, cosmopolitan Viennese court of Emperor Maximillian II, and his dialogue De Constantia develops the Stoic virtue of constancy as a chief source of individual strength and social comity during prolonged periods of warfare and civil strife. Conversation, in both brothers’ understanding, extends beyond the strict sphere of learned, humanist exchanges in promotion of a more inclusive ethos of humanitas, which included kindness and generosity.⁶³

Eleanor Hardy’s chapter also places Edward’s poetry within its continental contexts, focusing on his interactions with the followers of John Donne, including Thomas Carew and Aurelian Townsend, who accompanied Edward Herbert in his ambassadorship. These poets were dedicated to the circulation of European poetics in England and shared some of the same continental models. Carew had been associated with English ambassadorships to Venice and the Netherlands before his time in Paris. In his later highly successful 1634 masque at the court of King Charles I, Coelum Britannicum, Carew would ridicule the French prose stylist Guez de Balzac in ways that parallel Théophile de Viau’s enraged epistolary denunciation of his former friend.⁶⁴ But Marino in particular, she suggests, was central in developing a shared kind of poetic wit that found its expression in images and metaphors of reproduction, the basis of a particularly fecund transregional literary culture. Edward’s poetics, moreover, had philosophical implications; the focus on linguistic reproduction reflects his understanding of his diplomatic function. Guillaume Coatalen focuses in turn on overlooked European parallels to, and influences on, George Herbert’s devotional verse. Herbert’s was probably shaped by French Protestant antecedents including Chandieu, Grévin, and Sponde. Chandieu’s poems, for example, were available in print and manuscript, and were set to music by Claude Le Jeune and Pascal de L’Estocart; elegantly written and bound manuscript books of Chandieu’s popular Octonaires were in circulation, including copies by Esther Inglis, a calligrapher and artist whose parents were Huguenot refugees in Scotland and England. Inglis presented copies of her volumes to Queen Elizabeth and later to Prince Henry, as well as to Susan de Vere, Lady Herbert, wife of Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery, and to Lady Mary and Sir Philip Sidney’s brother, Baron Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle, among others.⁶⁵ The final two chapters take on the question of musical practices. Simon Jackson looks closely at Edward’s manuscript lute book within the context of his music books bequeathed to the library of Jesus College, Oxford, showing its distinctly international nature and suggesting therefore its agency in promoting and performing a wide and polylingual community through music. Similarly, in the final chapter of the book, Helen Wilcox focuses on European (and especially French and Swiss) forms of psalm-singing and their influence on the Sidney–Herbert coterie, demonstrating how George Herbert’s lyrics cannot be reduced to a hallmark of the sound of worship within the Church of England: George’s poetry harmoniously weaves in the rhythms and notes of a transnational, if not celestial, consort of the Sweet Singers of a potentially universal Israel.

While this volume focuses on the complex interactions between two brothers’ works and thought, placing their own contentiousness within the context of broader community building, this comparative study may, we hope, serve as a basis for future explorations of the dynamics of cosmopolitan idealism and practice within the larger European Republic of