George Herbert's "Holy Patterns": Reforming Individuals in Community explores Herbert's understanding of full individuality in community. Living communities depend upon imagined histories and futures. Like his mother Lady Magdalen Danvers and her friend John Donne, and unlike many of his Anglican contemporaries, Herbert imagined significant continuity with the pre-Reformation past; that imagination was tied to a prophetic imagining of the future triumph of Christ's universal and apostolic church. Herbert's project was to 'purify' a unified national church from within, this purification taking place through lives lived communally in self-scrutiny, self-regulation, sacrifice, and loving service. Such 'holy patterns' of living were imagined as leading to the purification of the whole church, the spread of the Gospel, human advancement through what we would call scientific knowledge, and international peace.

First Published in 1995. The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

Scholars of religious, literary, and cultural history will enjoy this illuminating collection.

Previous scholars have noted the Puritans' edenic descriptions of New World landscapes, but Inventing Eden is the first study to fully uncover the integral relationship between the New England interest in paradise and the numerous iconic intellectual artifacts and social movements of colonial North America. Harvard Yard, the Bay Psalm Book, and the Quaker use of antiquated pronouns like thee and thou: these are products of a seventeenth-century desire for Eden. So, too, are the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the first United States judicial decision abolishing slavery. Be it public nudity or Freemasonry, Zachary Hutchins convincingly shows how a shared wish to bring paradise into the pragmatic details of colonial living had a profound effect on early New England life and its substantial culture of letters. Spanning two centuries and surveying the works of major British and American thinkers from James Harrington and John Milton to Anne Hutchinson and Benjamin Franklin, Inventing Eden is the history of an idea that irrevocably altered the theology, literature, and culture of colonial New England -- and, eventually, the new republic.

The first book-length study of the fifteen surviving Little Gidding bible concordances, this book examines the visual culture of print in seventeenth-century England through the lens of one extraordinary family and their hand-made biblical manuscripts. The volumes were created by the women of the Ferrar-Collet family of Little Gidding, who selected works from the family's collection of Catholic religious prints, and then cut and pasted prints and print fragments, along with verses excised from the bible, and composed them in artful arrangements on the page in the manner of collage. Gaudio shows that by cutting, recombining, and pasting multi-scaled print fragments, the Ferrar-Collet family put into practice a remarkably flexible pictorial language. The Little Gidding concordances provide an occasion to explore how the manipulation of print could be a means of thinking through some of the most pressing religious and political questions of the pre-civil war period: the coherence of printed scripture, the nature of sovereignty, the relevance of the Mosaic law, and the protestant reform of images. By foregrounding the Ferrar-Collets' engagement with the print fragment, this book extends the scope of early modern print history beyond the printmaker's studio and expands our understanding of the ways an early modern Protestant community could productively engage with the religious image. Contrary to the long-held view that the English Reformation led to a decline in the importance of the religious image, this study demonstrates the ongoing vitality of religious prints in early modern England as instruments for thinking.

Reveals a much neglected strand of puritan theology which emphasised the importance of inner happiness and personal piety.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-284) index.

Professor C. S. Lim had a fondness for the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. A devout Christian, he loved the poetry of Donne, Marvell, and especially George Herbert. Lim found the poems beautiful, and he had a fascination for the themes of God and death and love. He began a dissertation in 1973 as a postgraduate student at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Lim died from cancer in 2011, and his wife, Rema Lim, published this little-known thesis that offers a rhetorical reading of Herberts The Temple and contributes to the understanding of the man himself. Praise for The Temple of George Herbert C.S. Lims remarkable study of George Herberts poetry goes a long way in reaffirming the importance of rhetoric in the literary world of seventeenth-century poets. Written forty years ago, it exhibits a kind of scholarship and insight that has become rare these days. Professor Lims analysis of the poems in The Temple shows the depth of Herberts rhetorical studies and also provides important insights into the nature of poetic language in the English Renaissance. The work also touches upon John Wesleys adaptations of Herberts poems. Professor Amlan DasGupta, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India