George Herbert: Complete Works: Volume I: English Prose [Hardcover]

A scholarly edition of the complete works of the Renaissance poet and priest George Herbert. Volume I offers the whole of Herbert's English prose, including his pastoral manual,The Countrey Parson; his collections of more than 1,100 aphorisms, theOutlandish ProverbsandJacula Prudentum; and, for the first time, the signed original of hisWill.Famed for his heart-searching devotional lyric poetry, George Herbert (1593-1633) also authored some of the finest and most influential English prose of his era:The Countrey Parson, his oft-cited pastoral manual, still valued for its spiritual insight, shrewd advice, and a style at once lively and refined, engaging and serious;A Treatise of Temperance and Sobrietie, his translation of Luigi Cornaro's jovial Italian tract on dietary health;Notes on Valdesso, his judicious and appreciative commentary (and sole theological work) on theConsiderationsof controversial Spanish humanist Juan de Vald?s; his collections ofOutlandish ProverbsandJacula Prudentum, pervasively popular for centuries and shot through with familiar wisdom and wit; hisLetters, providing the most intimate records of and reflections on his brief life; and hisWill,dictated and witnessed as he lay dying of tuberculosis in his Bemerton rectory at the age of 39. Each of these works, frequently cited as contexts for his renowned English poetry, appears here for close study in its own right.Volume I: English Proseoffers textual and critical introductions and annotations, a concise title essay and overview of prominent criticism for each chapter or section in subdivided works, and, above all, rigorous scholarly texts based on the earliest and best manuscript and print sources--some newly discovered or confirmed. Serious literary art by any measure, Herbert's English prose has emerged in recent years from the shadow of his rightly famous poetry. Such attentiolÓ}