This book explores the construction of gender ideology in early modern England through an analysis of the querelle des femmes - the debate about the relationship between the sexes that originated on the continent during the middle ages and the Renaissance and developed in England into the Swetnam controversy, which revolved around the publication of Joseph Swetnam's The arraignment of lewd, forward, and inconstant women and the pamphlets which responded to its misogynist attacks. The volume contextualizes the debate in terms of its continental antecedents and elite manuscript circulation in...

This volume replaces the traditional image of George Herbert as meditative recluse with a portrait of the poet as engaged throughout his life with the religion, politics and society of his time. Instead of an isolated genius living in retreat from the world, Herbert appears as a man writing public verse, active within an important social circle, and committed to nationalistic Protestantism. The book attends to the poetic brilliance of his verse as well as the institutions and contexts that influenced him: the upper class coterie, Cambridge University, and the Church of England.

This book places George Herbert's writing and biography within the history of social and economic change in seventeenth-century England. Drawing on the works of Max Weber, Raymond Williams, and the Protestant preachers of the period, the author argues that the doctrine of vocation is the shaping principle of The Temple and the prose manual The Country Parson, which coordinate inward devotion with outward social role like the soul with the body. This form of early modern subjectivity is shown to be significantly at odds with the system of status and yet developed in order to...