George Herbert – poet, orator, and preacher – was formed, enchanted, and yet ultimately disappointed by rhetoric. In this first book-length study of his complicated relationship with the discipline, nineteen chapters by leading Herbert scholars examine his achievements and continuing legacies, filling gaps and looking beyond critical commonplaces about his 'paradoxical' or 'self-consuming' relationship with language to the personal, institutional, religious, philosophical and political contexts of that relationship. The resulting collection interweaves Herbert studies with the latest scholarship on rhetoric's foundational importance to Renaissance humanism, to the biblical culture of post-Reformation England, and to early modern literature. This is a thoroughgoing reappraisal of Herbert's rhetorical art, placing one of early Stuart England's most sumptuous – and yet one of its plainest – writers at the centre of debate over Renaissance eloquence.

‘This is one of the richest examinations yet of Herbert's complicated relationship with the art of rhetoric. I cannot think of another volume that treats Herbert's eloquence in such far-reaching and comprehensive ways.'

Simon Jackson - Director of Studies in English, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge