Daniel W. Doerksen's Picturing religious experience is a powerful argument for treating The Temple as a representation and enactment of Calvinist spiritual life. Through a series of sensitive close readings, Doerksen draws important and persuasive connections between the poet and the theologian: both, he shows, centred their understanding of Christian experience on the Bible (and especially the Psalms) as a pattern for the believer's inner life, and both saw spiritual conflict as the crux of human intimacy with God. Reading Herbert and Calvin in this way requires revising some approaches to each. The second chapter, a shrewd examination of how early readers impressed The Temple and its author into a Laudian programme foreign to both, should be required reading for scholars working on seventeenth-century devotional poetry. More broadly, Doerksen makes the implicit case that reading devotional texts primarily through the lens of doctrine can blur the result, and, in Herbert's case, obscure the affinities of his writings with the pastoral side of Calvin's thought. While Doerksen does turn to the Institutes to show agreement between Herbert and Calvin, the latter's Commentary on the Psalms is a much more important touchstone throughout the study. In addition to adjusting our understanding of how Herbert's poems work, this emphasis is also part of a much briefer intervention on behalf of Calvin. The caricatures of Calvin as a steely prophet of despair and of English Calvinism as synonymous with Presbyterianism are, fortunately, becoming harder to find even in literary scholarship. Picturing religious experience nevertheless reminds readers that the English Church was broadly Calvinist from Elizabeth's accession to the mid-seventeenth century, that Calvinism is not reducible to predestination and that predestination is in any case a way of understanding God's mercy, and that the theologian was profoundly concerned with the compassionate care of souls. The study is thus convincing in arguing that Herbert had much in common with and on occasion was directly influenced by Calvin. Precisely because forms of devotional experience can sometimes be compatible with multiple doctrines, though, it would have been helpful if the book had had some account of the areas of overlap between the spiritual life described by Calvin, enacted by Herbert's poems, and assumed or prescribed by other devotional texts – for example, the Catholic private prayer books that, after tactful translation into English, were cheerfully used by English Protestants. That is, even Calvin is not always ‘Calvinist’ when his materials are traditional. Regardless of whether the pedigree of these ideas is completely pure, however, Doerksen here offers a description of how Herbert's lyrics work that seems, simply, true.