Indexing Herbert’s Temple

Abstract

The Temple (1633), a book of devotional lyrics by the English poet George Herbert, was a site of innovation in the seventeenth-century book trade. Scholars of book history have attended to its numerous editions, but one important paratext has been largely ignored: the expansive subject index that was appended to the collection in the printshop of Philemon Stephens in the 1640s. This subject index instrumentalized the collection. By using Stephen Orgel’s methodology of ‘the archaeology of texts’, this essay demonstrates how this index activated homiletical readings of Herbert’s poems. The essay uses the index first to reconstruct some of its readings. It explores the assumptions about the uses of lyric poetry that made such readings possible, and considers why twentieth-century critics have rejected them. While the essay connects the index to The Temple with earlier biblical and homiletical finding aids and an early modern cultural disposition to reading for action, it also marks, in the demise of this disposition, an origin for the modern practice of indexing lyric collections by first line. In closing, the essay compares the affordances of these two kinds of book index with the collation and search functions prepared for a recent digital edition.