Reading Herbert Reading Valdés: Antinomian Disruption, The Hundred and Ten Considerations, and The Temple
Reading Herbert Reading Valdés: Antinomian Disruption, The Hundred and Ten Considerations, and The Temple
This chapter focuses on the work of Catholic reformer Juan de Valdés, who was incorporated into the Protestant project to construct a pedigree for their Reformed Church, despite the fact that he remained within the Catholic Church throughout his life. Valdés was a biblical scholar and teacher who had fled from Spain to Italy in the early 1530s. He died in 1540, ten years before his major work was first published, in Basle. The Hundred and Ten Considerations reached England in its Italian version in the 16th century, but the first English edition was not published until 1638, when a translation by Nicholas Ferrar was finally passed for publication in Oxford. Herbert clearly thought this treatise so important that he viewed its publication a responsibility laid on Ferrar by God. Several critics have claimed that Valdés influenced Herbert’s poetry, but that is unlikely. What is more likely is that Herbert found so much of the work congenial because it has much in common with the spirituality of his own brand of early 17th-century English Protestantism.
Keywords: Juan de Valdés, George Herbert, English Protestantism, Nicholas Ferrar, translation
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