The Mystery of Hearkening: Listening for The Odour

What is it about?

Developing our understanding of the relations between orality and literacy in The Temple, this chapter provides a fuller view of Herbert’s mystagogy, the way he leads readers into the mystery of the Word. It does this by considering how The Temple resonates differently when we attend to early modern ideas about the physics, physiology, and theology of sound. By tuning into early modern frequencies, we discover that hearing and sound sometimes mean different things in the seventeenth century than they do for us and that such differences have crucial consequences for Herbert’s poetics of mystery.

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