Simon Jackson is Director of Music at Peterhouse and Little St Mary's Church, Cambridge, and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. His work focuses primarily on seventeenth-century musico-poetics, and has won the George Herbert Society Chauncey Wood Award (2013) and an English Literary Renaissance Award (2015).
This insightful and inviting book allows us to hear Herbert's musical world with fresh ears, attuned not only to individual imagination and pen but to the broader soundscape in which Herbert worked and thought. Simon Jackson's skillful approach offers new appreciation the profound impact of music on Herbert's poetry and, what is more, new and original understanding of Herbert's connections to the cultural orbits of his brother Edward (Lord of Cherbury), William Herbert and the Sidney family, Stuart masque culture, and more. Scott Trudell, University of Maryland Scott Trudell, University of Maryland George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture is that rarest of things - a triumph of learned, insightful interdisciplinarity. Jackson writes with equal sensitivity on music, verse, and biography, and tunes all three into a beautiful critical consort. His book is a landmark achievement in the study of Herbert and of early seventeenth-century artistic culture - a must for every lover and scholar of Herbert and his circle. Peter McCullough , University of Oxford