James Leeke, George Herbert, and the Neo-Latin contexts of the Church Militant

This article situates George Herbert's poem The Church Militant in new Neo-Latin contexts. Rather than reading the poem in relation to Herbert's English poetry, as has often been done before, it argues that it has close generic ties to Anglo-Latin miniature epics on the Gunpowder Plot. This article first shows how Herbert's English poem draws on and revises elements of this tradition; it then turns to a little-known manuscript translation of The Church Militant prepared immediately after its publication. The translation - which significantly revises Herbert's original text - attempts to pull Herbert's poem closer to the miniature epic tradition from which it had broken. Taken together, these contexts demonstrate the surprising proximity of this English poem to a Neo-Latin poetic genre and shed new light on Herbert's choice of the vernacular as a departure from the politics of the miniature epic tradition.