George Herbert: Complete Works Wins Fourth NEH Award
The George Herbert Society is pleased to announce that George Herbert: Complete
Works (GHCW) has been awarded a $300,000 Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant
from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities. The edition’s fourth from
the NEH, the award will finance production of the three-volume GHCW, now under contract
with Oxford University Press. GHCW is co-edited by founding editor Robert Whalen
(Northern Michigan University) and GHS Director Christopher Hodgkins (University of
North Carolina at Greensboro), who share the award with editors Paul Davis (University
College London) and Luke Roman (Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns). This
achievement is also GHS’s, which, in partnership with OUP and UNCG Libraries, will
preserve and publish the edition’s digital complement on an expandable free-access platform
for public use.
As its title suggests, Complete Works comprehends the entirety of Herbert’s writings,
including his Latin (and Greek) verse and prose, to which are added original translations by
Sarah Kunjummen (University of Chicago) and the editors. Edited texts are established
through close examination of multiple witnesses to Herbert’s works—his earliest editions and
surviving manuscripts, several of which have been recently discovered or identified after
some four hundred years and will be included for the first time in the new edition. The other
major component of GHCW is its extensive critical apparatus—i.e. a new brief biography
along with detailed introductions and annotations pertaining to Herbert’s life and to his
historical and intellectual contexts.
The finished product will appear in three print volumes as part of the Oxford
Scholarly Editions series. As already noted, the GHS, in partnership with the UNCG
Libraries and OUP, will preserve and publish an expandable digital complement: high-
resolution images of all witnesses presented in parallel display, alongside transcriptions that
capture the original spellings, abbreviations, and other features of early-modern books and
manuscripts, including the peculiarities of scribal Neo-Latin. This searchable archive, to be
based at UNCG, preserves the whole of the Herbert corpus for the twenty-first century and
beyond, providing free public access to materials otherwise available only to those who are
able to travel to the repositories that house them.
As the project’s co-editors, Whalen and Hodgkins oversee an international team of
textual scholars, literary critics, and Latinists, including a fourteen-member board of expert
advisors—all under the imprimatur of OUP, the world’s leading publisher of scholarly
editions. Now more than twenty years in the making, GHCW is a once-in-a-lifetime
production, providing the foundation for critical study of this essential poet for generations to
come.
General editors Robert Whalen and Christopher Hodgkins are pleased to announce that George Herbert: Complete Works—the first full edition of Herbert since 1941—is now under contract with Oxford University Press. A scholarly edition in three volumes, it will include extensive textual and critical apparatus, collation of recently-discovered manuscripts (including a new copy-text for Musae Responsoriae), and original translations of Herbert’s Latin and Greek poems and prose:
Volume I: English Prose (2023)
Volume II: Latin and Greek Verse and Prose (2024)
Volume III: English Verse (2025)
A parallel-text digital complement, to be offered gratis to the public, presents all witnesses as archive-quality images alongside diplomatic transcriptions. The edited texts, apparatus, and translations are reserved for the Oxford print edition, while the free digital resource will capture the full textual record as a dynamic and robust searchable archive, preserving the whole of Herbert’s oeuvre for future generations of scholars, students, and general readers. For additional information and samples of the digital complement, click here.
