Chapter 1 turns to Augustine’s musico-poetic treatise De musica to elucidate the theoretical ideas about music and poetry that lie behind Herbert’s musical practices. Herbert is known to have greatly valued Augustine’s works, yet few critics have engaged the implications of Augustine’s musico-poetic treatise on Herbert’s work. For both Augustine and Herbert, music and poetry were arts of ‘moving and measuring well’. Expressive musical and poetic performance was both an aesthetic and an ethical act, with implications for the health of body and soul. For both writers, this metaphysical understanding of the nature of music was derived from practical experiences of music-making. Reading The Temple in light of De musica reframes our understanding of Herbert’s poetry of affliction as a tuning of the individual and provides the reader with an overview of the theological ramifications of music that this book explores.

In Chapter 3, Herbert’s verse is read in the context of another collaborative enterprise, the Stuart court masque. These playful and extravagant secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s often modest devotional poetic, though Herbert can hardly have been ignorant of the genre: members of Herbert’s family – including the Earls of Pembroke, their wives and children, and Herbert’s own brother Sir Henry Herbert (c.1594–1673), sometime Master of the Revels – were involved in their performance and production. This chapter offers the court masque as a particularly vivid contemporary genre that engages with the possibilities of interdisciplinary expression. These entertainments alert us not only to the interplay between words and music, but also to the ways in which musical ideas of harmonious proportion might be expressed visually through the stage’s elaborate perspectival sets, and through the moving human medium of dance.