A Discourse of Life and Death
Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort (translated by Mary Sidney Herbert)
A verified public-domain excerpt for this text is still being set. The folio is catalogued and linked below; an original Sub Rosa rendering will follow.
What it is
Mary Sidney Herbert's English translation of Huguenot theologian Philippe de Mornay's prose meditation on the vanity of earthly life and the blessedness of a Christian death. She signed the translation 'The 13 of May 1590. At Wilton,' making the Pembroke seat the explicit locus of its composition, and published it together with her translation of Garnier's Antonius in 1592. The work reflects the Sidney circle's militant Protestant Calvinism: Mornay argues that 'we find greater civil war within ourselves' and that only trust in Providence reconciles the soul to mortality. Mary used the translation both as personal grief-work after Philip Sidney's death and as a public statement of Protestant literary patronage, establishing herself as heir to her brother's theological and literary politics.
Why it still matters
Mornay's Discourse, in Mary Herbert's lucid translation, offers a classical-Christian meditation on mortality that is still accessible today as an aid to preparation for death and the cultivation of detachment from worldly ambition.
Kept alongside
The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations
George Herbert's complete collection of English devotional poems, entrusted on his deathbed to Nicholas Ferrar with instructions to publish if they might help 'any dejected poor soul.' Herbert was a kinsman of the 3rd Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert), whose patronage secured him the rectory at Bemerton near Wilton House; he also answered Philip Sidney's secular sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella with early sonnets dedicated entirely to God. The Temple went through at least eleven editions by 1695 and immediately became the central text of English Protestant devotional lyricism. Its structure mirrors the Anglican liturgical year, and individual poems such as 'Love (III),' 'Easter Wings,' and 'The Altar' function as meditations on grace, humility, and the soul's encounter with Christ. Richard Baxter wrote that Herbert 'speaks to God like one that really believeth in God.'
John Donne's Sermon on Magdalen Herbert (with George Herbert's Memoriae Matris Sacrum)
A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers
John Donne's funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert (Lady Danvers), mother of George Herbert, published in 1627 with George Herbert's nineteen Latin and Greek memorial poems appended. Donne had been Magdalen's friend and protégé for twenty years, and the sermon describes her household prayer practice and her formation of her ten children in Anglican piety—including the young George—as a model of Protestant domesticity. George Herbert's decision to publish his memorial verse attached to Donne's sermon (his only act of publication in his lifetime) demonstrates how the Herbert family's devotional life was inseparable from its literary identity. The combined volume is a document of the devotional culture at the intersection of the Pembroke and Herbert–Newport family circles.
The Hundred and Ten Considerations of Signior John Valdesso (with notes by George Herbert)
Las ciento y diez consideraciones (Spanish); Cento e diece divine considerationi (Italian); English trans. by Nicholas Ferrar with notes by George Herbert
Juan de Valdés's spiritual treatise on the interior life, translated into English by Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding and prefaced with a letter from George Herbert—Herbert's 'Briefe Notes on Valdesso's Considerations'—published posthumously in 1638. Herbert reviewed Ferrar's manuscript during his Bemerton years (c. 1632–33) and returned it with detailed theological annotations and the commendatory letter; his endorsement carried the authority of the Pembroke connection. The work reflects the shared devotional culture of the Ferrar–Herbert circle and demonstrates George Herbert's role as a critical reader and devotional guide beyond The Temple. Valdés's Erasmian spirituality of inward transformation rather than external ceremony resonated deeply with Herbert's own poetics of the soul.