Author Description

This is the first newly prepared, complete edition of Henry Vaughan's poetry and prose for over a century. In the introduction, the reader will find an up-to-date biography of Vaughan, a substantial history of developments in Vaughan scholarship and criticism from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, and full bibliographical descriptions of each of the volumes published in the author's lifetime. The texts carefully reproduce original spelling and punctuation, with textual variants and significant editorial emendations made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries noted at the foot of the page for easy reference. Vaughan's volumes are printed in the order of their first publication and each is introduced by a brief essay on the date and circumstances of its publication, its historical and literary contexts, and the nature of its contents. Vaughan's surviving letters are also included, and appendices print additional poems found in other volumes, poems of dubious ascription, and marginalia made in medical books owned by Vaughan. The third volume contains the commentary on prose works and poems. The notes on the poetry take into consideration material derived from scholarly and critical work published over the past forty years, and the edition locates Vaughan's translations and original prose texts firmly, and for the first time, in the complex religious, political, and intellectual contexts of the mid-seventeenth century. The third volume also contains a substantial bibliography and an index.