George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety
Regular price
€82.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Ceri Sullivan
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Ceri Sullivan
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSB
Category=DSBD
Category=HBLH
Category=HRAX
Category=NH
Category=QRAX
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780198906810
- Weight: 498g
- Dimensions: 162 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 20 May 2024
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Contemporary nudge theory points out that people make good choices over issues where they have had past experience of similar circumstances, where there is reliable, substantial, and relevant information about the situation, and where they will get prompt feedback about the effect of their decision. Yet none of these conditions apply to the most vital choice of action facing early modern Protestants: how can they be saved? In George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety, Ceri Sullivan uses nudge theory to show how practical divinity disregards the doleful conclusions of predestination--that salvation cannot be earned--to supply readers with suggestions on how to prepare to act, regardless of their final destiny. Such texts create cognitive niches to support cheerful, godly thought and action, in a way which is far from being despairing or compulsive. Their nudges were repeatedly put into practice by Herbert's friends, the Ferrars, who tried to form an ideal religious community at Little Gidding. These prescriptions and examples illustrate how George Herbert's The Temple (1633) is a compendium of the techniques of choice architecture. Herbert's poems are full of the humour emerging from a life of faith which is willing to guard high ideals by low cunning, stooping to use the least little things to change a self. George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety initially calls on theories of the extended mind to ask what sort of minor physical and social structures scaffold decisions, then examines a selection of nudges used by Herbert: contracts with the self, building a mind, cleaning a heart, conversing with God, making to-do lists, and working on working well.
Ceri Sullivan is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, and the author of several books about the literary features that structure early modern texts about religion, trade, bureaucracy, and rhetoric. She was educated at the University of Oxford, and was formerly a banking systems analyst in the City of London and an NGO worker in sub-Saharan Africa.
