Christopher T. Hodgkins

Education: Ph.D. University of Chicago-1988, M.A. University of Chicago-1982, B.A. University of the Pacific-1980. Research Interests: The winner of UNCG’s 2010-2011 Senior Research Excellence Award, Dr. Hodgkins has interests in the literature of the Renaissance, specifically the early modern protestant lover’s quarrel with beauty, art, play, and worldly power. He is co-founder of the George Herbert Society, which in 2007-2008 brought over 300 scholars and poets together for conferences in Salisbury, England and at UNCG to reflect on Herbert’s pastoral life in Britain and his print and cultural legacies worldwide. He also co-planned the recent meeting at Herbert’s birthplace in Montgomery, Wales, in October of 2011. He held a 2010-2011 NEH Digital Humanities Scholarly Editions Grant to co-edit The Digital Temple (University of Virginia Press, 2012) the first authoritative born-digital edition of Herbert’s The Temple incorporating the two known manuscripts and the 1633 first edition. As Director of UNCG’s Atlantic World Research Network, he is developing resources and conference venues at home and abroad to explore the many ways in which history, culture, and the environment have been made and remade around the Atlantic Rim. He has been invited to speak recently at the University of Aarhus, Denmark; Brecon, Wales; the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; the University of Catania, Sicily; Wheaton College, Illinois; and Sarum College, Salisbury, England. Teaching Interests: The winner of UNCG’s 2003-2004 Senior Alumni Teaching Excellence Award, Dr. Hodgkins currently offers undergraduate courses exploring the early and later plays of Shakespeare, the literature of 17th-Century England, transatlantic literature from Medieval through the 18th Century, and literary study of the Bible. At the graduate level, he offers courses on the Metaphysical Poets, on the 17th-Century English lyric, on the life and work of Milton, and on the British imperial imagination. As the Department’s first Class of 1952 Professor from 2007-2009, Dr. Hodgkins has offered experimental undergraduates courses on such topics as Renaissance anti-theatricalism and the literature of empire, and experimental graduate seminars on such topics as the teaching of research and the transatlantic tradition in poetry.

There are 14 included publications by Christopher T. Hodgkins :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Betwixt This World and That of Grace’: George Herbert and the Church in Society. 1990 1278 Much as George Herbert's early biographers idealized him as a devoted celebrant of Britain's national church, so they portrayed him, at least in his last years, as correspondingly estranged from "the world." Izaak Walton describes how Herbert's e...
The Church Legible: George Herbert and the Externals of Worship 1991 6196 Christ's gospel is not a ceremonial law, as much of Moses' law was, but it is a religion to serve God, not in bondage of the figure or shadow, but in the freedom of spirit, being content only with those ceremonies which do serve to a decent order and...
[Review] Bruce Wathen. Sir Francis Drake: The Construction of a Hero. 2009 1716 "Thou concludest like the sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scraped one out of the table," says Lucio in the first act of Measure for Measure — words that could describe the greatest naval hero of Shakespeare's era...
[Review] Cristina Malcolmson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic. 2001 1062 Although George Herbert recently turned 400, only during the past decade has he really come out in society. Herbert has of course long been a major figure for serious scholarly study, and the subject of many important monographs treating his religion...
[Review] Elizabeth Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: “Divinitie and Poesie, Met.” 1999 2621 Since the publication a generation ago of Joseph H. Summers' George Herbert, His Religion and Art (1954), the essential lineaments of Herbert's Protestant faith have been clear, and since Barbara K. Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Sev...
[Review] James Boyd White, “This Book of Starres”: Learning to Read George Herbert. 1996 1406 "CURB YOUR DOGMA!" read the homosexual activist's protest sign a few year back during a papal visit to San Francisco. And one need not be a militant to share in our era's chafing at authoritative religious teaching; many within the churches are profo...
[Review] Jonathan F. S. Post, Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric. 2002 852 What a wonderful idea for a book! As the subtitle announces, Jonathan Post has brought together some of our finest contemporary poets and set them to interpreting and appreciating many important lyricists from Tudor-Stuart England and early colonial ...
[Review] Kristine A. Wolberg, “All Possible Art”: George Herbert’s The Country Parson. 2009 1124 George Herbert's prose pastoral manual has from the start been both linked to and overshadowed by his poetry. Completed in 1632, before his much more famed posthumous lyric masterpiece The Temple (1633), but not published until 1652, Herbert's...
[Review] The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. 1993 1237 The analysis of plays like the dissection of one's playmate, promises to increase our knowledge, but at a certain cost. Anyone seriously discussing something called “play theory” risks being alternately soporific and ridiculous—droning polysyllabical...
[Review] Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship. 1997 2251 Michael C. Schoenfeldt's Prayer and Power is proving to be the decade's most influential study of George Herbert. It is also one of the best pieces of sustained new historicist criticism in print, which is a compliment less extravagant than it...
[Review] Robert N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance. 1995 2558 Bacon wrote that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." I would add to his menu another kind that is worth consuming, but best taken with a grain of salt. Such a book is Robert N. Watson's study...
[Review] Terry G. Sherwood, Herbert’s Prayerful Art. 1991 2127 The specter of a Calvinist George Herbert loomed ever larger during the 1980s, and some critics clearly fear that, should such a view prevail, the poetic landscape will go grayer from the pale Genevan's breath. It is at first difficult to know whethe...
Stooping to Conquer: Heathen Idolatry and Protestant Humility in the Imperial Legend of Sir Francis Drake 1997 2594 The Muses seem to have neglected Sir Francis Drake. "It is curious," writes W. T. Jewkes, "that Drake's voyages and exploits have made such a small impact on major English literature, particularly in his own age."1 On one level, Jewkes ...
"Yet I love thee": The "Wayes of Learning" and "Groveling Wit" in Herbert's "The Pearl" 2004 2250 The word "yet" is a sharp little monosyllable. Like the arrow pointing on the highway, it signals a sudden turning away, or across, or back. Especially if repeated, the word "yet" adds a certain dynamic tension, a touch of interior drama, to any stat...