Centuries of Meditations

Further Reading

Other editions. Bertram Dobell’s first edition, Centuries of Meditations (London, 1908), printed from the manuscript in modern spelling, was reissued in December of the same year and reprinted several times by his sons’ firm, P. J. and A. E. Dobell. H. M. Margoliouth edited Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings in two volumes for the Clarendon Press (Oxford, 1958), with the Centuries in the first, and Anne Ridler’s one-volume Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings (Oxford University Press, 1966) follows Margoliouth’s text. Jan Ross’s The Works of Thomas Traherne (D. S. Brewer, from 2005) gives the Centuries together with the Select Meditations in its fifth volume (2013), and Julia J. Smith had earlier edited the Select Meditations on their own (Carcanet, 1997). Among the selections are Alan Bradford’s Selected Poems and Prose (Penguin, 1991) and Denise Inge’s Thomas Traherne: Poetry and Prose (SPCK, 2002). A new critical edition, The Oxford Traherne, under the general editorship of Julia J. Smith, is in preparation.

The life and the critics. The first full biography is Gladys I. Wade’s Thomas Traherne (Princeton, 1944), and the standard short life is Julia J. Smith’s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Smith is preparing a fuller one. For the manuscripts, Peter Beal’s entries in the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 are the most complete census. Among the critics, Louis L. Martz’s The Paradise Within (1964) remains the classic study of the book’s structure, and K. W. Salter’s Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet (1964) its most searching doctrinal critique. A. L. Clements, Stanley Stewart and Richard Douglas Jordan wrote the major studies of the following decade. The recent revival can be followed in Denise Inge’s Wanting Like a God (2009), Elizabeth S. Dodd’s Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Theology (2015) and the essays gathered by Dodd and Cassandra Gorman in Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-Century Thought (2016). Carol L. Marks’s two articles of 1966 remain the starting point on his Platonic and Hermetic sources.

Companion books. The Centuries read best beside the books they answer or resemble. Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1650) and George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) are their nearest neighbours in verse, and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1643) in prose. John Earle’s character of “A Child” in Microcosmography (1628), whose soul is a clean page the world has not yet written on, anticipates both the empty book and the Third Century. Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man and John Everard’s Divine Pymander (1650) show the Renaissance and Hermetic sources at work in the Fourth Century, and the Cambridge Platonist John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660) the English Platonism of the same years. For the form, the Four Centuries on Love of Maximus the Confessor and Joseph Hall’s Meditations and Vowes (1605) are the models in Greek and English. For the later kinship, Wordsworth’s Intimations ode and Emerson’s Nature (1836) are the obvious pairings.