The Mount of Olives

The Mount of Olives is a devotional prose work by Henry Vaughan, the Welsh metaphysical poet who lived from 1621 to 1695 and who is now best remembered as one of the major figures of seventeenth century English metaphysical poetry alongside John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. The book was published in 1652 and represents Vaughan’s contribution to the substantial body of Anglican devotional literature that the English seventeenth century produced.

Vaughan’s poetic reputation rests principally on his collection Silex Scintillans, the religious verse collection first published in 1650 and substantially expanded in 1655 that contains his most famous poems including The Retreat, They Are All Gone Into the World of Light, The World, and various others that have remained in standard English poetry anthologies since the nineteenth century. The Mount of Olives belongs to the prose devotional work that accompanied the religious poetry across his career and that drew on similar Anglican spiritual sources for its substance.

The Mount of Olives refers to the hill east of Jerusalem where Christ prayed during the events of Passion Week before his arrest and crucifixion, particularly in the Garden of Gethsemane on the western slope of the mount. Vaughan uses the Mount of Olives as the central organising image for a book of devotional exercises, prayers, and meditations aimed at the substantial Anglican audience that the Civil War period had left without the formal Anglican liturgical worship that had been suppressed by the parliamentary regime during the 1640s and 1650s.

Vaughan was writing from within the displaced Royalist Anglican tradition that the parliamentary victory had pushed out of the institutional Church of England. The book belongs to the substantial body of mid seventeenth century Anglican devotional literature that provided private devotional resources for Anglicans during the years when the formal Anglican Book of Common Prayer worship was not available. Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying are the most famous of this body of literature and Vaughan’s book belongs to the same broader tradition.

The book is of interest to readers of seventeenth century English Anglican devotional literature, to scholars of Vaughan’s poetry who want to see his prose religious writing, and to readers of metaphysical religious literature more broadly. It pairs naturally with Silex Scintillans and with the other major Anglican devotional works of the mid seventeenth century.