A public orator at Cambridge and later a priest in the Church of England, George Herbert (1593–1633) balanced a vigorous intellectual life with a passionate devotion to his faith. These two important strands in his life informed his great work, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, published shortly after his death at the age of thirty-nine. The Temple is considered one of the finest collections of devotional verse in the English language and among the most significant works of early modern literature.

The Digital "Temple" brings together the primary materials essential to the study of Herbert's English verse and presents them in a user-friendly online environment. This digital edition includes complete diplomatic and normalized transcriptions of the two known manuscripts of The Temple, in addition to a copy of the 1633 first edition. The 700 pages of high-resolution scans include each document in its entirety (excepting some Latin poems in one of the manuscripts). The editors have prepared textual and technical introductions, and the documents are fully annotated. No previous edition of The Temple has included facsimiles, transcriptions, and editorial commentary. This new resource provides students and scholars with all three and adds to this the power and convenience, including comparative display and full-text searching, of a digital edition.