SOURCE: Jordan, Richard Douglas. “Thomas Traherne and the Art of Meditation.” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, no. 3 (July-September 1985): 381-403.

In the following essay, Jordan analyzes Traherne's works in the context of the period in which they were written and compares them to those of his contemporaries.

Thomas Traherne is a devotional writer whose works belong in significant ways to the period in which they were written, the period between the Restoration in 1660 and Traherne's death in 1674, yet they have seldom been considered in that context. Instead, Traherne has repeatedly been discussed by scholars within a context limited to writers of the earlier seventeenth century, particularly those writers of devotional prose and poetry who produced their works before the Civil Wars.¹ Traherne was strongly influenced by these earlier writers—it would have been remarkable and had he not been—but to see him as a belated contributor to...