The Role of Preaching in Political and Cultural Ch...
Hugh ADLINGTON
University of Birmingham
In 1966,the Times Literary Supplement devoted three issues to‘New Ways in History’.Forty years later,also in the TLS,Keith Thomas measured the predictions of 1966 against the reality of four decades of historical study.Some of those predictions,as Thomas observes,‘were patently off target’.[2]Econometric history has not rendered all other approaches obsolete.Social history,rather than occupying the central role foreseen in 1966,has been overtaken by cultural history.Quantitative history has had limited success,even in cultural realms such as book history(e.g.William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period(Cambridge,2004)),but remains subordinate to qualitative approaches in most areas of modern historical writing.Yet,though history has not become a social science,it is much closer to adjacent disciplines than it used to be.[3]Historians of subjects such as religion,ritual,and kinship now utilise the techniques of social and cultural anthropology in an effort to draw closer to the lived experience of historical actors(including their mentalités,vocabularies,and habits of life).The reasons for this shift in emphasis are many;Thomas cites three:modern ideas of respect for other cultures;the declining appeal of Marxism,with its tendency to dismiss conscious thought as mere‘super-structure’;and renewed interest in the philosophy of R.G.Collingwood,who saw history as the recollection or re-enactment of past experience.The result of these factors is a cultural history based,rather perversely as Thomas wryly observes,on the belief‘that what happened in the past is less important than what most people thought had happened’.[4]Whether we agree or not with that provocative claim,there is no doubting another of Thomas's principal findings:that the subject matter of history has broadened beyond recognition.The impact of contemporary events and cultural change has led to the burgeoning of histories of gender and sexuality,of the relations between cultures and classes within and between different world regions,of environmental history,histories of the body,of consumer goods,of human emotions,and of personal identity.A renewed interest in the history of religion has also been fuelled by a belated recognition of religion's centrality to society,politics,and culture in the early modern period,and by the inescapable impact of the so-called‘clash of civilisations’.
All of this helps to explain the resurgence in scholarly interest in early modern sermons that has flourished in recent years.In the last two decades,the landscape of sermon studies has been transformed by a number of seminal monographs and essay collections,such as Peter McCullough's Sermons at Court(Cambridge,1997),Lori Anne Ferrell's Government by Polemic(Stanford,1998),Ferrell and McCullough's The English Sermon Revised(Manchester,2000),Larissa Taylor's Preachers and People in the Reformations(Leiden,2001),Susan Wabuda's Preaching during the English Reformation(Cambridge,2002),Jeanne Shami's John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the late Jacobean Pulpit(Woodbridge,2003),David Appleby's Black Bartholomew's Day.Preaching,Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity(Manchester,2007),Arnold Hunt's The Art of Hearing(Cambridge,2010),and most recently,McCullough,Hugh Adlington,and Emma Rhatigan's The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon(Oxford,2011),and Mary Morrissey's Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons,1558-1642(Oxford,2011).Each of these works,written in the light of revisionist Reformation historiography,considers the sermon‘as literary art inextricably engaged in the public sphere’,and seeks to reflect the rich diversity of recent literary and historical studies.[5]This is in contrast to mid-twentieth-century accounts of early modern preaching,which focussed largely on the literary qualities of canonical works by authors such as John Donne,Lancelot Andrewes,and Joseph Hall,with little consideration of wider religious,political,or cultural concerns.It is also in contrast to new historicist accounts of literary and political culture in early modern Britain.The best scholarship on early modern preaching is increasingly aware of the conceptual limitations of this critical school.Richard Strier,for example,has admitted that religion is‘something of a problem for New Historicism,which tends—unlike Renaissance English culture—to have a radically secular focus’.[6]Brian Cummings has gone further,arguing that without reference to religion,‘the study of early modern writing is incomprehensible’.[7]
With this in mind,this essay hopes to achieve two main aims.The first is to survey developments in sermon culture between 1500 and 1720,with an eye to preaching's role in shaping and reflecting larger political and cultural events and trends.The second is to report on principal areas of interest in recent sermon studies.These areas include research on sermons in performance;women and sermons;the social,economic,and literary history of sermons in print;non-elite preaching;new insights into methods of sermon exegesis;new studies on neglected genres such as assize sermons;and sermons preached in Scotland,Ireland and Wales.Some preliminary remarks on important aspects of sermon composition,delivery,and reception will serve as a basis for the pursuit of these aims.