I.Composition,delivery,and reception
A good place to begin is with ars prædicandi,the theory and practice of preaching in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.By the end of the seventeenth century,adaptable versions of four basic sermon structures—the homily,the thematic sermon,the classical oration,and the doctrine-use scheme—were available for use by English preachers.Each of these schemes drew something from the most influential rhetorical manuals in the period.These included Augustine's On Christian Doctrine,Book 4,Erasmus's colossal Ecclesiastes,sive de ratione concionandi(1535),and subsequent works by Philipp Melanchthon and later Protestant sermon rhetoricians—Andreas Hyperius,Niels Hemmingsen,Gerhard Vossius,Bartholomaus Keckermann,and William Perkins.Several key questions underpin the theory of early modern English preaching:How could scriptures be at the same time sacred,authoritative,and obscure?How could a caste of skilled preachers distinguish themselves from the non-preaching laity,from classically-trained rhetors,and even from God Himself,whose divine artistry precedes and exceeds all human art?And how could the spiritual,social,psychological differences of a sermon audience be recognised and accounted for,in terms of both the individual believer and the communal church?[8]
It will be useful to add here a brief word about the kinds of learned apparatus and resources used by early modern British Protestant preachers.No matter how social,political,plain,or eloquent,the primary subject of every sermon in the period was one book—the Bible.Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century preachers used the successive bibles appointed by authority for use in churches(Great,Matthew,Bishops’,Authorized),and also variously deployed‘unofficial’biblical texts in English(psalters by Coverdale and Sternhold and Hopkins;the Geneva,and Douai-Rheims bibles).It is crucial to remember that Protestant preachers of this period also incorporated within their exegeses bible translations in the ancient languages:Vulgate(both pre-and post-Tridentine versions),Torah and associated rabbinical commentary,Erasmus's Greek New Testament,and Tremellius's Protestant Latin bible.[9]
The church fathers were also a crucial source for preachers throughout the early modern period.By the late sixteenth century most clergymen were steeped in the writings of both western and eastern church fathers(such as Augustine,Jerome,Ambrose,and Gregory the Great;and Basil,Gregory of Nazianzen,Athanasius,and John Chrysostom,respectively).In a complex and shifting polemical climate,the most characteristic feature of patristic discourses is a sense of rigorous occasionality—a willingness to construct and exploit classic factional positions on the fathers,but an equally strong appetite for modifying and undermining these assumptions as the situation demands.Protestants had little compunction in appealing to a patristic consensus when it suited their purposes,nor did Catholic controversialists shy away from invoking the authority of individual fathers,especially in cases where there was little hope of achieving collective patristic assent.The same principle applies to doctrinal positions associated with a particular father or group of fathers.While it is certainly helpful to highlight some general trends—the early reformers’reliance on Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings,for instance,or the Laudian use of the Greek fathers’ views on episcopal dignity—we should be wary of overestimating the solidity of identifications which,in practice,were almost always open to strategic manipulation.[10]
The indebtedness of early modern British preaching to continental Roman Catholic and Reformed writing is acknowledged by recent studies,yet has received little in-depth discussion.Carl Trueman,by contrast,has shown in detail how much of that debt is owed to an astonishingly rich treasury of medieval and Renaissance biblical commentary:from twelfth-century Franco-Spanish Jewish exegetes such as Abraham Ibn Ezra,through the late medieval theology of Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen,to the sixteenthcentury scriptural glosses of Jesuit and Protestant Hebraists and theologians such as CorneliusàLapide and Jan Drusius respectively.Trueman also notes the relative indifference of the English Reformation to Lutheran theology,the subsequent ascendancy of Calvin,and the emerging importance of Arminian doctrine and ecclesiology in the seventeenth century.Recent studies in this area are united in seeking to explicate the polemical context—textual and religious—in which preachers applied such varied scholia,showing how such integration reflects the resolutely dialogic character of Christian exegesis in general,and of the early modern pulpit in particular.[11]
The objection by some evangelical Protestants to the use of‘profane’,or classical,texts is well known,but perhaps has an exaggerated place in stereotypical assumptions about preaching in the period.The roots of those objections lie in early evangelical biblo-centrism and reappear throughout the period(in late Elizabethan‘puritanism’,in mid-seventeenth-century radicalism,and in the later dissenting tradition).But it is important to note,briefly,the often strident defence of the use of Greek,Roman,and late antique poetic,historical,and philosophical texts and the high degree of creativity with which many preachers,often in socially and intellectually‘elite’contexts,deployed exempla from authors as varied as Ovid,Herodotus,Josephus,Aristotle,Homer,Seneca and Cicero within their Christian homiletics.[12]
The study of specific preaching venues and congregations has been crucial to recent scholarship of the early modern sermon.Studies such as McCullough's Sermons at Court(1997)and Mary Morrissey's Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons,1558-1642(2011)have focussed on individual pulpits,demonstrating the value of reading sermons in the context of the institutional apparatus and traditions of preaching in specific locations.Current research in this area covers most of the major preaching venues in the early modern period,including the royal court,St Paul's Cross,the Spital pulpit,inns of court,liveries,universities,and also non-elite pulpits in the parishes.[13]A related trend in recent studies of early modern preaching is the insistence that sermons were,first and foremost composed,delivered,and received not as written or printed artefacts but as oral performances.The foundations of sermon delivery were laid in the classical canons of oratory(memoria,pronuntiatio et actio)taught in schools and universities;these governed not just the preacher's own delivery,but also the expectations and judgements of audiences who often placed a higher premium on delivery than on content itself.Recent research in this area,such as that by Kate Armstrong,stresses the need for modern readers to animate their readings of printed texts with a lively sense of how gesture and voice were deliberately manipulated to further the rhetorical aim of raising emotion in the audience.[14]
In a recent example of this kind of study,Armstrong focusses on the response of letter-writer and gossip John Chamberlain to a 1617 Gunpowder Plot sermon delivered at Paul's Cross by Henry King.Chamberlain observes to his long-time correspondent Dudley Carleton that:‘he[Henry King]did reasonablie well but nothing extraordinarie,nor neere his father,beeing rather slow of utterance orator parum vehemens’.[15]Armstrong notices that Chamberlain is primarily struck by King's delivery,his performance of his sermon,rather than by the sermon's content.In couching his scant praise of King in the phrase‘orator parum vehemens’(rather a spiritless orator),Chamberlain is quoting from Cicero's De officiis.[16]This text was recommended by the schoolmaster John Brinsley not only for its moral content,but also as a suitable basis in the grammar school for‘witty pleasant disputations’.[17]In citing Cicero directly,and this line of Cicero in particular,Chamberlain therefore judges King specifically against standards of the fifth part of rhetorical delivery,actio,as taught formally in late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century grammar schools and universities. Moreover,Chamberlain clearly assumes that Carleton will understand his judgement that King was‘rather slow of utterance orator parum vehemens’.Armstrong concludes that it is similarly incumbent upon modern scholars to understand the expectations of delivery held by early modern preachers and their auditors.[18]
Another notable feature of recent sermon scholarship has been its willingness to look beyond its traditional narrow focus on elite preaching to consider the ritual,pastoral,and edifying roles played by sermons in the lives of early modern British parishioners,both in London and in the provinces.What was preached in English parish churches from 1500 to 1720,however,is likely to remain elusive,for two reasons.First,there is little first-hand evidence of either the content,style of delivery or reception of parish sermons.Most of the sermons that survive were given at court or in the capital or a cathedral or other large church,by a leading cleric who was both highly educated and had considerable experience as a preacher;and many of the extant texts were modified for publication by the author or editors who were hoping to drive home the message to an imagined community of readers.[19]Second,while the ideal may have been a single pastor preaching regularly to a single flock,the reality was often very different.In the‘dark corners’of the North and West sermons remained rare for some time,unless there was a peripatetic incumbent like Bernard Gilpin nearby or an evangelical dean or bishop like Tobie Matthew who was prepared to endure the rigours of frequent journeys on exposed tracks to pay a flying visit.[20]Even in the South and East,it proved hard to fill many of the poorer livings with a licensed preacher,and many of those who were licensed had to serve two,three,or more churches or chapels on a temporary or permanent basis.Others combined pastoral duties with cognate roles—as cathedral clergy,chaplains to the royal family or landed elite,or schoolteachers.This meant that during a typical clerical career of twenty-five to thirty years,a licensed preacher had to adjust to the needs and responses of a variety of congregations.He had to be able to provide regular sermons on Sundays and holy days in one or two places,deputise for a sick or absent colleague in a third,give a funeral sermon in a fourth,and(if sufficiently well regarded)give a weekday lecture or assize or visitation sermons in yet others,often with some highly educated clergy as well as laity present.Did he consciously preach in different ways in different situations,as Luther and Zwingli had done?Did he have the time,the books and the skills to prepare brand new sermons each time he preached,or did he cultivate a series of useful headings and tropes which could be applied extemporaneously to a variety of texts and contexts?How many clergy,as ordinands or newly ordained incumbents,composed sets of sermons which they could later re-work,supplementing them with other men's ideas which they had meanwhile encountered in manuscript or printed form?[21]
How were sermons received?The subject is both vital and vast,yet one that has received very little scholarly treatment,primarily because the evidence is so elusive.If we know little about how these discourses were actually delivered—questions of tone,gesture,appearance,audibility,fluency—and even less about the context in which they were received,from Paul's Cross to parish churches,we know almost nothing about the range of responses to thousands of sermons preached to a variety of audiences.The little we can know must be gleaned from a myriad of sources—epistles dedicatory in printed sermons,incidental evidence scraped from a variety of narratives,letters,parish accounts,anecdotal observations or church court proceedings.It is noticeable that historians and literary scholars have begun to attend more closely to the art of listening,the soundscapes of parish worship and the acoustic world of early modern England,but much remains to be uncovered.[22]
This brings us to the equally important topic of the print publication and dissemination of sermons.Thousands of sermons were published in the early modern period,reflecting the rise of print culture in the sixteenth century,the establishment of the Licensing Act(1556),and the rapid growth of a reading public.But what status could a printed sermon could have in a religious culture insistent on the immediate power of God's word to work Salvation?And could God's word survive what Natalie Zemon Davis has called the‘desacralising technology of the printing shop’?The extant evidence of sermon printing,purchasing,and ownership suggests that the answer to the second of these questions is a resounding‘yes’.Yet it is important to note that the printed sermon is always produced and read in association with other genres:devotional writing,stage plays,summaries of legislation,and above all,as the seventeenth century progressed,the popular pamphlet.[23]
Before turning to specific developments in sermon culture between 1500 and 1720,it is worth mentioning one further area of growing interest in sermon studies more broadly.That is,the roles played by women in a religious,political,and literary culture enlarged by vernacular preaching:first as subjects,but then as patrons,consumers,and preachers of sermons.Key scholars with regard to the first three roles include Margaret Ezell,Barbara Lewalski,Elizabeth Hodgson,Christine Peters,Suzanne Hull,Sarah Mendelson and Patricia Crawford.With regard to women as preachers,Suzanne Trill's discovery of a manuscript sermon(c.1606)by Anna Walker,court lady to Anne of Denmark,constitutes an exciting moment in this neglected part of the history of sermons.The entire manuscript contains a sermon and dedications,exegetical passages of biblical texts from woman to woman,emblematic coloured drawings,poems,biographical materials,and other writings in Walker's gothic,italic,and secretary hands.The originality of Walker's sermon achievement is stunning,beginning with her choice of a text(Colossians 4:5:‘Walke wisely:towards them that are without,and redeeme the time’)that puns on her surname,but developed throughout the manuscript's expert deployment of the‘discursive strategies of her more well-known,sermon-writing male contemporaries’,including their forms of exegesis,rhetoric,and poetics.[24]The self-referential aspects of the sermon extend beyond the choice of text into the dedication to Queen Anne of Denmark,where Walker depicts herself as a‘walker’in the Lord's garden of true believers,a potential‘foundation of identification’between herself and the Queen based on their common interest in the‘true’Church and on Walker's‘high-status Danish connections’(bolstered by allusions to her father and to the Queen's father and brothers).[25]Even Walker's choice of handwriting for the sermon links her with signifying systems more usually associated with male authorship.[26]Trill posits that the parts in gothic script encode a semi-private Danish signification,self-consciously used by Walker to support her request for financial succour based on common national identity and history.[27]