Conclusion
Why should we be interested in sermons at all in the early modern period?Findings from the STC show that between 1603 and 1640 sermons,works of religious controversy,and theological tracts comprised by far the majority of works printed.Godfrey Davies has gone as far as to call the early seventeenth-century pulpit,‘the most influential of all organs of public opinion’.[83]As well as serving an edifying function,public sermons also supplemented the meagre printed sources of news,and often offered editorial commentary on current events to a broad cross-section of society.Shifting back and forth between the historical and tropological senses of a given scriptural text,preachers of sermons could thus make subtle allusion to current events.Indeed,recent studies have drawn attention to the inherent topicality in this period of even the most apparently innocuous homily preached in provincial parish pulpits.Allied to this recognition of topicality,is the increasingly orthodox notion that sermons are fundamentally,though never simplistically,occasional pieces of writing.Jeanne Shami,Peter McCullough,Lori Anne Ferrell and other scholars have all sought to emphasise the responsiveness of early modern pulpit oratory to exigencies of time,place and auditory.Detailed reconstruction of historical context has become a hallmark of recent study:‘And this can be achieved without a wholesale rejection of formal analysis,but rather by studying sermons’forms in the context and evaluative terms of the culture that produced them’.[84]Since many of early modern sermons’subtlest effects depend on precise twists and recoils,context cannot simply be mustered around the works themselves as a nebulous cladding of fact.Thus,readers,whether specialists or not,require more specific detail,which is difficult to muster without the expositor crossing over into interpretative coercion.Such caveats apply in particular to the interpretation of the‘sensitive,controversial vocabulary’of seventeenthcentury religious polemic,and the attendant risks of taking such vocabulary at face value.Indeed,in methodological terms,a focus on the flexible,adaptive eloquence of preachers responsive to occasion and auditory may be one of the key contributions literary scholars can make to revisionist Reformation historiography.
As Keith Thomas points out in his 2006 article,computers have transformed the ways in which historians conduct research.Early English Books Online brings images of virtually every work printed in English from 1473-1700 directly to our desktops,and has driven research into a vast range of sermons and preachers,previously only available to those researchers with access to copyright libraries.Other vital research resources,such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,State Papers Online 1509-1714,and the Clergy of the Church England Database,have also enabled ever more detailed historical contextualisation.Digitisation of manuscript images is still in its infancy by comparison with resources such as EEBO,and sites such as Scriptorium:Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online tend to focus on poetic miscellanies and commonplace books rather than sermons or devotional material.[85]Yet new and forthcoming scholarly editions of sermons by major Jacobean preachers such as Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne promise new findings in the bibliography of sermon manuscripts,and in the study of textual transmission.
Recent research in sermon studies has drawn attention to neglected topics such as the ritual significance of local,parish sermons to domestic life,the role of women in sermon patronage,delivery,and reception,and the vibrant British preaching culture beyond England,in Scotland,Wales,and Ireland.Fine-grained studies into the print publication of sermons also promise to reveal much about the way in which such texts were viewed by contemporaries.Above all,studies into the intense biblicism of the early modern period promise to bring us closer to the experience of contemporary auditors of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century sermons.Patrick Collinson has described the pervasiveness of early modern biblical culture in vivid terms:‘minds saturated in scripture and able to move around in it with the familiarity and ease of a blind man who knows the position and feel of every stick of furniture in his own house’.[86]If we are to understand better how people thought,felt,and why they acted as they did in early modern Britain,then we must attain an equivalent familiarity with our historical sources.Manuscript and printed sermons are not the least of those sources.
【注释】
[1]Hugh Adlington can be contacted at h.c.adlington＠bham.ac.uk.This paper,intended as an introductory survey,is comprised of abridged material from P.McCullough,H.Adlington,and E.Rhatigan(eds.),The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon(Oxford,2011).I am indebted to the following contributors to the volume:Kate Armstrong,Tony Claydon,John Craig,Katrin Ettenhuber,Lori Anne Ferrell,Raymond Gillespie,Ian Green,Crawford Gribben,Pasi Ihalainen,Matt Jenkinson,Kevin Killeen,Greg Kneidel,Peter McCullough,Ashley Null,Noam Reisner,Emma Rhatigan,the late James Rigney,Stephen Roberts,Jeanne Shami,Carl Trueman,Tom Webster,Lucy Wooding-Kostyanovsky.
[2]K.Thomas,‘New Ways Revisited’,The Times Literary Supplement,5402(13 Oct 2006),3.
[3]K.Thomas,‘New Ways Revisited’,4.
[4]K.Thomas,‘New Ways Revisited’,4.
[5]L.A.Ferrell and P.McCullough,The English Sermon Revised(Manchester,2000),2.
[6]R.Strier,Resistant Structures:Particularity,Radicalism,and Renaissance Texts(Berkeley,1995),73.
[7]B.Cummings,The Literary Culture of the Reformation:Grammar and Grace(Oxford,2002),6.
[8]This paragraph is an abridged version of G.Kneidel,‘Ars Prædicandi:Theories and Practice’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,3-20(3,12,9).
[9]The material in this paragraph is drawn from L.A.Ferrell,‘The Preacher's Bibles’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,21-33.
[10]This paragraph is an abridged version of K.Ettenhuber,‘The Preacher and Patristics’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,34-53(37).
[11]For further discussion,see C.Trueman,‘Preachers and Medieval and Renaissance Commentary’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,54-71.
[12]For further discussion,see N.Reisner,‘The Preacher and Profane Learning’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,72-86.
[13]For further discussion,see E.Rhatigan,‘Preaching Venue:Architecture and Auditories’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,87-119.
[14]See C.J.Armstrong,‘“Error vanquished by delivery”:Elite Sermon Performance in Jacobean England’(University of Oxford,D.Phil.thesis,2008).
[15]J.Chamberlain,The Letters of John Chamberlain,(ed.)N.E.McClure,2 vols.(Philadelphia,1939),Ⅱ.114;cited in C.Armstrong,‘Sermons in Performance’,Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,120.
[16]Cicero,De officiis,(trans.)W.Miller.Loeb Classical Library(Cambridge, MA,1913),1.i.3.
[17]J.Brinsley,Ludus literarius or the Grammar Schoole,(ed.)E.T.Campagnac(London,1917),207.
[18]This paragraph is an abridged version of C.Armstrong,‘Sermons in Performance’,120-136(120-121,135).
[19]I.Green,Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England(Oxford,2000); I.Green,‘Orality,Script and Print:The Case of the English Sermon c.1530-1700’,in H.Schilling and I.G.Tóth(eds.),Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe,1400-1700(Cambridge,2006),236-255;I.Green,Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England(London,2009).
[20]D.Marcombe,‘Gilpin,Bernard(1516-1584)’,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online(2004);W.Sheils,‘Matthew,Tobie(1544?—1628)’,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online(2004).
[21]I.Green,Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching,4,11-18,21-24.This paragraph is an abridged version of I.Green,‘Preaching in the Parishes’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,137-154(137-138).
[22]This paragraph is an abridged version of J.Craig,‘Sermon Reception’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,178-197(179).See also,P.Burke,‘Notes for a social history of silence in early modern Europe’,in The Art of Conversation(Ithaca,1993),123-141;J.Craig,‘Psalms,groans and dogwhippers:the soundscape of worship in the English parish church,1547-1642’,in W.Coster and A.Spicer(eds.),Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe(Cambridge,2005),104-123;A.Hunt,The Art of Hearing(Cambridge,2010);B.Smith,The Acoustic World of Early Modern England(Chicago,1999);C.Sullivan,‘The Art of Listening in the Seventeenth Century’,Modern Philology,104(2006),34-71.
[23]For further discussion,see J.Rigney,‘Sermons into Print’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,198-212.
[24]S.Trill,‘A Feminist Critic in the Archives:Reading Anna Walker's Sweet Savor for Woman(c.1606)’,Women's Writing,9,2(2002),201-202.
[25]S.Trill,‘A Feminist Critic in the Archives:Reading Anna Walker's Sweet Savor for Woman(c.1606)’,203-204.
[26]S.Trill,‘A Feminist Critic in the Archives:Reading Anna Walker's Sweet Savor for Woman(c.1606)’,212.
[27]This paragraph is an abridged version of J.Shami,‘Women and Sermons’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,155-177(153,167-168).
[28]S.Wabuda,Preaching During the English Reformation(Cambridge,2002),26-48.
[29]R.Whitford,A Werke for Housholders(1530),Diiijr-v.
[30]P.Marshall,The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation(Oxford, 1994),88.
[31]M.Dowling,‘John Fisher and the preaching ministry’,Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte,82(1991),306.
[32]J.Fisher,A Mornynge Remembraunce had at the Moneth Mynde of the Noble Prynces Margarete(1509),Aviv.
[33]R.Rex,The Theology of John Fisher(Cambridge,1991),33-34.This paragraph,and the one following,are abridged versions of L.Wooding,‘From Tudor Humanism to Reformation Preaching’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,329-47(330,332,334-335,341-342).
[34]P.Marshall,Reformation England,1480-1642(London,2003),58.
[35]This paragraph,and the one following,are abridged versions of A.Null, ‘Official Tudor Homilies’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,348-365(348,363).
[36]E.Duffy,The Voices of Morebath:Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village(New Haven,2001).
[37]P.Collinson,Elizabethans(London,2003),115.
[38]C.Hill,The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution(London,1993),49;D.Appleby,Black Bartholomew's Day:Preaching,Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity(Manchester,2007),92.
[39]P.McCullough,Sermons at Court(Cambridge,1998);L.A.,Ferrell,Government by Polemic(Stanford,1998);M.Morrissey,‘Presenting James VI and I to the public:preaching on political anniversaries at Paul's Cross’,in R.Houlbrooke(ed.),James VI and I:Ideas,Authority,and Government(Aldershot,2006).This paragraph,and the two following,are abridged versions of K.Killeen,‘Veiled Speech:Preaching,Politics and Scriptural Typology’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,387-403(387-88,395-6).
[40]T.Jackson,Judah must into Captivitie(1622),29.
[41]Gataker,A Sparke toward the Kindling of Sorrow for Sion(1621),8-9.
[42]Gataker,A Sparke toward the Kindling of Sorrow for Sion(1621),17.
[43]Gataker,A Sparke toward the Kindling of Sorrow for Sion(1621),25.
[44]For further discussion,see T.Webster,‘Preaching and Parliament,1640-1659’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,404-420.
[45]Edward,earl of Clarendon,The History of the Rebellion,(ed.)W.D.Macray(Oxford,1888),Ⅳ.194;Ⅰ.401.
[46]S.Marshall,A Sermon Preached to the House of Commons November 17th 1640(1641),33,49.
[47]A.Trapnel,A Legacy for Saints(1654),2.This paragraph,and the two following,are abridged versions of T.Webster,‘Preaching and Parliament,1640-1659’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,404-420(404-405,409-410,412-413).
[48]J.Owen,The Duty of Pastors and People Distinguished(1644),in The Works of John Owen(1850-3),20,25.
[49]V.Powell,Christ and Moses Excellency(1650),A4v.
[50]T.Webster,‘Preaching and Parliament,1640-1659’,412-413.
[51]E.C.Dargan,A History of Preaching(New York,1912),Ⅱ.163.
[52]W.Fraser Mitchell,English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson(London, 1932),343.
[53]H.Davies,Worship and Theology in England(Princeton,1975),Ⅱ.177- 180;C.H.Sisson(ed.),The English Sermon:An Anthology(Cheadle,1976)Ⅱ.15;I.Rivers,Reason,Grace and Sentiment(Cambridge,1991),Ⅰ.25-88;K.G.Stevenson,Milton to Pope,1650-1720(Basingstoke,2001),202-219.
[54]This paragraph,and the one following,are abridged versions of H.Adlington,‘Restoration,Religion,and Law:Assize Sermons,1660-1685’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,423-441(424-425).
[55]Dargan,History of Preaching,168-185.
[56]See respectively,N.H.Keeble,The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England(Leicester,1987);Rivers,Reason,Grace and Sentiment,89-163;Appleby,Black Bartholomew's Day,18-54.
[57]I.Green and K.Peters,Religious Publishing in England,1640-1695’,in J. Barnard and D.F.McKenzie(eds.),The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain(Cambridge,2002),Ⅳ.80.
[58]This paragraph,and the two following,are abridged versions of M.Jenkinson,‘Preaching at the Court of Charles II:Court Sermons and the Restoration Chapel Royal’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,442-459(444-445,447-448,455).
[59]M.Goldie,‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’,Political Studies,31,1(1983),71-73.
[60]M.Goldie,‘The revolution of 1689 and the structure of political argument’,Bulletin of Research in the Humanities,83(1980),473-564.
[61]R.Astbury,‘The renewal of the licensing act in 1693 and its lapse in 1695’,The Library,5th series,33(1978),296-322.
[62]This paragraph,and the three following,are abridged versions of T.Claydon,‘The Sermon Culture of the Glorious Revolution:Williamite Preaching and Jacobite Anti-Preaching,1685-1702’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,480-494(480-481,489-490).
[63]Anon.,Dr Burnet's Sermon before his Highness the Prince of Orange,at the Cathedral of Exon.(1688?),9.
[64]Anon.,Dr Burnet's Sermon before his Highness the Prince of Orange,at the Cathedral of Exon.,12.
[65]T.Claydon,‘William III's Declaration of reasons and the Glorious Revolution’,Historical Journal,39(1996),91-7.
[66]T.Claydon,‘William III's Declaration of reasons and the Glorious Revolution’,87;J.Caudle,‘Measures of Allegiance:Sermon Culture and the Creation of a Public Discourse of Obedience and Resistance in Georgian Britain,1714-1760’(Yale University,PhD thesis,1996),100,111-13;T.Claydon,‘The Sermon,the“Public Sphere”and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England’,in L.A.Ferrell and P.McCullough(eds.),The English Sermon Revised,208,213-14.This paragraph,and the four following,are abridged versions of P.Ihalainen,‘The Political Sermon in an Age of Party Strife,1700-1720:Contributions to the Conflict’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,495-513(495-6,499,510-11).
[67]Ihalainen,The Discourse on Political Pluralism in Early Eighteenth-Century England(Helsinki,1999),325-326.
[68]See K.A.Francis and W.Gibson(eds.),The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon,1689-1901(Oxford,2012).
[69]The Confession of the Faythe and Doctrine Beleved and Professed,by the Protestantes of the Realme of Scotlande(1561),cap.19.
[70]A Directory for the Publique Worship of God,throughout the three kingdoms of England,Scotland,and Ireland(1645),27.
[71]This paragraph,and the three following,are abridged versions of C.Gribben, ‘Preaching the Scottish Reformation,1560-1707’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,271-286(271-272,274,279-280).
[72]D.Mullan,Scottish Puritanism(Oxford,2000),55-62.
[73]D.Mullan,Scottish Puritanism(Oxford,2000),55-62.
[74]M.Todd,‘Bishops in the kirk:William Cowper of Galloway and the puritan episcopacy of Scotland’,Scottish Journal of Theology,57,3(2004),303-312.
[75]O.Chadwick,‘Robert Leighton after three hundred years’,Journal of the Society of Friends of Dunblane Cathedral,14,4(1985),126.
[76]Trinity College Dublin,MS 1688;Marsh's Library,Dublin,MS Z4.5.19.
[77]P.Kilroy,‘Sermon and Pamphlet Literature in the Irish Reformed Church,1613-34’,Archivium Hibernicum,33(1975),110-121.
[78]This paragraph,and the one following,are both abridged versions of R. Gillespie,‘Preaching the Reformation in Early Modern Ireland’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,287-302(288,300).
[79]St J.D.Seymour(ed.),Adventures and Experiences of a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman(Dublin,1909),16.
[80]T.Wright(ed.),Three Chapters of Letters relating to the Suppression of Monasteries(London,1843),183-4.This paragraph,and the two following,are abridged versions of S.K.Roberts,‘The Sermon in Early Modern Wales:Context and Content’,in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon,303-325(303,305-306,321).
[81]L.J.Hopkin James and T.C.Evans,Hen Gwndidau,Carolau a Chywyddau [Old Sermons in Song,Carols and Strict Metre Poems](Bangor,1910),128.
[82]L.J.Hopkin James and T.C.Evans,Hen Gwndidau,Carolau a Chywyddau,81.
[83]G.Davies,‘English Political Sermons,1603-1640’,Huntington Library Quarterly,3,1(1939),7.
[84]Ferrell and McCullough,The English Sermon Revised,9.
[85]The exception to this rule is Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons(GEMMS),an online bibliographic database of early modern sermon manuscripts from the British Isles and North America.It should be noted,however,that GEMMS still contains relatively few digitized images of manuscript sermons themselves.
[86]P.Collinson,‘The Protestant Cathedral’,in P.Collinson,N.Ramsay and M.Sparks(eds.),A History of Canterbury Cathedral(Oxford,1995),103.