The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon

Scholarly interest in the early modern sermon has flourished in recent years, driven by belated recognition of the crucial importance of preaching to religious, cultural, and political life in early modern Britain. The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon is the first book to survey this rich new field for both students and specialists. It is divided into sections devoted to sermon composition, delivery, and reception; sermons in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; English Sermons, 1500-1660; and English Sermons, 1660-1720. The twenty-five original essays it contains represent emerging areas of interest, including research on sermons in performance, pulpit censorship, preaching and ecclesiology, women and sermons, the social, economic, and literary history of sermons in manuscript and print, and non-elite preaching. The Handbook also responds to the recently recognised need to extend thinking about the 'early modern' across the watershed of the civil wars and interregnum, on both sides of which sermons and preaching remained a potent instrument of religious politics and a literary form of central importance to British culture. Complete with appendices of original documents of sermon theory, reception, and regulation, and generously illustrated, this is a comprehensive guide to the rhetorical, ecclesiastical, and historical precepts essential to the study of the early modern sermon in Britain.

Peter McCullough is Fellow & Tutor in English at Lincoln College Oxford, and a leading expert on the works and lives of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes.


Hugh Adlington is Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham; he specialises in early modern religious writing, especially the sermons and scholarship of John Donne.


Emma Rhatigan is Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Sheffield; her research and publications focus on early modern texts in performance (both drama and preaching), and their audiences.

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Preface
I. Composition, Delivery, Reception
1. Ars Praedicandi: Theories and Practice, Greg Kneidel
2. The Preacher's Bibles, Lori Anne Ferrell
3. The Preacher and Patristics, Katrin Ettenhuber
4. Preachers and Medieval and Renaissance Commentary, Carl Trueman
5. The Preacher and Profane Learning, Noam Reisner
6. Preaching Venues: Architecture and Auditories, Emma Rhatigan
7. Sermons in Performance, Kate Armstrong
8. Preaching in the Parishes, Ian Green
9. Women and Sermons, Jeanne Shami
10. Sermon Reception, John Craig
11. Sermons into Print, James Rigney
12. Preaching & Context: John Donne's Sermon at the Funerals of Sir William Cokayne, Peter McCullough
II. Sermons in Scotland, Ireland and Wales
13. Preaching the Scottish Reformation, 1560-1707, Crawford Gribben
14. Preaching the Reformation in Early Modern Ireland, Raymond Gillespie
15. The Sermon in Early Modern Wales: Context and Content, Stephen Roberts
III. English Sermons, 1500-1660
16. From Tudor Humanism to Reformation Preaching, Lucy Wooding Kostyanovsky
17. Official Tudor Homilies, Ashley Null
18. Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement, Arnold Hunt
19. Veiled Speech: Preaching, Politics, and Scriptural Typology, Kevin Killeen
20. Preaching and Parliament, 1640-1659, Tom Webster
IV. English Sermons, 1660-1720
21. Restoration, Religion, and Law: Assize Sermons 1660-1685, Hugh Adlington
22. Preaching at the Court of Charles II: Court Sermons and the Restoration Chapel Royal, Matt Jenkinson
23. Sermons in Print, 1660-1700, Rosemary Dixon
24. The Sermon Culture of the Glorious Revolution: Williamite Preaching and Jacobite Anti-Preaching, 1685-1702, Tony Claydon
25. The Political Sermon in an Age of Party Strife, 1700-20: Contributions to the Conflict, Pasi Ihalainen
V. Appendixes
I. Preachers on Preaching
II. Sermons Observed
III. Sermons Regulated
Select Bibliography
Index