For readers who are seeking a comprehensive and generally accessible volume that summarizes the history of preaching during the nineteenth century in Europe and North America, this book is not it. For readers who are seeking a collection of serious, substantial studies across a wide array of topics that are essential to any learned approach to understanding the importance of preaching in the English-speaking world of the nineteenth century, this text may be indispensable.

Robert Ellison has assembled an impressive, diverse body of contributors to write extended chapters on various homiletical topics. Their expertise generally encompasses matters associated with rhetoric. But as scholars, they have professorial profiles in history and English literature and social sciences. The chapters tend to be extensive, expansive, and presumptive about the level of prior knowledge one will have before starting to read. It is refreshing, in a way, to have an assortment of serious people write for an assortment of serious readers. In how many other studies of homiletics or history, for instance, has one encountered the observation that sermons on temperance in nineteenth-century America were “imbricated with other social movements” (376)?

The volume begins with a useful introduction in which the editor provides some context for this project. He links it to the 1998 book, The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press), in its attempt to analyze preaching not from the perspective of the biographies of preachers but from the perspective of clear rhetorical analysis of their products. He pays tribute to J. N. Ian Dickinson and O. C. Edwards, whose contributions included providing both method and form for studying religious and cultural sources for “sacred speech.”

Besides his introduction, the editor also contributed an opening essay that set a standard for the chapters that follow. Each is equipped with a complete apparatus and ample footnotes. The index is helpful, though modest, but it is probably sufficient for a volume of this type. Ellison's essay on “The Tractarians Sermons and Other Speeches” offers a thorough discussion of Newman. In it, he also distinguishes “plain preaching” from the “university sermon,” and discusses the statutory requirement at Oxford for a rotating series of sermons in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. (Methodists will recall the impact of John Wesley's homily in that setting on St. Bartholomew's Day, which became the last time he was ever invited to deliver such a University sermon.)

Bob Tennant's chapter on “Missions, Slavery, and the Anglican Pulpit” offers a marvelous contextual description of the way that the nature of the British Empire was “imbricated” with the content of much nineteenth-century preaching. For example, one sermon at Cambridge built upon the concept of empire as a vehicle for Christian “stewardship” over those parts of the world that had become “our high and holy trust.” Tennant's work also demonstrates that the existence of the empire created an umbrella under which the missionaries could work without having to fret over forming a centralized system to manage their missions. The empire provided it.

Dorothy Lander's marvelous chapter on “The Itinerant Pulpit of the WCTU” stretches the design of the volume, in the sense that she pays significant attention to contributions by individual preachers in the temperance movement. Frances Willard features prominently in this chapter, as one would expect. But Lander places her in context, showing the degree to which itinerant male preachers did—or did not—find room for women in the pulpit. More significantly, Lander allows a newly generous definition of itineration to emerge in this essay. Hence, Willard itinerated across the boundaries of various rhetorical styles and settings, developing a connection between social activism and social holiness that transcended the inward and intimate focus on entire sanctification that was so characteristic of her mentor Phoebe Palmer.

Other chapters in the volume offer stimulating and creative approaches to the task. John Wolffe's section “is focused on discrete occurrences that gave rise to sermons on a single day, or within a short, defined period of time” (181). Thomas Carmody devotes twenty-five pages to the rhetoric of the anti-dueling movement. For those who wonder about the roots of African American preaching and its impact on the social order, the chapter by Joseph Evans on “Sacred Rhetoric and the African-American Civic Sermon” deserves attention. Evans notes, for instance, that Frederick Douglass demonstrated the power of an intellectual approach to the pulpit, using both “secular and sacred visionary rhetoric” (447). He then moves beyond the nineteenth-century to discuss Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gardiner Taylor—but Douglass's power gave those preachers a place on which to stand.

As a part of Brill's “New History of the Sermon” series, this volume demonstrates that substantive rhetorical analysis is a vital scholarly contribution to understanding the work of preaching. It is not the book with which to begin a study of preaching. But one cannot approach the end of such a study without the resources in these chapters.