Clement’s book is an original contribution to early modern sermon studies. Whereas recent monographs on the topic have focused chiefly on the sermon’s role in politics, institutions and social contexts such as delivery, reception and publication, Clement works from inside the texts of sermons themselves to assess what they can tell us about early moderns and their emotions. Objecting to an over-emphasis in scholarship on ‘medicalised’ (Galenic, humoral) understandings of the emotions, the author seeks to recover a more complex sense of them as controllable, teachable and, indeed, profitable when understood as feelings that were responsive to the believer’s rectified will and conscience. And in early moderns’ efforts to accept and direct emotions properly, sermons were nothing less than ‘the art of teaching people how to feel’ (p. 19).

Taking a cue from Edward Reynold’s Treatise of the passions (1640), the book is divided into chapters on five different emotions: love, fear, anger, grief and joy. But this is no Procrustean bed; rather, one of the great strengths of the book is its careful attention to how, in the crucible of real lives and in the sermons that engage them, boundaries between emotions constantly blur, sometimes even to the point of paradoxical mutual interdependence. And Clement shows repeatedly how much more ambiguous emotions are than we might conventionally assume. Fear – of God, of sin – is a good thing. Anger can be properly directed or combined, as when it joins love to become commendable zeal. So, too, joy, especially as epitomised in the reception of holy communion, has as its pendant emotion grief for Christ’s Passion.

The book’s structure, though, is anything but blurry; chapters are consistently divided and summarised, lending a clarity that is one of the many aspects that recommend it to those new to the field, not least students. The intended audience is clearly in English literary studies, and Clement’s juxtaposition of poems (by Herbert, Lanyer, Donne and others) with sermons neatly shows that, although critics learned generations ago how to write seriously about religious emotions in early modern verse, they have neglected sermons, which deserve similar attention, and have thus missed opportunities to show how each literary form can enrich appreciation of the other. Clement is also well versed in the theology and historiography of mainstream English Calvinism, and confidently deploys a range of pertinent philosophical and theological antecedents, including Seneca, Augustine and Aquinas.

There are many things that this book does not do. There is very little about form or genre; almost nothing about rhetoric in the specialist sense of parts of an oration or tropes and figures of speech; very few detailed readings of complete sermons; and very little by way of biography or textual history (except for the welcome reminder that sermons had meaning and influence in print no less than in delivery). But these are all things that Clement is clear that she is not setting out to consider in the first place. Rather, she keeps her focus on what sermons and other religious texts taught about emotions, including their risks as well as their proper uses. In addition, she is up front about limiting her book not only to the period 1600–40 but also to preachers who fit squarely in the tradition and preaching ethos of evangelical conformist Calvinism. If there are omissions, then, they are by design and have the compelling effect of being felt not so much as flaws than as opportunities for further work. Surely, for example, ‘Laudians’ had things to say about emotions, and could express them in their sermons; reading this book has been a good prompt to think about how and why.

There are aspects of this study that seem perhaps not fully realised, or at least not fully articulated, that are worth drawing out. One might be the fact that the sermons chosen here for being the best examples of an affective kind of preaching – one characterised by a strong communal sympathy between preacher and auditory – mostly turn out to be parochial sermons, or sermons for smaller, corporate fraternities (Lincoln’s Inn, the late Prince Henry’s household), where a degree of intimacy mixed with preacherly confidence of superiority was more possible than, say, at the court before the king. Most striking to me, though, was the natural way in which Donne’s sermons feature so prominently here alongside the likes of Thomas Adams, John Preston and Richard Sibbes. Without saying so explicitly, Clement has, using only her criteria of preachers’ attention to emotions, put Donne exactly where he belongs on the spectrum of the early Stuart church: squarely among sermon-centred Calvinists (even if he was also the most sophisticated of them). Contextualising Donne in this way, through a rich reconstruction of the emotional alertness and sincerity of this group of preachers (who, Clement wisely cautions, expressed emotions from the pulpit pedagogically and pastorally, not necessarily personally), is perhaps the best, if here unarticulated, riposte I have seen to T. S. Eliot’s sneer that Donne was some kind of outlier, a mere ‘sorcerer of emotional orgy’.

When read and appreciated in its own terms, and with lively thought about the doors it opens, this is a satisfying book. One therefore hates to mention flaws, and the most nugatory will be passed over here only with the caution (to all of us) that, as academic presses invest less in proofreading and expert scrutiny of copy, authors need to do more. Two small matters of fact call for correction: prayers are ‘intercessory’ not ‘intersessionary’ (p. 119), and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy from Bartholomew fair was not an ‘obnoxious parson’ (p. 92) but the only thing that Ben Jonson thought was worse: a layman who sounded like one. More substantively, though, I found the final chapter, on joy and holy communion, the weakest. It was here that some potential flaws in methodology regrettably became actual: chiefly an over-reliance on the simple juxtaposition of sermons with other literary texts, in this case the Book of common prayer, rather than more carefully demonstrating what they had to do with each other. The commendable desire to attend to sermons that were preached in the context of a holy communion service was hampered by use of a sermon series by Sibbes, the actual relationship of all of which to the liturgy (not least, whether preached at a communion or as preparation over days in advance of it) was regrettably loose. Most egregious, however, was the repeated identification of the liturgy’s Gloria as the ‘Agnus Dei’ – the latter, of course, excised from the Church of England’s rite by Cranmer and not put back until 1928. And, in a chapter on climactic joy in communion, it was a lamentably lost opportunity not to acknowledge and discuss Cranmer’s revolutionary removal of the Gloria to the end of his reformed rite – as a summative expression of joy firmly placed after, rather than before, the sermon.