In his introduction, Arnold Hunt proposes to offer “a study of hearing rather than preaching” (5)—in other words, less of a study of preachers and their texts than of the experience of audiences—from 1590 to 1640. In practice, this fine monograph does both more and less than it claims. Hunt sometimes deviates from his stated chronological bounds, drawing on sources from the 1650s and beyond to form conclusions about earlier customary behavior without interrogating the reliability of that evidence for such uses. He is also unable consistently to stay focused on hearing rather than preaching, such as in the two final chapters, which provide brilliant explications of the contents of assize and Paul’s Cross sermons and the treatment of predestination in sermons. While those chapters do try to tease out what audiences heard, they are at least as much about what the preachers said (or tried to say). But the bottom line is that they are brilliant, informative, and pathbreaking.

Much of the first three chapters also focus on preachers and texts more than on hearers/readers, as they explore evolving ideas about the importance of hearing sermons as well as the value of printing them. Through a subtle reading of sources, Hunt shows that the goalposts shifted over time. While conformists like Whitgift held that reading sermons was useful and puritans held that it was useless, soon conformists began to argue that reading was preferable, and puritans argued that it was useful but not ideal. The change in puritan attitudes can be traced in part to printed sermons becoming more common and their benefits more apparent over time. Hunt shows that preachers came to appreciate that printing could bring sermons to audiences that had no access to a regular godly preaching ministry, inspire conversions, and remedy defects of memory and note taking. However, once it was in print, preachers lost control of what the reader/hearer did with the text and how it was read. Hunt also shows that whether to preach from notes or text, generally seen as a defining division between “godly” and “conformist” preachers, turns out often to have been site specific; preachers, who would rage against using a text in their parish pulpits, used one for a sermon at court or Paul’s Cross. Thus, Hunt shatters some myths about the differences between puritans and conformists and the unanimity of the godly. In the process, he gives us the best discussion we are ever likely to have about the ways in which sermons moved from pulpit to print and were changed in the process. By comparing notes or manuscripts to printed sermons, in those rare cases in which both exist, he shows that printed sermons are a poor guide to the “plain style”; sermon notes show that lively examples and contemporary/local references were edited out for publication, and language was made more sophisticated. The fourth chapter is a brilliant explication of sermon gadding, although mostly limited to London. Using manuscript sermon notebooks, Hunt shows that morning and afternoon sermons differed substantially; the former addressed basic morality, while the latter were more theological and complex. Gadding usually took place in the afternoons. Surprisingly, gadding divided puritans, some of whom were critical of the way it breached the bond between pastor and congregation and resulted in ministerial loss of control.

In many ways, the book is best read as a collection of related essays, rather than under the influence of an introduction that sets up expectations that are not entirely met and can distract from the real achievements and insights that pop off the pages. Another distraction is that Hunt’s treatment of other historians can verge on unpleasant. He implies, rather arrogantly, that he is the “scholar-prince” who will rescue the Sleeping Beauty of sermons from the “sleep of critical obscurity” (2), which is part of a pattern of dismissing or ignoring the work of other scholars who previously covered some of the same ground, conveying a sense of more pioneering on his part than is always the case. When he does cite other scholars, the effect can be ugly. My work is reported inaccurately and out of context (236); other scholars have their interpretations high-handedly dismissed as not credible, without evidence of how or why (295). This pales in comparison to Hunt’s relentless assault on Christopher Haigh’s work in chapter 5, which, although a valuable and persuasive corrective to Haigh’s reading of complaint literature, seems mean-spirited.

In the second chapter, memory occupies a central place in the discussion of how audiences were to hear and use sermons. However, Hunt does not appear to have examined the substantial literature on memory, nor does he convincingly address the reliability of memory. He trusts it when it suits his argument (e.g., his use of Richard Saxby’s notes on William Gouge’s sermons), but why should notes constructed by a hearer from memory be considered more reliable than what the preacher himself claimed to have preached? In chapter 3, there are several pages on the use of shorthand as an aspect of how sermon notes were taken, but it is not clear that Hunt looked at the many shorthand manuals that survive. Doing so (which I have done) gives one insight into the enormous practical difficulties of using these tools while listening to sermons. A final criticism must be aimed at the publisher, not the author. There is no bibliography except for a partial list of manuscript sources, which is regrettable because it is a real struggle to track down full citations in long, densely footnoted chapters.

While at Cambridge University, the late Patrick Collinson supervised many students who have made major contributions to our understanding of the English church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This long-awaited monograph has, to be sure, some flaws, and reading it can occasionally be frustrating, but together with a long list of outstanding essays and articles, it assures Arnold Hunt of a place in the first tier of Collinson’s protégés. Hunt’s tenacious pursuit of relevant sources in the dark corners of remote archives, subtle and nuanced readings of sources, new insights into old questions, and accessible prose make this one of the most thought-provoking and truly must-read books of the past ten years for people interested in early modern religion.