Sermon studies are relatively virgin territory in post-medieval British ecclesiastical history. That is surprising, for a superabundance of evidence survives from the hundreds of thousands of sermons preached weekly since the Reformation in parish churches and chapels, in the form of the manuscript and published sermons by clergy of all sorts, and frequent references to sermons in the letters and diaries of laypeople. Sermons were experienced by most people of all classes, for they drew large congregations. The main criticism made by lay people was that they wanted more sermons. This need was partly met by the major output of individual and collections of sermons by the bookselling and printing industry in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries. Sermons were the stock-in-trade of newspapers, journals and booksellers until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It must have been a lucrative business. Letters and diaries show that people of all sorts bought and read sermons, and read them aloud in their households. Although they litter libraries, little attention has been paid to them in their own right, or as evidence about the lives and preoccupations of earlier generations. Now, with the publication of The Oxford handbook of the early modern sermon (Oxford 2011), and the volume under review, there is an introduction to this new discipline, which, because of the availability of the evidence, largely concentrates on published sermons.

The editors propose ‘sermon studies’ as an interdisciplinary endeavour, including historians of religion, publishing and social movements, literary and linguistic scholars, theologians and rhetoricians. The contributors to this volume are mostly historians of religion, writing from their own research perspectives. The editors’ intention is to examine – mostly published – sermons in their cultural and historical context. To this end they have gathered thirty-seven essays by thirty-five contributors under five headings: ‘Communities, cultures and communication’; ‘Occasional sermons’; ‘Controversies and the development of ideas’; ‘Missions and ideas of empire’; and ‘Sermons and literature’. The essays are wide-ranging, and avoid the temptation to focus on ‘great preachers’. They include nineteenth-century Anglican village sermons, ‘lectures’ as a variant of sermons, Quaker, eighteenth-century Evangelical and Roman Catholic sermons, Scottish sermons, Irish political sermons, Anglican sermons in Wales, and in Welsh, sermons preached before the royal court and parliament, sermons preached in response to wars in the eighteenth century, sermons and charges delivered at visitations and consecrations of bishops, funeral sermons, sermons preached to raise funds for charity schools, sermons in the light of the Enlightenment and rationalism, and in response to the ideas of Paley and Darwin, and bishop Colenso's sermons in Natal, sermons promoting the ideas of overseas missions, and ideas about empire, sermons by three nineteenth-century poets, sermons in relation to the gothic revival, and sermons and the Victorian novel.

These essays give a broad overview of published sermons for different audiences and occasions. Keith Francis notes, however, that most sermons, even in times of controversy, addressed the nature of the Christian life and how to live it, which, he suggests, is why sermons did not change much over the two centuries, and explains why the sermons of great preachers – Tillotson, Burnet, Butler and Secker – continued to be studied by candidates for ordination and preachers in the nineteenth century. He also astutely suggests that sermons were a chameleon form of literature, able to acculturate themselves to a wide array of forms and settings.

Bill Gibson, in an introductory essay, discusses briefly the evidence from bishops’ ordination and visitation charges and clergy letters and diaries for training and equipping clergy as preachers, the sources they used, and their attitudes towards preparing sermons. He also provides some background information about sermon-publishing, and how lucrative it could be for printers and booksellers, and introduces a discussion of the extent to which printed sermons may differ from sermons as delivered.

In his conclusion Keith Francis suggests a large number of areas for further research, including sermons by women, and directed at or for the benefit of women, sermons by laypeople, the economics of printing and publishing sermons, including the income that clergy derived from publishing sermons, the definition of a sermon, and what might be included under the heading ‘sermon’. He suggests a major research project to establish a data base of the, he estimates, 85,000 sermons published during the period, including access to the texts.

Numerous further questions come to mind. Why were sermons so popular? As Keith Francis shrewdly points out the number of sermons commercially published suggests that the British were very religious during these centuries, and that there are few signs of a decline in interest in sermons, at least amongst the book-buying classes, which raises questions about claims of ‘secularisation’. Further discussion about the purpose of the sermon in Anglican or Nonconformist worship would be helpful. Are the 85,000 or so published sermons representative of the much larger number of sermons preached week by week in chapels and churches throughout the British Isles? Do published sermons reflect sermons as preached? What were the criteria for evaluating sermons? How might sermons be categorised? More discussion about how preachers were trained and equipped to undertake this central task of their ministerial role would be helpful, as well as about their sources for preparing sermons, and how they prepared. To what extent and how did clergy use the Bible in their sermons, and did Anglican clergy use the Prayer Book lectionary as a focus for their preaching? How did clergy and ministers use sermons pastorally and strategically in their ministerial role? How were sermons received by congregations? What evidence is there, by contemporary standards, that sermons achieved their purposes of, for example, conversion, teaching, reforming manners, raising funds for educating and providing medical care for the poor, raising funds to build and maintain chapels and to pay clergy and ministers? What part did sermons play in the development of newspapers, journals and publishing?

Perhaps the major element missing from this collection, given its title, is any extensive discussion of sermons in dissent, nonconformity and Methodism, where they played an even greater role in worship than in Anglicanism. Eschewing concentrating on great preachers is wise but only a passing mention of some of the greatest preachers of their age, who filled vast buildings, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon, seems odd. Perhaps another volume will be devoted to these topics.