‘[T]his book … is essentially a study of hearing rather than preaching, focused … on the two-way relationship between the preacher and his audience’ (p. 5), writes Arnold Hunt in his introduction to The art of hearing. English Sermon Studies have indeed grown up. Once the stuff of treacly Anglican encomia, the early modern sermon was finally subjected in the 1990s to rigorously historicist scrutiny by literary scholars like Peter McCullough and Jeanne Shami; with Hunt's monograph we find this revivified subfield now taking its second revisionist turn. Employing a wide range of critical theories – of religion, reception and revision – starting from the still essential '90s revisionist premise that sermons were occasional texts, Hunt now turns from the page to the pulpit, assaying what people thought they heard when they heard people preaching. The art of hearing adds, then, not only to current scholarship on the English sermon but also to a growing body of intriguing scholarship on early modern aurality and acoustics. (It also purports to explain the English sermon's decline by the eighteenth century, the only unconvincing – perhaps because Hunt actually pays little sustained attention to it – aspect of an otherwise very persuasive book.) Hunt acknowledges that, given the stubborn silence of the past, he is still obliged to consult written texts – an irony he counters by consulting works that move beyond printed sermons – which, of course, he still cannot do without. In seven densely argued chapters he close-reads his sermons against early modern instructional works on note-taking, memory work and active listening; compares manuscript sermons to their printed versions; examines and questions the subtle distinctions made between the genres of treatises, manuals and sermons; and examines the way in which theological language negotiated political conflict. In so doing he revises historicist claims that already threatened to become commonplaces. Bible reading and preaching are extricated from their long marriage of convenience in Hunt's intriguing analysis of the early modern Protestant distrust of the former. The Bible was, even for Protestants – or, perhaps, especially for Protestants – often impossible to comprehend. (Scripture lacked the inherent capacity to deliver emotional charge – unless it had been translated into focused exegesis and then charismatically delivered.) And in an important discussion of the ever-present politics of predestination in this era, Hunt convincingly presents early modern ‘theology’ as a controversial medium every bit as effective as ‘polemic’, and with the added advantage of retaining its sheen of higher purpose throughout the fray. In sum, Hunt's book offers the best kind of insight into early modern English religion: taking this highest and most characteristic mode of its expression at its word, it neither redirects it into political speech nor sneers at its genuine wealth of feeling. It would seem that Hunt, like the audiences that he has so meticulously reconstructed, has in fact heard what the preachers had to say.