Collected with the intent of fleshing out the generalised histories of preaching produced by O. C. Edwards and H. O. Old, these twelve essays (with an introduction by Isabella Sandwell) focus on the intersection between preacher, audience, context and performance as it played out in individual examples of (mostly expository) preaching across two millennia. In this regard it follows recent interest in questions of the identity and response of preachers' audiences, reception versus intent, and preaching as performative. Regrettably, the preachers used to explore these questions serve to reinforce rather than expand the historical trajectory presented by Edwards and Old. The diversity of preaching in the early medieval and medieval periods from Spain and Anglo-Saxon England to Italy, is unreferenced, the sole essay devoted to these ten centuries focusing instead on the well-known Hildegard of Bingen. The other preachers and sermons selected produce a mostly mainstream and, for the early modern and modern periods, somewhat Anglo-American view of preaching. With these constraints in mind, the volume does expand the historical study of preaching and offers useful insights into the specific aspects that it aims to expound. Claiming the first four centuries ce as a foundation common to both eastern and western preaching tradition, the first four essays explore the synagogue preaching of the Apostle Paul (Sean Winter), Origen's exegetical methods (Morwenna Ludlow), listening to Scripture with specific reference to the preaching of Chrysostom and Augustine (Carol Harrison) and how Chrysostom engaged his audiences with exegetical preaching (Sandwell). For the medieval period, Beverly Mayne Kienzle's essay assesses how Hildegard of Bingen reconciled science and miracles in her exegetical preaching. Turning to the post-Reformation, Mark Elliott uses Johannes Brenz to rehabilitate the view of Lutheran preaching after Luther. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are represented by essays on the Baptist preacher Hanserd Knollys (Simon Woodman, who draws relevance to contemporary concerns over hate preaching vis-à-vis the role of context in the preacher-text-context interface) and the affective preaching of the New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards (Oliver Crisp). Two essays focus on preachers who were also poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Ralph Pite) and the First World War army chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (Stuart Bell, who argues that Kennedy's principal themes of a suffering God and social justice were context-specific and limiting, yet enduring for a post-modern world). Turning to the twentieth century, Michelle Krejci offers a performance analysis of the first exploitation of mass media by a preacher in Los Angeles in the 1920s (Aimee Semple McPherson also built the first pentacostal mega-church and used theatricality in her face-to-face preaching), and William Lyons analyses a sermon preached by Canon John W. Rogerson in the 1990s at a Sheffield charismatic service that targeted the dance club culture (unwittingly delivered as a scandal was breaking concerning the ministry and its vicar). Lyons offers a fascinating exploration of its immediate reception and the shifting meaning of the sermon between delivery and publication. The book will be of greatest interest to scholars of the history of preaching and teachers of homiletics.