Ecclesiastical authorities of the Elizabethan and early Stuart Church of England demanded adherence to the Book of Common Prayer and allowed no deviation from this scripted liturgy. Parishioners heard the same words wherever they worshipped. The only avenue for pastoral virtuosity was the sermon, which many ministers regarded as an optional addition to their duties. Nobody can tell how many sermons were preached year by year in the early modern era, or what proportion of priests were preachers. But sermons survive in bulk in manuscript and in print, and Arnold Hunt seems to have seen most of them. In this effective and persuasive study he elaborates both the theory and practice of preaching, explores the differences between live performance and printed text, and examines the contribution of sermons to social, political, and theological discourse. This is a learned and judicious work, attentive to the ambience and context of ecclesiastical auditories and fully attuned to modern historiography. Its greatest achievement is to resuscitate a scattered trove of manuscript material, including notes and drafts of sermons not yet doctored for the press.
Sermons, like plays, employed persuasive language, artful rhetoric, and arresting ideas. Most expounded a verse or passage from Scripture, and applied it in the service of conventionally pious instruction. Relatively few sermons were transgressive, though those considered radical or dangerous have disproportionately attracted the attention of historians. Hunt cleaves close to the mainstream, and is more concerned with routine practice than with notorious exceptions. He shows how ministers matched their preaching to their audience, and how some then revised their words for the very different medium of print. Preaching was a dynamic exercise, the voice in action, designed for religious persuasion. Different styles of address and erudition were appropriate to different audiences—clerical, academic, urban, rural—or at the royal court, county assizes, or Paul's Cross in London. Published sermons that are easy to find and read are almost surely unrepresentative of the vast numbers that were preached.
English Protestants argued among themselves about the importance of sermons. Some insisted that the pastor's principal duty was preaching, without which there was no salvation. Others fell back on the homilies, and on routine reading of scripture. Ceremonialists and Laudians by no means avoided preaching, and some were very good at it, but they disagreed with puritans who privileged the spoken word from the pulpit above the printed word of God. Hunt traces this debate from Carter and Whitgift to the eve of the English Civil War, but rather than emphasizing the differences he looks for evidence of compromise and common ground.
Most fruitfully, Hunt directs out attention to the audience for sermons, as well as the preacher, and reminds us of the importance of reception as well as production. Eager and responsive listeners shared the benches and pews with parishioners who might be befuddled, indifferent, or asleep. Attentive sermon-goers took notes, and enjoyed reciting or reviewing the lessons they had learned, but others misheard, misremembered, or misunderstood. Comparison of the texts of surviving sermons with notes taken by original auditors reveals the gap between the preacher's intentions and the hearer's response. Even devout and literate note-takers could miss the complexity of theological argument and fail to grasp the nub of debate about grace and atonement. Those who preached predestination did so with increasing subtlety and caution.
Some preachers were stars, others stumblers. The best used nuances of voice and gesture, and made good use of the acoustics and accouterments of ecclesiastical space. Was it vanity or evangelical ambition that drove some of them to see their sermons printed, or for admirers to oversee production of collected editions? Sermons sold well, and some were several times reprinted. A printed text could serve for study, for emulation, or even plagiarism, as several examples allude. Protagonists argued whether printing was a kind of preaching, or whether setting a sermon in type undermined the primacy of the spoken word. A printed sermon was a more polished product, and could include ideas and phrases that had never been spoken from the pulpit. Close comparison of manuscripts and published editions reveals a variety of emendations. Homely idioms that made some sermons more accessible to country congregations were edited out when the work was prepared for print and posterity. In time the medium affected the message, for growing familiarity with highly polished printed sermons set new standards to which live preaching was expected to conform.
Hunt's analysis provides substantial examples, and several extended case-studies of preaching in practice. These include the career of John Wright in Jacobean Cornwall, William Hull in Jacobean Derbyshire, and Thomas Lydiat in early Stuart Oxfordshire. None of these was a celebrity churchman, and modern scholarship has mostly ignored them. Yet each minister preached diligently over a span of years, and each left written records of his pastoral labors—in Hull's case eight large folio volumes. Through skilled close reading of their manuscript sermons, Hunt is able to reconstruct something of the style, pace, manner, and substance of country preaching. Gauging its impact is more problematic, although one imagines clumps of sullen and resentful parishioners on successive Sundays when the preacher castigated his listeners' sins.
This work contributes to continuing debate about the religious culture of early modern England. Though Hunt does not side specifically with Patrick Collinson, Christopher Haigh, Peter Lake, or other shapers of this debate, he offers fresh material and useful correctives that extend and enrich the conversation.
