Lori Anne Ferrell, Peter McCullough, eds. The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. x + 270 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-5449-5.
Reviewed by Alexandra Walsham (Department of History, University of Exeter)
Published on H-Albion (November, 2000)
Rediscovering the Sermon in Early Modern England
Rediscovering the Sermon in Early Modern England
In recent years the boundary between the disciplines of history and English literature has become increasingly blurred. Discarding older assumptions about the timeless and transcendent character of literary works, critics have focused growing attention upon the cultural and historical contexts from which they emerged. Simultaneously, "the linguistic turn" has compelled historians to display ever greater sensitivity to the textuality of the evidence they employ and to recognise the inherently rhetorical nature of the "facts" which are their quarry. The English Sermon Revised is a product of this mutually enriching process of osmosis. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough have brought together accomplished practitioners of both disciplines to create a book which is a testament to the merits of interdisciplinarity.
In a series of diverse essays of consistently high quality, the contributors to this volume breathe new life into a body of texts which has suffered the double indignity of misunderstanding and neglect. The marginal role which sermons play in our own culture has severely hampered understanding of the central importance of preaching as a mode of communication, instrument of indoctrination, and organ of opinion formation in the early modern period. While earlier literary scholars subjected them to arid taxonomic analysis as specimens of Renaissance prose, historians have too often ruthlessly plundered them for colorful quotes with little regard for the generic conventions by which they were shaped. This valuable collection introduces a range of refreshing new approaches to sermons as sources for our understanding of politics, culture and society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.
Prefaced by the editors' lucid introduction, the essays are arranged in three sections. The first highlights the need for a proper appreciation of the rhetorical theory which underpinned preaching in early Stuart England. In a study of sermons preached to promote the Virginia Company between 1606 and 1624, Andrew Fitzmaurice examines how humanist convictions about the power of oratory as an agent of political action played a crucial part in forging an idealistic civic vision for the English colony in America. Mary Morrissey's meticulously careful account of Jacobean jeremiads delivered at Paul's Cross argues that failure to understand the technicalities of homiletic discourse has led scholars to misconstrue the nature of the relationship between God and England embedded within them -- one wonders if contemporary readers and hearers were equally alive to the precision and subtlety of the distinctions being posited here. Emphasising the performative quality of sermons, Brian Crockett offers a persuasive re-reading of the "verbal pyrotechnics" of Thomas Playfere which not only unsettles ingrained assumptions about the anti-theatrical instincts at the heart of Protestantism but draws attention to the enormous emotional energy they could unleash (p. 59).
Part II, entitled "Sermons on Emergent Occasions," comprises four essays. In an attempt to test the old commonplace that Elizabeth I "tuned her pulpits," Arnold Hunt's splendidly nuanced contribution revisits the thwarted revolt of the Earl of Essex in February 1601 from the perspective of the sermons preached prior to and in its wake. He thereby sheds fresh light both on the religious context of the rebellion itself and on the complex processes of negotiation and accommodation between preachers and the political and ecclesiastical authorities. Peter Lake offers a characteristically penetrating analysis of the "rhetoric of moderation" employed by Joseph Hall and Robert Skinner which lays bare the limitations of the sterile polarities between "Anglican" and "Puritan," "Calvinist" and "Arminian" which have long dominated historical writing about the religious landscape of pre-Civil War. He demonstrates that attention to the circumstances in which particular sermons were preached is vital if scholars are to understand the significance of the strategies deployed.
Jeanne Shami's discerning and finely textured essay on anti-Catholicism in the sermons of John Donne rests on the same methodological premiss: successfully capturing the contingent and idiosyncratic character of Donne's intolerance, it operates as a trenchant critique of "fragmentary and uncontextualised readings" of sermon texts made up of a mosaic of striking "sound bytes" (p. 140). It must be said that Deborah Shuger's study of Donne's "absolutist theology," reprinted with minor alterations from her book Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (1990), sits somewhat uneasily alongside these two essays. Treating Donne's sermons as a homogeneous body of thought, Shuger resorts to precisely the kind of selective and uncritical culling which Lake and Shami overtly reject as distorting and flawed. Notwithstanding the eloquence and force of Shuger's analysis, her inclusion simply underlines the considerable distance which has been travelled in sermon studies in the space of a decade and highlights the rigor of more recent approaches.
The essays in Part III explore the links between preaching and the currently fashionable concept of the "public sphere." James Rigney contributes an illuminating discussion of the anxieties and challenges associated with translating sermons from the realm of the spoken word into the medium of print. Focussing on the 1640s, he examines the encounter between preaching and the publishing industry, showing how authorial control of texts was progressively eroded as the book trade transformed sermons into marketable commodities. Particularly interesting are his insights into the way in which the "desacralising technology" of printing (p. 189) turned "the printed page into a public space for the inscription and exchange of views" (p. 194): a forum in which readers contested and created meaning by means of marginal annotation. Tony Claydon engages rather more directly with Juergen Habermas's influential model of the emergence of a "public sphere" in his energetic essay on the crucial role of preaching in the political culture of late seventeenth-century England. Insisting that sermons were the very "crucible of public debate" (p. 224) in the late Stuart period, he offers a salutary corrective to the prevailing view that the broadening of political participation after 1660 was an essentially secular phenomenon, toppling the coffee house from its "iconic status" (p. 210) as the very embodiment of open, quasi-democratic discussion.
James Caudle's discussion of preaching in Parliament between 1701 and 1760 similarly questions the tendency to suppose that the sermon inhabited "a kind of cultural Siberia" in Georgian Britain, "eking out a miserable sort of half-life, living off the memory of Tudor and Early Stuart glory" (p. 235). On the contrary, the pulpit continued to play a formative role in eighteenth-century politics, as the development of subtle mechanisms for vetting, screening and censuring the content of sermons reveals. Both Claydon and Caudle's essays serve to deflate some of the more exalted claims which have been made for the novelty of the "public sphere" and to emphasise the fundamentally Christian flavour of English culture and discourse in an age allegedly characterised by rationalist thinking and religious indifference.
The English Sermon Revised, then, paves the way for a renaissance of the sermon, both as a literary artefact and as an historical source. It suggests that preaching, a hybrid medium which stands on the boundary between writing and speech, should be at the forefront of attempts to understand the dynamics of a culture in which print did not yet exert overpowering influence. As well as signalling the beginnings of a methodological revolution in sermon analysis, individual essays speak to a variety of key debates about religion and politics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. There is one important issue, however, with which very few of the contributors engage and that is the problem of how audiences received and responded to the sermons they heard. It is to be hoped that future research will more actively take up this challenge.
Many Elizabethan and Stuart preachers feared that once their orations were "turned into Dead letters, and laid forth in Sheets, their life is gone" (p. 195). Ferrell, McCullough and their contributors have done much to prove them wrong. They have collectively helped to resurrect this group of texts from the graveyard of dull seventeenth-century prose.
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Citation:
Alexandra Walsham. Review of Ferrell, Lori Anne; McCullough, Peter, eds., The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2000.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4710
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