Scholarly interest in the early modern sermon has flourished in recent years, driven by belated recognition of the crucial importance of preaching to religious, cultural, and political life in early modern Britain. The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon is the first book to survey this rich new field for both students and specialists. It is divided into sections devoted to sermon composition, delivery, and reception; sermons in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; English Sermons, 1500-1660; and English Sermons, 1660-1720. The twenty-five original essays it contains represent emerging areas of interest, including research on sermons in performance, pulpit censorship, preaching and ecclesiology, women and sermons, the social, economic, and literary history of sermons in manuscript and print, and non-elite preaching. The Handbook also responds to the recently recognised need to extend thinking about the 'early modern' across the watershed of the civil wars and interregnum, on
both sides of which sermons and preaching remained a potent instrument of religious politics and a literary form of central importance to British culture. Complete with appendices of original documents of sermon theory, reception, and regulation, and generously illustrated, this is a comprehensive guide to the rhetorical, ecclesiastical, and historical precepts essential to the study of the early modern sermon in Britain.
Industry Reviews
Open[s] new and exciting vistas for future scholarship. The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon provides a splendid introduction to the subject ... A great virtue of the Handbook is its extensive - and hitherto unprecedented - geographical and chronological coverage ... an impressive scholarly achievement. * Paulina Kewes, The Seventeenth Century *
This volume in the Oxford Handbook series represents a significant contribution to the study of the sermon, an the culture, of early modern England. Its publication is to be welcome and celebrated. * John N. Wall, Journal of Ecclesiastical History *
This is a superb source which those studying these tumultuous years can turn to for information and insight. * Contemporary Review *
This is a publication that does what any Oxford Handbook ought to do, but for this particular (and peculiar) subject, it does very much more. It shows the transformation of the study of English preaching over the last twenty years; it indicates where gaps in our knowledge remain; it will help to shape the ways in which early modern sermons are studied in the coming years. * Mary Morissey, English Historical Review *
they have done an extraordinaty job of bringing the early modern sermon to life and making us realise just how important preaching was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ... Particularly interesting for scholars are the three appendices, which contain extracts from contemporary preachers on their art along with comments made by prominent listeners ... libraries should certainly stock it and it would make a wonderful gift to any preacher from well-to-do relatives or from a generous parochial church council. The editors and the press have done an excellent job and their work will remain the definitive resource on the subject for many years to come. * Gerald Bray, Churchman25/03/2014 *
The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon is beautifully conceived and successfully executed, with clearly organized information, sensitively chosen examples, and well supported judgments. If you want to understand the sermon culture which formed Spenser's biblical mindset without reading hundreds of sermons, this is your book. * Margaret Christian, The Spenser Review *
