Historiographical reviews interdisciplinarity and the study of early modern sermons

Historical Journal

Volumn 42, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 1111-1123

  Morrissey, Mary ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950029021     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0018246x99008833     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Peter McCullough, Sermons at court: politics and religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching (Cambridge, 1998), p. 3; Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by polemic: James I, the king's preachers and the rhetorics of conformity, 1603-1625 (Stanford, 1998), p. 10.
2. McCullough, Sermons at court, p. 1; Ferrell, Government by polemic, pp. 11-12. The 'methodological slipperiness' remarked on by Ferrell refers to a comment by Jeanne Shami that sermons have 'tended to fall between the disciplines' in seventeenth-century studies, with which I am in complete agreement: Shami, 'Introduction: reading Donne's sermons', John Donne Journal, 11 (1992), p. 2.
3. W. Fraser Mitchell, English pulpit oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: a study of its literary aspects (London, 1932), pp. 3-4.
4. P. S. Seaver, The puritan lectureships (Stanford, 1978), p. 125; R. C. Bald, John Donne, a life (Oxford, 1970), pp. 479-80, 522-3, 532.
5. Alan Fager Herr, The Elizabethan sermon: a survey and a bibliography (Philadelphia, 1940).
6. Millar MacLure, The Paul's Cross sermons, 1534-1642 (Toronto, 1958); Register of sermons preached at St. Paul's Cross, 1534-1642, revised and expanded by Peter Pauls and Jackson Campbell Boswell (Ottawa, 1989); John F. Wilson, Pulpit in parliament: puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640-1648 (Princeton, 1969).
7. Barbara White, 'Assize sermons 1640-1720' (doctoral thesis, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1980);
8. James Joseph Caudle, 'Measures of allegiance: sermon culture and the creation of a public discourse of obedience and resistance in Georgian Britain, 1714-1760' (doctoral thesis, Yale, 1995).
9. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan puritan movement (London, 1967);
10. idem, The religion of Protestants: the church in English society (Oxford, 1982);
11. idem, Godly people: essays on English Protestants and puritanism (London, 1983);
12. J. Sears McGee, The godly man in Stuart England: Anglicans, puritans and the two tables, 1620-1670 (Yale, 1976);
13. John Morgan, Godly learning: puritan attitudes towards reason, learning and education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge, 1986);
14. Paul S. Seaver, The puritan lectureships: the politics of religious dissent, 1560-1662 (Stanford, 1970);
15. idem, Wallington's World: a puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (London, 1985).
16. Richard Greaves, Society and religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), p. 554.
17. William Wheatlie [Whately], A caveat for the covetous (1609), sig. Clr, p. 31.
18. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (1679), in Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth ([1839-45]; repr., London, 1992), V1, pp. 167, 190-7;
19. Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ed. W. D. Macray (6 vols., Oxford, 1888), 111, pp. 56, 65; v1, pp. 40-2;
20. William Haller, The rise of puritanism: or the way to the New Jerusalem as set forth in pulpit and press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton (Columbia, 1938);
21. idem, Liberty and Reformation in the puritan revolution (Columbia, 1955);
22. M. M. Knappen, Puritanism: a chapter in the history of idealism (Chicago, 1939);
23. Christopher Hill, Society and puritanism in pre-revolutionary England (London, 1964; republ., London, 1986);
24. The English Bible and the seventeenth-century revolution (London, 1994); Wilson, Pulpit in parliament.
25. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and social change, and other essays (London, 1967); Wilson, Pulpit in parliament. Wilson to some extent acknowledges having taken his cue for this study from Trevor-Roper and from Godfrey Davies, 'English political sermons, 1603-1640', Huntington Library Quarterly, 1 (1939), pp. 1-22.
26. John Morrill, 'Introduction: England's Wars of Religion', in The nature of the English revolution (London, 1993), p. 35.
27. Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism, 1590-1640 (Oxford, 1987), appendix 1.
28. Thomas Fuller, The church history of Great Britain, ed. James Nichols (London, 1868), p. 357.
29. Peter Lake, Moderate puritans and the Elizabethan church (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 201-42; idem, 'Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge and avant-garde conformity at the Court of James I', in The mental world of the Jacobean court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 113-33, Linda Levy Peck, ed., p. 131.
30. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, 'Agency, appropriation and rhetoric under the gallows: puritans, romanists and the state in early modern England', Past and Present, 153 (1996), pp. 64-107, at p. 75.
31. Glenn Burgess, 'The divine right of kings reconsidered', English Historical Review, 107 (1992), pp. 837-86; idem, The politics of the ancient constitution: an introduction to English political thought, 1603-42 (London, 1992), pp. 73-7.
32. Tony Claydon, William III and the godly revolution (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 4-6, 28-33, 83-7-
33. Caudle, 'Measures of allegiance', pp. 26-7, 52. The phrase 'deck of cards' is used in the abstract.
34. I am reminded strongly of a point Anthony Milton has made in his recent article on censorship - that the jostling of competing groups for control of the press (and, I would say, by analogy the pulpits) determined what became the orthodoxy: Anthony Milton, 'Licensing, censorship, and religious orthodoxy in early Stuart England', Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 625-51; Ferrell, Government by polemic, pp. 82, 116.
35. On the practice of preaching from notes, see John Sparrow, 'John Donne and contemporary preachers: their preparation of sermons for delivery and for publication', Essays and Studies, 16 (1931), pp. 144-78. It may have been an innovation of William Laud's, while he was bishop of London, to insist that those he appointed to preach at St Paul's Cross provided a copy of the sermon before they preached: MacLure, The Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534-1642, p. 13. No letters appointing preachers for the Elizabethan or Jacobean period have been located, but three from the early Tudor period have been found. Two are to Matthew Parker, the first from Thomas Cromwell ([1537]), the second from Nicholas Ridley ([1550?]) (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 114, items 129 and 133). The letter from Cromwell is reprinted in Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. John Bruce and T. Perowne (Parker Society, 1853), p. 5. The third letter is from Dr Haynes and the addressee is unknown. Internal evidence suggests a date of 1534 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 106, item 68). In none of these letters is the preacher asked, or commanded, to have a copy of his sermon ready beforehand.
36. On preachers delivering the 'wrong' message to Queen Elizabeth, particularly Alexander Nowell's disastrous sermon on Ash Wednesday 1565, see McCullough, Sermons at court, pp. 46-8, 67, 93). For preachers who delivered political, dangerous or unwelcome messages from Paul's Cross, see MacLure, Register of sermons preached at St Paul's Cross, rev. edn. pp. 86, 100, 111, 116-17, 121, 123.
37. Ferrell, Government by polemic, p. 19. A similar awareness of the need to utilize the rhetorical precision of sermons is evident in Ferrell's, 'Donne and his master's voice, 1615-1625', John Donne Journal, 11 (1992), pp. 59-70.
38. Perry Miller's The New England mind: the seventeenth century (Harvard, 1954); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, 1978); David Minter, 'The puritan Jeremiad as a literary form', in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The American puritan imagination: essays in revaluation, (Cambridge, 1974), pp-45-55-On the Jeremiad, see also Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To live ancient lives: the primitivist dimension in puritanism (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 312-43; Stephen Foster, The long argument: puritanism and the shaping of New England culture, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill, 1991), pp. 312-20.
39. Harry Stout, The New England soul: preaching and religious culture in colonial New England (Oxford, 1986); Teresa Toulouse, The art of prophesying: New England sermons and the shaping of belief (Georgia, 1987). See also Marie Ahearn, The rhetoric of war: training day, the militia and the military sermon (New York, 1989).
40. Toulouse, The art of Prophesying, p. 181.
41. George Williamson, The Senecan amble: a study in prose form from Bacon to Collier (London, 1951), pp. 231-74.
42. The introductions of both Fraser Mitchell's and Horton Davies's studies of 'metaphysical' preaching explicitly state that the classification is borrowed from poetry, and in particular from the classification of Donne the 'preacher-poet' as a 'metaphysical'.
43. Mitchell, English pulpit oratory, pp. 120-1, 125.
44. Miller, The New England mind, p. 333; John Donne, A sermon preached at St. Pauls, June 21, 1626, in The sermons of John Donne, G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, eds., (10 vols., Berkeley CA, 1953-62), v11. P-198.
45. James Downey, The eighteenth century pulpit: a study of the sermons of Butler, Berkeley, Secker, Sterne, Whitefield and Wesley (Oxford, 1969); Rolf P. Lessenich, Elements of pulpit oratory in eighteenth-century England, 1660-1800 (Cologne, 1972). Yet an even more recent study of preaching and the 'reform of style' is still very dependent on Mitchell's schematic account of style: Barbara Butler Hickey, 'Style and structure in the sermons of Jeremy Taylor (Ph. D. thesis, Notre Dame, 1982).
46. Debora K. Shuger, Sacred rhetoric: the Christian grand style in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1988); Peter Auksi, Christian plain style: the evolution of a spiritual ideal (Montreal, 1995).
47. Horton Davies, Like angels from a cloud: the English metaphysical preachers, 1558-1645 (San Marino, 1986).
48. See Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and metaphysical imagery: Renaissance poetry and twentieth-century critics (Chicago, 1947).
49. Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the preacher, 1665-1626: the origins of the mystical theology of the Church of England, trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford, 1991).
50. Jeanne Shami, John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot sermon: a parallel-text edition (Pennsylvania, 1996); idem, 'Donne on discretion', ELH, 47 (1980), pp. 48-66; idem, 'Kings and desperate men: John Donne preaches at court', John Donne Journal, 6 (1987), pp. 9-23; idem, 'Introduction: reading Donne's sermons', John Donne Journal, 11 (1992), pp. 1-20; idem, 'Donne's sermons and the absolutist politics of quotation', in Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi, eds., Donne's religious imagination: essays in honor of John Shawcross (Conway, AR, 1995), pp. 380-412.
51. R. C. Bald writes that Donne was 'at least in part, in sympathy with the King's directions', which he interprets as effectively stifling opposition to the king's policies, but that Donne's sermon 'scarcely touches the real issues' by presenting the Directions as 'unexceptionable': John Donne a life, pp. 433-5. A more extreme statement is made by John Carey, who writes that 'Donne, the absolutist, was stirred by the image of numinous majesty, scattering opposition as the sun disperses clouds': John Donne: life, mind and art (London, 1981; repr. 1990), p. 102; Debora Shuger's, 'Absolutist theology: the sermons of John Donne', in Habits of thought in the English Renaissance: religion, politics, and the dominant culture (Berkeley, CA, 1990), pp. 159-218.
52. Jeanne Shami, '"The stars in their order fought against Sisera": John Donne and the pulpit crisis of 1622', John Donne Journal, 14 (1995), pp. 1-58.
53. McCullough, Sermons at court, p. 28.