The English Sermon Revised; Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750

by Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, Editors

• ISBN13: 9780719054495
• ISBN10: 0719054494
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2000-06-10
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

This exciting volume of essays reassesses and reasserts the centrality of preaching in early modern English culture. Showcasing the work of established experts and scholars in the fields of English literature, history and religious studies, it offers a retrospective review of how sermons have figured in past scholarship and teaching, and points to new ways to study sermons as literary artifact and historical evidence. The interdisciplinary group of contributors demonstrate the pertinence of sermons to a new generation of Renaissance literary studies.

Author Biography

Lori Anne Ferrell is Associate Professor and Chair, at Claremont Graduate University and Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California.

Peter McCullough is Sohmer-Hall Fellow in English Renaissance Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford and University Lecturer in English.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Notes on the Contributors	ix
PART I INTRODUCTION
Revising the study of the English sermon	2	(22)
Lori Anne Ferrell
Peter McCullough
PART II THE RHETORIC OF PREACHING
`Every man, that prints, adventures': the rhetoric of the Virginia Company sermons	24	(19)
Andrew Fitzmaurice
Elect nations and prophetic preaching: types and examples in the Paul's Cross Jeremiad	43	(16)
Mary Morrissey
Thomas Playfere's poetics of preaching	59	(27)
Bryan Crockett
PART III SERMONS ON EMERGENT POLITICAL OCCASIONS
Tuning the pulpits: the religious context of the Essex revolt	86	(29)
Arnold Hunt
Absolutist theology: the sermons of John Donne	115	(21)
Debora Shuger
Anti-Catholicism in the sermons of John Donne	136	(31)
Jeanne Shami
Joseph Hall, Robert Skinner and the rhetoric of moderation at the early Stuart court	167	(21)
Peter Lake
PART IV SERMONS AND THE MODERN `PUBLIC SPHERE'
`To lye upon a Stationers stall, like a piece of coarse flesh in a Shambles': the sermon, print and the English Civil War	188	(20)
James Rigney
The sermon, the `public sphere' and the political culture of late seventeenth-century England	208	(27)
Tony Claydon
Preaching in Parliament: patronage, publicity and politics in Britain, 1701-60	235	(30)
James Caudle
Index	265