Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon

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 ofsermons 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 generouslyillustrated, this is a comprehensive guide to the rhetorical, ecclesiastical, and historical precepts essential to the study of the early modern sermon in Britain.

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., 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., This is a superb source which those studying these tumultuous years can turn to for information and insight., 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., 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.

Peter McCullough is Fellow & Tutor in English at Lincoln College Oxford, and a leading expert on the works and lives of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes.Hugh Adlington is Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham; he specialises in early modern religious writing, especially the sermons and scholarship of John Donne.Emma Rhatigan is Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Sheffield; her research and publications focus on early modern texts in performance (both drama and preaching), and their audiences.