The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750. (Reviews).

Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, eds., The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750.

(Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, 9. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. x + 270 pp. $74.95. ISBN: 0-7190-5449-4.

Sermons, whether heard or read, officially promoted or suppressed, dominated the early modern English cultural, religious, and political landscape, but have only recently begun to command serious attention in literary studies. The present collection of essays is one of several recent efforts (including fine books by editors Ferrell and McCullough) to give sermons and other religious discourse their due. Taken as a group, the collection realizes its editors' desire to showcase the vitality of sermon studies across a variety of emphases.

The introductory first chapter, "Revising the Study of the English Sermon," positions the volume in relation to earlier approaches to sermons and acknowledges its debt to the recent contributions of "revisionist" history. Then Andrew Fitzmaurice's essay, subtitled "The Rhetoric of the Virginia Company Sermons," shows how an analysis of sermons promoting the Company's activities highlight the humanist ideals undergirding the enterprise. Mary Morrissey's "Elect Nations and Prophetic Preaching: Types and Examples in the Paul's Cross Jeremiad" finds that the comparisons preachers make between Israel and England are examples rather than types, and that "the prophetic sermons preached at Paul's Cross do not presuppose a 'national covenant' or any kind of special relationship between God and England" (54). Bryan Crockett's solid chapter, "Thomas Playfere's Poetics of Preaching," makes good on the Introduction's claim that "nothing was closer literary kin to the drama that flourished in early modern England than the sermon" (8) by providing a sketch of the colorful Playfere and analyzing the play of thought and emotional effect of his sermons both in terms of rhetoric and performance.

Arnold Hunt's "Tuning the Pulpits: The Religious Context of the Essex Revolt," suggests that the preacherly activity surrounding this episode illustrates how politicians tried, with incomplete success, to use preachers to influence opinion and communicate with the public on matters of political importance. Debora Shuger, in her chapter "Absolutist Theology: The Sermons of John Donne," demonstrates that Donne's sermon images of God and his relation to the sinner are those of absolute monarchy, emphasizing power and submission, and finds "Donne ... drawing on more archaic strata of psychic life, privileging, as it were, a drastic affectivity permeated with infantile and erotic longings" (129-30). Jeanne Shami's "Anti-Catholicism in the Sermons of John Donne" cites evidence from sermons throughout Donne's career to show him as a man of integrity who genuinely regarded "papist and puritan extremes as equal menaces" (162), even after the Jacobean political moment for such rhetorical even handedness had passed. Pet er Lake, in "Joseph Hall, Robert Skinner, and the Rhetoric of Moderation at the Early Stuart Court," argues that court sermon rhetoric that castigated "extremists" expressed both Calvinists' concerns about the Roman Catholic threat and Laudian concerns about Puritanism.

In James Rigney's essay, subtitled "The Sermon, Print and the English Civil War," he asks the question, "what does print do to the sermon?" (189), and drawing on prefaces, correspondence, and other evidence, offers a fascinating meditation on the differences between a sermon preached and a sermon read. Tony Claydon's "The Sermon, the 'Public Sphere,' and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England" makes the case that during the Restoration, sermons and their reception combined to create an important "public sphere" which, perhaps taking shape as early as Elizabeth's reign, may have been responsible for "the unusual lack of hostility to the Church and the Christian religion" (228) during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. James Caudle's essay, "Preaching in Parliament: Patronage, Publicity and Politics in Britain, 1701-60," argues that the most influential political sermons during this period emanated not from the Court or the provinces, but from the Parliament as part of its obs ervance of civic holidays. Caudle outlines the institutional processes used to appoint preachers and publicize their sermons. The fact that these processes were occasionally contested, says Caudle, demonstrates that sermon discourse, and the means of controlling it, continued to be politically important into the late eighteenth century

The diverse, lively, and well-researched essays collected in this volume make clear that a focus on sermons can be effectively turned to a variety of uses. It is to be hoped that Ferrell and McCullough have encouraged many others to proceed along the path they and their authors have blazed.