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Page 1 of 30 Renaissance Studies 1 Recent studies in the early modern sermon suggest that preaching matters more than print. Peter McCullough, one of the most important sermon scholars working today (and the general editor of the Oxford edition of Donne’s sermons), argues, in the ‘Introduction’ to his volume of Launcelot Andrewes’ sermons, that ‘Sermons, although avidly consumed by Elizabethan and Jacobean readers, were first and foremost live, theatrical events. As Vickers has said of classical oratory, they are “performance-art”’ (xxxviii). In another article, McCullough suggests that ‘It is dangerous… to treat “sermons” as an undifferentiated category to which the same kinds of interpretation always apply. Early modern sermons – whether “elite” or otherwise – were radically occasional pieces of performed writing, contingent upon the contexts in and for which they were delivered. They suffer, in turn, from any interpretative engagement that does not attend carefully to the circumstances outside the remaining textual artefact that moulded and shaped it ab origine ’ (‘Preaching’ 213-4). McCullough is not wrong: it is often the case that sermons need to be studied in context with great care. Court sermons, McCullough’s specialty, especially repay the kind of embedded reading that pays attention to audiences, political and religious context, and other important influences. I take issue, however, with the assumption that our readings of the ‘remaining textual artifact’ need always to be embedded in the performance of the sermon in the pulpit. I certainly agree that we must not read all sermons as if Accepted Article they were ‘undifferentiated’ but that makes it all the more important to recognize when early modern sermons require other modes of reading to discern what’s at stake in their publication for their writers, editors, and readers. As Rosemary Dixon suggests, we have much to learn about how This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version record. Please cite this article as doi:10.1111/rest.12362. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Renaissance Studies Page 2 of 30 2 sermons circulated in print, not least since so much recent research has focused on sermon pamphlets rather than the full range of sermon publications (461). In this article, I argue that there is a great deal at stake besides the ‘contexts in and for which’ sermons were preached. The printed artifacts that are our records of these sermons generate their own contexts that owe more to the contexts of authorship, editorship, patronage, and intertextual engagement than they do to the contexts of original delivery. This matters because studying sermons as printed artifacts adds more to our understanding of the genre than a tight and sometimes rather exclusive focus on performance and on original delivery allows. McCullough is not alone in his claim that occasion matters a great deal for understanding the early modern sermon. Indeed, it seems to be a critical consensus that, for printed sermons in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the occasion was all. This occasional reading of sermons returns them, whenever possible, to the conditions of original delivery, rooting them tightly in a very localized, and synchronic context, supported by the evidence of paratexts such as title pages and prefaces. As Mary Ann Lund writes, This typical method of titling raises a key point about sermon paratexts: most writers take pains to tell readers where and/or when their sermons were delivered. Not only title pages but also prefatory epistles, tables of contents and individual sermon titles Accepted Article may mention the venue and time of a sermon, even down to the time of day. …Hence printed paratexts reinforce for readers the sense that sermons should be interpreted in the light of their original circumstances. (148) This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Page 3 of 30 Renaissance Studies 3 Sonia Suman likewise stresses the importance of the original circumstances of a sermon’s delivery: ‘The occasion permeates the sermon, even shaping the theological stance a preacher might be required to uphold, either because of the demands of the occasion (in the case of the Spital, a plea for charity) or because of the type of auditory’ (230). It is indeed true that many preachers did take pains to list the time, place, and occasion for their sermons. And Suman is right to say that the occasion of the sermon matters for understanding the printed sermon; Suman’s study of the Spital sermon, or McCullough’s work on court sermons, or Mary Morrissey’s study of the Paul’s Cross sermons, all indicate the extent to which occasion and place shape theological stance, textual choices, and political interventions. 1 But I would modify Suman’s point to argue that the occasion of the preached sermon sometimes , but not always , matters for understanding the printed sermon. Although a study of printed sermons in the first half of the seventeenth century turns up many sermons that stress occasion and place, it turns up nearly as many that do not. Leif Dixon makes this point as well: ‘While some sermons tell the reader about the date and location, they almost never say anything about the congregation or exactly how the sermon was shaped for that particular audience. Furthermore – and this is particularly true of sermon collections – it was fairly common for no details about time or place to be given at all’ (256). Dixon’s insight provides a starting point for this article’s focus on those sermon collections that emphasize other kinds of Accepted Article contexts besides the original circumstances of delivery and occasion, such as the Scriptural texts from which the preacher takes his sermons, the series in 1 See McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (1998); and Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons (2011). This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Renaissance Studies Page 4 of 30 4 which the sermons were delivered, and the ways in which the sermons demonstrate the preacher’s claims to authority. The prefatory paratexts to these collections suggest that occasion and place do not always determine the conditions of reading a sermon. To recognize this is to recognize how a variety of contexts matter when we read seventeenth-century printed sermons, not solely the context that we gain when we know where, when, and to whom a sermon was originally delivered. To be clear, I am not suggesting that we not read sermons in the context of their original delivery. But I am suggesting that we should not prioritize that context to the exclusion of others. Although some prefaces and dedications are very concerned to ensure that the printed sermon would be read in terms of where, when, and to whom it was originally preached, many do not, and tend rather to reduce the importance of the sermon event in favour of a more universalising stance that defines the sermon, however occasional, as relevant for a wider audience and a longer time than just the immediate context of delivery. The current critical focus on occasion and specificity risks obscuring the extent to which preachers aimed their work at a larger readership, and obscuring also what they aimed for in printing their sermons. Helen Wilcox gestures at the shifting uses of the form when she calls the sermon a ‘chameleon genre,’ one that thrives ‘on immediacy and rhetorical power yet often being printed very soon afterwards for private contemplation and prayerful re-reading’ (113). As a bestselling genre in its own time, it’s clear Accepted Article that there is more than one context in which we can study the early modern sermon. In this article, I start by showing how posthumous sermon collections generally focus on preserving the voice of the dead author, usually, if not This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Page 5 of 30 Renaissance Studies 5 always, avoiding explicit references to occasion. As James Rigney has put it, ‘Among clerical responses to the polemical appropriation of their writing that characterized the period [the 1640s and 1650s] was an emphasis on the book as the living monument to the author, an emphasis that attempted to relocate authority on to the figure of the preacher. This was a strategy that also had roots in the recent puritan tradition’ (‘To lie’ 190). Although Rigney’s observation is accurate, we should note that this emphasis on the book as a ‘living monument’ to the preacher starts before the 1640s, as I will show in my analysis of the paratexts to John Preston and Richard Sibbes’ sermons. Then I analyze the printed sermon collections of two important preachers, John Preston and Richard Sibbes. Both men were famous preachers whose sermons attracted large audiences at important London pulpits, Preston at Lincoln’s Inn and Sibbes at Grey’s Inn. Preston published nothing in his lifetime, and most of his sermons include no information at all about where and when they were preached. Sibbes, who was a friend of Preston’s 2, and who helped edit four of Preston’s most important posthumous sermon collections, published several collections in his lifetime, and these and his posthumous sermon collections rarely offer details about original delivery either. These posthumous collections aim to preserve the preacher’s ideas, his phrasing, and his ability to convey complex theological ideas in accessible and interesting ways, and we should recognize these aims as significant alternatives to the desire to preserve the sermon event.

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