Article Volume 3 | Number 1 2 Preaching in Britain’s “Parish Church”: Sermons at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Frances Knight University of Nottingham,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies Part of the Christianity Commons, History of Religion Commons, and the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Knight, Frances. "Preaching in Britain’s “Parish Church”: Sermons at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." Sermon Studies (Journal) 3.1 () : 5-18. https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies/vol3/iss1/2 Copyright 2019 by Frances Knight This Original Article is brought to you by Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact the editor at
[email protected] Knight: Preaching in Britain’s “Parish Church” Preaching in Britain’s “Parish Church”: Sermons at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Frances Knight ORCID: 0000-0002-0124-8118 Introduction This paper explores “space, place and context,” the themes of the Sermon Studies Conference in 2018, with an examination of changing preaching practices at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral between about 1700 and 1900. The cathedral was, and remains, one of Britain’s most important religious spaces, a place where various types of national drama have been played out, and a setting for significant acts of public commemoration and celebration. The enormous scale of the building meant that for most preachers, preaching at St. Paul’s was always an event, and never a matter of routine. This sense of “event” meant that sermons preached at St.