Arnold Hunt

The art of hearing : English preachers and their audiences, 1590-1640

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Ecclesiastical authorities of the Elizabethan and early Stuart Church of England demanded adherence to the Book of Common Prayer and allowed no deviation from this scripted liturgy. Parishioners heard the same words wherever they worshipped. The only avenue for pastoral virtuosity was the sermon, which many ministers regarded as an optional addition to their duties. Nobody can tell how many sermons were preached year by year in the early modern era, or what proportion of priests were preachers. But sermons survive in bulk in manuscript and in print, and Arnold Hunt seems to have seen most of them. In this effective and persuasive study he elaborates both the theory and practice of preaching, explores the differences between live performance and printed text, and examines the contribution of sermons to social, political, and theological discourse. This is a learned and judicious work, attentive to the ambience and context of ecclesiastical auditories and fully attuned to modern historiography. Its greatest achievement is to resuscitate a scattered trove of manuscript material, including notes and drafts of sermons not yet doctored for the press.Sermons, like plays, employed persuasive language, artful rhetoric, and arresting ideas. Most expounded a verse or passage from Scripture, and applied it in the service of conventionally pious instruction. Relatively few sermons were transgressive, though those considered radical or dangerous have disproportionately attracted the attention of historians. Hunt cleaves close to the mainstream, and is more concerned with routine practice than with notorious exceptions. He shows how ministers matched their preaching to their audience, and how some then revised their words for the very different medium of print. Preaching was a dynamic exercise, the voice in action, designed for religious persuasion. Different styles of address and erudition were appropriate to different audiences--clerical, academic, urban, rural--or at the royal court, county assizes, or Pauls Cross in London. Published sermons that are easy to find and read are almost surely unrepresentative of the vast numbers that were preached.English Protestants argued among themselves about the importance of sermons. Some insisted that the pastors principal duty was preaching, without which there was no salvation. Others fell back on the homilies, and on routine reading of scripture. Ceremonialists and Laudians by no means avoided preaching, and some were very good at it, but they disagreed with puritans who privileged the spoken word from the pulpit above the printed word of God. Hunt traces this debate from Carter and Whitgift to the eve of the English Civil War, but rather than emphasizing the differences he looks for evidence of compromise and common ground.Most fruitfully, Hunt directs out attention to the audience for sermons, as well as the preacher, and reminds us of the importance of reception as well as production. …

Religious publishing in England 1557–1640

Religious books, in conventional terms, are found to have been the single most important component of the publishing trade. In England, apart from oral communication, there was a mass of both polemical and devotional material which, if published, was published scribally, surviving only in manuscript. Some of the most active preachers of the age never appeared in print, or never in their lifetimes. A large part of the story of indoctrination concerns English Bibles, and there is no better case study of the interaction of public and private interest, commerce and edification, than the English Bible. Many of the Catholic books of the devotional writers included prefaces addressed to the impartial Christian reader, and not just to the Catholics. The use of a commonplace book was typical of university-trained readers, but Nicholas Byfields Directions for the private reading of the Scriptures, first published in 1617 or 1618, was an attempt to make the practice more widespread among lay Bible readers.

A JACOBEAN ANTIQUARY REASSESSED: THOMAS LYTE, THE LYTE GENEALOGY AND THE LYTE JEWEL

This paper discusses two objects once owned by the antiquary Thomas Lyte (1568–1638). The Lyte Genealogy, now in the British Library, is an illustrated pedigree of Britain’s monarchs, tracing the royal succession through multiple lines of descent from the Trojan prince Brute. It demonstrates the importance of antiquarianism, and the continuing relevance of the traditional British history derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, in supporting the legitimacy of the Stuart succession. The Lyte Jewel, now in the British Museum, is a tablet miniature containing a portrait of James i by Nicholas Hilliard, presented to Thomas Lyte by the king as a reward for his work on the Genealogy. New evidence points to the king’s jeweller, George Heriot, as its likely designer. Together, the Lyte Genealogy and the Lyte Jewel offer new insights into the antiquarian pursuits of the early Stuart gentry and the intellectual and material culture of the Jacobean court.