The 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 of sermons 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 generously illustrated, this is a comprehensive guide to the rhetorical, ecclesiastical, and historical precepts essential to the study of the early modern sermon in Britain.

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.