This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.

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.

Portion of edition statement from back cover.

This volume is the third volume to be published in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. The edition presents the sermons arranged according to place of preaching and --within that and as far as possible--chronology, and in accordance with the principles of modern textual scholarship. This volume contains the ten sermons preached by Donne at Lincoln's Inn between 1620 and 1623. It includes the sermon Donne preached at the dedication of the Inn's new chapel in May 1623, supplies new dates for seven of the ten sermons in the volume, and provides fresh evidence for the place and sequence of Donne's sermon series on the Trinity. In each case an authoritative text has been established by freshly collating multiple copies of the seventeenth-century print editions. The Introduction describes the institutional and physical context of Donne's Lincoln's Inn sermons, analyses his style of preaching and doctrinal positions, and explains the nature of his recourse to forms of legal thought and argument. For the first time, the sermons appear with a full critical apparatus: headnotes to each sermon describe its textual state and supply local historical context and suggestions for further reading, while extensive commentaries trace Donne's use of his sources, translate passages in foreign languages, and gloss important and unfamiliar words.