Chapter 1 - Passion and Persuasion

Summary

Chapter 1 explores the use of gesture in preaching, with reference to the branch of rhetoric known as pronunciatio, which provided the theoretical basis for much of the discussion of gesture in the early modern period. The basic rules of pronunciatio were derived from classical sources, but were developed and adapted by sixteenth-century writers on sacred rhetoric. All these writers were united by a shared insistence on the need for decorum and moderation, but in the early seventeenth century a contrast began to emerge between the techniques favoured by Reformed theologians in the Ramist tradition, who stressed the importance of bodily restraint and self-control, and the more dramatic style of preaching pioneered by Jesuit rhetoricians in France. One of the unexpected findings of this chapter is that the Jesuit style was widely admired and copied by seventeenth-century English Protestant preachers as a way of giving their sermons more emotional impact. Against the common assumption of an anti-theatrical prejudice in early modern Protestantism, we should think of a dynamic relationship between the pulpit and the stage in which preachers and actors watched and learned from each other.