This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.

During his long professional career as a clergyman in the Church of Ireland, Swift was obliged to preach sermons. This chapter analyses the dozen sermons attributed to him that have been preserved. Sermon culture in Swift’s lifetime was strongly politicised and Swift, like other preachers, took sides. He was a partisan polemical divine. His extant sermons inveigh against Protestant dissenters, rebellion, faction, regicide, fanaticism, and disobedience. While doctrinally orthodox and written in the plain style of contemporary Anglican homiletics, this chapter argues that Swift’s sermons are nevertheless idiosyncratic, occasionally strange and sometimes even amusing performances.

This chapter focuses on popular culture as seen by the late antique church, in particular as visible through the sermons of Caesarius of Arles. First the key features of Caesarius’ opus are introduced, along with the methodological problems it poses for scholars, including a close discussion of Serm. 1. Caesarius’ ideological programme is discussed, including his use of the concepts of rusticitas and imperitia. The bishop’s concern with the bodily habitus of his congregation is considered next, then his attack on scurriltas, singing and dancing as key features of popular culture. This chapter therefore considers popular culture both substantively and discursively, while exploring the ways in which Caesarius and the church sought to appropriate elements of this popular culture, while at the same time seeking to oppose it, in an ongoing dialectic.

Homilies and other texts of Christian instruction form an important part of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and give unparalleled insight into the religious worldview of medieval Icelanders and Norwegians. This chapter traces the development of this corpus, beginning with the first Norse encounters with Christian book culture in the conversion period and the earliest examples of book-production in Norway. It surveys evidence for the character, frequency and context of preaching in Iceland and Norway, including descriptions of sermons in such literary texts as Sverris saga. It discusses the most important repositories of sermons and homilies from this period, including the Icelandic Homily Book and Norwegian Homily Book. Finally, it considers Christian instruction and clerical training more broadly in the Old Norse world, looking at vernacular adaptations of theological primers and treatises translated from Latin, such as Elucidarius, Alcuin’s treatise on virtues and vices, and the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and closing with discussion of the exempla (dœmisögur) associated with Jón Halldórsson, bishop of Skálholt.

Festal sermons exhibit a distinct mode of creating and communicating knowledge and, hence, constitute one specific element of the late-antique Christian intellectual world. Through their dynamic character and the flexibility of the genre, sermons offered the preacher endless possibilities to spread the word of God and to inspire his audience by drawing them into the liturgical and spiritual world that he created for them. Three elements contributed to this: rhetoric and style; the use of the scriptures; and a theological and liturgical epistemology, in which the sermon transcends the concrete here and now to encompass the past, present, and future of God’s plan of salvation for humanity. The final section shows that the preacher’s liberty was substantial but not unlimited: in the end he remained a servant of the Word and of his congregation.

Focussing on a reading of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, and its accompanying shorter poems, this chapter sets Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo compositions within the context of broader, contemporary debates concerning the relations between war, religion, and sacrifice. While elsewhere in the Thanksgiving volume attempts are made to cleanse the ‘stains’ of a ‘perturbèd earth’, the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ remains dogged in its attention to the human costs of ‘victory sublime’, an attention that, this chapter argues, should be read within the larger context of Wordsworth’s struggle to submit Imagination to the will of God. With memories too of how, in 1802, peace conflated the distinctions between union and disunion, legitimacy and illegitimacy in Wordsworth’s sexual relations, the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ tacitly acknowledges the recent wedding of the poet’s daughter, Caroline Wordsworth-Vallon. Figured as the bearer of conflict and as a principle of restitution, Caroline hovers on the margins of the ode, a symbol of peace founded in war.

This chapter examines the important cultural role played by early modern sermons in refining and developing the meaning of sympathy. The chapter begins by exploring how metaphors and concepts involving the human and social body were appropriated by religious writers in the 1580s, including Edwin Sandys, John Udall, and Christopher Hooke. It then explores a particular sermon by William James from 1589 that uses the term sympathy to describe a mutual suffering, in which James seeks to unite his listeners whilst excluding those of a different religious or political persuasion. The chapter goes on to argue that, by the mid-1590s, preachers such as Henry Holland were using the term to describe an active and imaginative engagement with the other, in ways that recall several contemporaneous dramatic works – including Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595). Finally, it examines Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) and proposes that these questions about the performance and representation of sympathy recur across Protestant and Catholic cultures.

Early Rus written culture, and eventually literature, developed following the spread of Christianity, which was adopted as the official religion at the end of the tenth century. Christian writings reached Rus in Church Slavonic translation, mainly from Greek originals. Church Slavonic was close enough to local East Slavonic to be treated as the learned register rather than a different language. This learned register was not a closed system. Much Rus writing sticks closely to imported Church Slavonic linguistic and stylistic models, notably in homiletics and in some kinds of hagiography. However, where there is significant local content (in chronicles, for example), there is also more linguistic flexibility across registers. Surviving local compositions are not common. They cannot provide hard evidence of an established culture of literariness. However, they are sufficient to suggest patterns of production in two areas. Prominent among the earliest works are the ‘foundational’ texts whose principal theme is the origins and dignity of Rus itself and of its Christian institutions. Second, a small number of texts hint at a culture of verbal display beyond the devotional, perhaps at court.

This chapter argues that sermons are the one genre where there is a more-or-less continuous tradition of using English through the long twelfth century, a consequence of the pragmatic necessity of communicating with a largely monoglot laity. It begins with an account of twelfth-century preaching and the role of written texts vernacular and Latin in its performance. It then considers the Vespasian Homilies, a booklet of four sermons produced in Kent around 1200, focusing on Vespasian 2, which it argues is a distinctively Middle English text, probably composed around 1150, but which shows substantive debts to Ælfric and pre-Conquest textual culture. The final section of the chapter considers, along with two other related manuscripts, the Lambeth Homilies, copied around 1200 in Worcestershire, showing that similar continuities and developments can be traced there. Sermons, in short, were the primary vehicle for the continuity of practices for writing English in the period.

First, this chapter analyzes the non-elite socialization places in which anti-secular opinions were produced and expressed such as mosques, Qur’an courses, houses and coffeehouses. It shows the people’s insistence on their religious practices by receiving secret Qur’an courses or by disobeying the Turkish call to prayer. Second, it outlines a wide range of ways people expressed their critical views, ranging from seditious conversations, rumors, placards and anonymous critical letters to authorities, to writing on walls, doors and trees. Third, this chapter examines the rhetoric and discursive strategies anti-secular talks used. Fourth, it reveals how those social groups or individuals who had lost their authority or economic advantages due to secular reforms or those people who were discontented with economic conditions took part in the production and dissemination of anti-secular and anti-regime discourses. This chapter also shows how the non-elite daily socialization places contested the state’s secular propaganda and socialization spaces such as People’s Houses and Rooms.

The significance of viriditas (greenness) in Hildegard of Bingen’s writing is well known, but how original was her thinking, and how important was it to her concept of preaching? This chapter surveys Hildegard’s activity as a preacher before broadly probing the content of her writing for signs of her adaptation of patristic models. Comparing Hildegard’s use of viriditas to the works of Sts. Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory shows her following their inspiration, but she is seldom derivative. Rather, her exegesis and homiletics rely on a method akin to the intratextual hermeneutics on view in her Exposition of the Gospels. Like the church fathers, she uses her knowledge about natural science to convey a spiritual understanding of scripture, but her exegetic method is more dramatic and visionary as she explains the unifying forces of greenness. Borrowing salient concepts, words, and phrases from her models, she teaches her reader about the opposition of greenness and dryness as well as the relevance of internal and mental greenness to preaching and to prove that God’s greenness is manifest in her community of nuns.

This essay explores the intersection of religion and literature in sermons and lectures during the British Romantic period. The essay traces the advance of elocutionary advice in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and demonstrates how interest in orality proliferated the printing of both sermons and lectures on religious themes. In addition to noted figures such as S. T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Edward Irving, women’s voices emerged during the time, as women in dissenting religious circles set the stage for the first public lectures by women in Britain.

This chapter examines the dynamics of the notion of peregrinatio in Augustine’s thought, with particular attention given to its use in the Enarrationes in Psalmos. It uses Derrida’s reflections on metaphor to explore the rich regression of images in peregrinatio. Augustine uses the concept, literally denoting the status of a resident alien, to express the affective dynamics of a Christian living away from their home in the heavenly Jerusalem: their sense of misalignment in the world, but also their sense of joy in the very transience of their existence. For no one can be a peregrinus without having a home from which he has traveled, and to which he looks forward to returning. Derrida’s phrase the “destinerrancy of desire” perfectly captures this Augustinian notion.

Looks forwards to the shipping container, a universally recognisable box crucial to the networks and infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. This ubiquitous object, a box with a standardised form, has transformed the global movement of stuff. The box of all boxes, this icon of modernity is a reminder that the way we live continues to be constrained by material things. Summarises how the book as a whole has told the story of the early modern precursors to this object, a dynamic range of boxes that enfranchised ways of being, thinking, and writing.

Begins by offering a contrast between Shakespeare's current status as one of the best-known and most revered writers in the world and his position in the early 1590s, when his plays were published without attribution of authorship in disposable editions very different from their contemporary equivalents. Notes that the aim of the book as a whole is to track how we have moved, over the course of the centuries, from a situation where Shakespeare's texts were throwaway publications to a situation where copies of the first edition of his collected plays change hands for millions of pounds. Logs the parameters of the book as a whole and explains the logic of the Chronological Appendix.

Chapter Three, “The Sonnets and the Messiah” shows how Victorian enthusiasts did with Shakespeare’s lyric expressions exactly as they had done with his plays. Charles Ellis’s astonishing collection, Shakespeare and the Bible: Fifty Sonnets, with their Scriptural Harmonies (1896) deliberately juxtaposes Shakespearean sonnets with passages from scripture so as to demonstrate their mutual accord.This chapter untangles the peculiar theological expectations implicit in Victorian reading to show how their conception of Shakespeare’s divinity served to ensure and to perpetuate unlikely interpretations of the sonnets.