Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons
1558-1642
Mary Morrissey
OUP £63
(978-0-19-957176-5)
Church Times Bookshop £56.70 (Use code
CT812 )
IT IS a rare tribute to say of a book derived from sermon
transcripts that it is an absorbing read. Yet so it is with Mary
Morrissey's Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons 1558-1642. The
book analyses one of the most important and complex institutions of
public preaching in the history of the Church of England in the
Reformation period.
Public open-air sermons were delivered at least weekly from a
large, free-standing wooden structure - a sort of homiletic
bandstand - built in the mid-15th century to the north of the
choir of Old St Paul's Cathedral. The Bishop of London's chaplains
and officers selected, appointed, and paid the preachers. After
Bishop Aylmer of London (d. 1594) endowed the preachers' expenses,
the series was well-supported: preachers included many bishops and
deans, prominent theologians, and occasional former Roman
Cath-olics received into the Church of England and recanting their
beliefs, as well as fellows and students of the universities.
The Paul's Cross sermons were once described as a public
noticeboard for the religious and political Establishment of Tudor
and Stuart England. Morrissey shows that this impression
over-simplifies matters. The Bishop could not always predict what
would be said (until William Laud insisted on seeing the texts
beforehand), and preachers were a heterogeneous group. The element
of unpredictability made it attractive.
The book concentrates on the topical and controversial material
rather than bread-and-butter sermons of doctrine, exegesis, and
exhortation. Paul's Cross witnessed sermons on politically
sensitive crises, on state anniversaries of events such as the
monarch's accession or the Gunpowder Plot, and a steady stream of
controversial theology. Protestants attacked Roman Catholics, and
conforming disciplinarian clergy reproved "puritan" disturbers of
the peace. Morrissey's analysis offers sensitive, well-balanced
interpretation of these difficult texts, showing deep appreciation
of the controversial historiography.
It emerges just how much the Church of England under Elizabeth
and James was a Church of the Word. Even the most sacramental
clergy supported, delivered, and even listened to extremely long
and complex sermons. Preachers devoted time and trouble to their
texts, often, though not invariably, published. Until the Laudian
movement in the 1630s, the theology of Paul's Cross fell broadly
within that spectrum of Calvinistic Protestantism which
conforming Prayer-Book Protestants and radical "hot gospellers"
alike affirmed.
Paul's Cross gives a compelling insight into the contested
identity of the Church of England in the first 80 years after the
Elizabethan Settlement, and it is thus that Morrissey presents
it.
Dr Euan Cameron is Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation
Church History at the Union Theological Seminary, New
York.