Attending to the Passion in Early Modern England: Lancelot Andrewes's Good Friday Sermons

Abstract

This article investigates writing about the Passion in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. It examines the sermons preached on Good Friday by Lancelot Andrewes (1555 – 1626). Like many Protestants, Andrewes hoped to minimize the idolatrous potential of the Passion. Rather than problematizing the sensuality of the Crucifixion, however, Andrewes's sermons cultivate an interpretive disposition that can read it correctly. Drawing on Bernardine and Augustinian models, he treats the attention of his listeners as a vital resource for negotiating the outward materiality of the Crucifixion: reading the Passion “with due attention” reveals through its carnality an eternal message of divine love and integrates it within a broader pattern of scriptural reading. Andrewes's openness to the roles of mental and ocular sight in worship commits him to explaining how outward surfaces reveal inner truths. His theorization of attention in these sermons sheds new light on post-Reformation readings of the Passion's iconography.