Prayers for Purses

Abstract

This essay explores the trope of “compensation” in the sermons which helped promote Virginia Company activities in early seventeenth-century England. Not only were these sermons, in and of themselves, made to compensate for the lack of material gain or for the ill fate of prior English ventures to the same or adjacent areas, but, in their content and tone, they also used the trope of compensation as a means to redress a long series of historical, ideological, and socioeconomic aspects in which England's colonial venture had been, and still was, defective. At the same time, the preachers commissioned to write and deliver these sermons – some of them, like William Crashaw, active participants in the Company's enterprises – also employed rhetoric in order to create a convenient place for themselves in the “new” England they were promoting along with these ventures sent across the Atlantic.