Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London, by Jennifer Farooq

Abstract

After the work of James Downey (1969) and Rolf Lessenich (1972), the study of preaching and the sermon in the eighteenth century was, until recently, badly neglected. Robert Ellison ignited interest in the nineteenth-century sermon in The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1998), but there has been no comparable work on the eighteenth century. Of course, some notable scholars have used sermons in their work—principally Donna Andrew to illuminate charity sermons, David Appleby to explore ‘Black Bartholomew’ preaching and François Deconick-Brossard to exemplify patterns of worship—but there were few studies which considered preaching and sermons as part of the wider culture of eighteenth-century Christianity. In the last decade, however, this omission has been addressed. A group of scholars, including Joris van Eijnatten, Pasi Ihalainen and Rosemary Dixon, has drawn attention to the importance of sermons in the eighteenth century in religious culture, political ideology and print culture respectively. The Sacheverell and Bangorian sermons have also attracted much-needed attention in recent years. In addition, the Brill multi-volume series on the ‘New History of the Sermon’ and the publication of the Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (2011; rev. ante, cxxviii [2013], 141–4) and the Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689–1901 (2013) have brought many scholarly hands and perspectives to the endeavour of recovering the significance of the sermon. The publication of the latter volume was regrettably too late to be included in the study under review, by Jennifer Farooq. It is in this context that Farooq’s doctoral thesis has been revised for publication in the Boydell ‘Studies in Modern British Religious History’ series.