Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article explores how the ministers preaching Fast Sermons before the Long Parliament in the 1640s understood the successes and failures, and the chronology of the English Reformation. Although they agreed that Reformation was a slow and difficult process, beset by obstruction and resistance, their conception differed significantly from the notion of the “Long Reformation” in recent historiography. The preachers drew on parallels with Old Testament Israel, so that Reformation was figured as “Temple Work”; ambitions were high, and the risks of failure ever present. Alongside the printed sermons, the article draws briefly on lay sermon notes, to suggest how hearers absorbed the preachers’ urgings to personal and general reformation. The 1640s evidence suggests that a sharp contrast between print and manuscript evidence for the impact of preaching is unhelpful, and that influential modern accounts of the “Long Reformation” require modification.
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