Lancelot Andrewes Research Articles

A Likeness Only Fancied? Lancelot Andrewes and Gertrude Stein

A Likeness Only Fancied? Lancelot Andrewes and Gertrude Stein

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

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.

Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan. David Gay. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. xiv + 210 pp. $70.

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Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan by David Gay

Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan by David Gay

Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan DavidGay. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. xiv + 209pp. ISBN 13:9781487505288. $70.00 (cloth).

Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan DavidGay. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. xiv + 209pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13:9781487505288. $70.00 (cloth).

How to do things with the Church Fathers: Mary Magdalene and anti-Calvinist court rhetoric in Lancelot Andrewes’s Easter Sermons (1620-22)

ABSTRACT Mary Magdalene was one of the most controversial Scriptural figures in Post-Reformation England. This article draws attention to a remarkable moment in the early 1620s when Lancelot Andrewes decided to preach on Mary Magdalene not once but three consecutive times. Crucially, he did so during the highest point in the Christian calendar, Easter Sunday, and in the locus classicus of political power, the Royal Court. In so doing, Andrewes deliberately challenged a tradition of Reformed Protestant biblical commentaries which saw Magdalene’s femininity as intimately tied to her inability to trust Christ’s promise that he would rise from the grave. For the first time, I uncover how these three sermons constitute a trilogy (I term them the “Magdalene Triptych”). Moreover, I contextualise them within an ascendent English anti-Calvinist movement which began to weaponize the nascent field of patristic scholarship to specific confessional and political ends.

The Senses of Sight in Lancelot Andrewes’s Sermons

Lancelot Andrewes constructed visually intense scenes and symbolic images to capture his auditors’ interest, but he never let them forget that his visual enargia was rooted in the words of scripture and had no reality outside that given by God’s Word. His strategy was, therefore, not only to make Christ’s presence concrete and accessible to his listeners, but also to hint at how God will always be out of reach, a truth that cannot be seen. In exploring this rhetorical strategy, I focus especially on Andrewes’s 1604 Good Friday sermon, 1620 Easter sermon, and 1620 consecration rite. The two sermons were delivered at opposite ends of Andrewes’s career in James’s court, but both are notable for their intense scrutiny of what it means to see Christ in the eyes of the mind, body, and soul.

Gay, David. Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan.

Gay, David. Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan.

Queen Anne's Body in Stuart Court Sermons

This article aligns the 1605, 1606, and 1609 court sermons of Lancelot Andrewes with Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty (performed in 1605 and 1608, respectively) in order to argue that both genres politicize James VI and I's domestic life by commenting on Queen Anne's political and domestic roles. Scholars have examined the ways in which Anne's performance in the court masques allowed her to claim a sense of authority and agency over her body. Recent research on sermons has demonstrated how they were another form of court entertainment, more akin to masques and plays than we might expect, and that the sermon genre often commented on ongoing political and domestic situations in the Stuart court. Yet, scholars have not considered how the masques prompted a response from another popular court genre, the sermon. In placing these two genres—sermon and masque—alongside one another, I argue that Andrewes's patriarchal downplaying of the woman's body in the Biblical Nativity narrative is actually a response to Jonson's masques, rather than the normative touchstone of early modern understandings of gender and maternity. Considering Andrewes's view of the female body as a contrast to Jonson's display and celebration of the female body reveals multiple models for understanding maternity in the early modern period.

Hearing and reading: responding to the Articles of Perth in the 1618 court sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Buckeridge

ABSTRACT Although we often study the printed text of sermons, most originated as oral performances. Because the apparatus of printed versions tends to amplify the political and polemical aspects of a sermon, this focus has led some scholars to read sermons as they would polemical tracts, while ignoring an important purpose of the genre—the spiritual edification of hearers. This essay considers both oral and printed rhetorical effects in an examination of three English court sermons, all published in 1618. The study reveals that the oral rhetoric of the sermon speaks to an immediate need for individuals to reform their worship practices by incorporating both internal and external modes of piety into personal worship. The polemical and political attitudes, by contrast, would have been muted and implicit to hearers. As a result, I argue, a disproportionate emphasis on the printed text has dulled our sensitivity to early Laudianism’s moderate appeals.

Biblical, Linguistic, and Literary Conversions: John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Milton

Biblical, Linguistic, and Literary Conversions: John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Milton

Metafora ciemnej nocy w dziełach Johna Henry’ego Newmana

The metaphor of dark night has been deeply rooted by John Henry Newman in the Bible, as evidenced in his sermons. In addition, it results from the inspiration of works of the Fathers of the Church, including St. Gregory of Nazianzus, whose poetry he valued, as well as it was taken over from Anglican theologians, Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop Winchester and Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of London. Apparently, this metaphor resounded in The Pillar of the Cloud, and other works confi rm the interpretation that the dark night depicts whole life of man as a pilgrim. Faith helps him to lean on God who leads him home. Certain similarities with this metaphor also occur in the poetry of Luis Rosales, a 20th-century Spanish poet. The dark night is also the season that fell after original sin, making the world unfriendly to man; henceforth he is subject to ignorance, sin and death. However, a believer can see some positive signs that night, which indicate the truth that the world is moving to the end of its path.

Gluttony and Gratitude: Milton’s Philosophy of Eating. Emily E. Stelzer. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+364.

<i>Gluttony and Gratitude: Milton’s Philosophy of Eating</i>. Emily E. Stelzer. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+364.

George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.

<i>George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England</i>. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.

The political sermons of Lancelot Andrewes

ABSTRACTThe political sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, delivered between 1607 and 1622 on the anniversaries of the Gowrie and Gunpowder Plots, deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. Although he has often been called a Jacobean absolutist, Andrewes is better described as a political Elizabethan. The key to his intellectual originality resides not in his fundamental theoretical positions but rather in his method of exegesis. Andrewes was the first theologian or theorist to have worked out a coherent exposition of the doctrines of divine right and non-resistance which was founded on the formalist analysis of the Bible, for which achievement he deserves a place in the history of political thought. In his emphasis on providentialism, moreover, he reinforced the idea that monarchy was divinely ordained. By analysing these sermon sequences, we can see how he dismantled and interpreted Biblical texts in order to confirm commonplace political propositions.

Faith in Lancelot Andrewes’s preaching

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the role of faith in Andrewes’s preaching. Andrewes’s position as an avant-garde conformist who paved the way for a Laudian ecclesiology has led to a focus in his scholarly reception on ceremonies and sacraments. Andrewes’s understanding of faith, and its instrumental role in his scriptural hermeneutics, are fields of enquiry which remain neglected. This article demonstrates that he was, in fact, consistently invested in examining what can be known by faith, and how this way of knowing functions. Drawing on Andrewes’s critically overlooked early lectures, which demonstrate the close relationship between faith and knowledge in his thought, it evinces the continuing importance of a faith-based hermeneutic in Andrewes’s later preaching. In his Easter Day sermons, Andrewes explores the limits of a variety of probative methods (forensic, antiquarian) in order to demonstrate the operation of an interpretive faith rooted in exegetical, devotional and liturgical practices.

Ad Lanc. Andrewes, Episc. / To Bishop Lancelot Andrewes

Ad Lanc. Andrewes, Episc. / To Bishop Lancelot Andrewes

‘Securing the day’s devotion’: the spirituality of John Henry Newman and his Anglican inspirers

John Henry Newman’s spirituality and understanding of prayer was formed and framed by his years as an Anglican, from 1801 until his move to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, and particularly by the years following his Anglican ordination in 1824. Influenced originally by the aspects of the Evangelical tradition, Newman discovered both the Fathers of the Church and the seventeenth-century Anglican divines. This paper explores the significance for him of the devotional work of three Anglican divines, the Sacra Privata of Thomas Wilson, Bishop of Sodor and Man (1663–1755), the Golden Grove of Bishop Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), and the Preces Privatae of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), as encapsulating models of Christian devotion which, as an Oxford Movement leader, he wished to commend to others.

The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, Volume 1, by T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919 –1926, Volume 2, by T. S. Eliot

<i>The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, Volume 1</i>, by T. S. Eliot, <i>The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919 –1926, Volume 2</i>, by T. S. Eliot

Book Review: Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert. By John Drury. Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press, 2014. xix + 396 pp. $35.00 (cloth).Late in this splendid literary biography, John Drury writes that achievement of candour and simplicity invited imitation. He had made poetry look as if anyone could do it so long as they did not put on airs: the deceptive appearance of an which concealed art (p. 285). Like the poetparson of Bemerton, Drury, through his elegant prose style, mastery of a wide variety of scholarly sources, attunement to poetry, and passion for Herbert the artist in all his complexity, makes it look easy. However, there are a number of reasons why no one before him has managed to write this book. Drury delivers a learned but accessible biography that offers the reader rich readings of the poetry and an invitation into the shifting landscape of early seventeenth-century England, when religious and political storms were brewing that would eventually, after Herbert's death, break into Civil War.George Herbert (1593-1633) poses a number of challenges as the subject of biography. He had a reputation for saintliness immediately upon his death, capitalized on by one of his early biographers, Izaak Walton, who made him a model clergyman of a lost golden age of the English Church. Herbert did not have a dramatic life. He spent his childhood and youth in intense study. Early in his career, he held a prestigious position as University Orator for Cambridge, making florid Latin and Greek speeches to visiting dignitaries. He struggled between choosing a prestigious court career and the ministiy, delaying his priestly ordination for years. He was often ill, and recovered in various country houses. Finally, in his late thirties, he married, was at last ordained priest, and received a living at Fugglestone and Bemerton, serving his parishioners faithfully for three years before succumbing to tuberculosis just shy of his fortieth birthday.The facts of Herbert's life alone do not make for scintillating reading; fortunately, Drury focuses on Herbert's rich inner life, his fascinating aristocratic family, and his friends, some of the brightest luminaries of his age (including Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, and Francis Bacon). Throughout, he gives excellent readings of the poems.Drury is the best of anyone who has written on Herbert's vocational crises, making a solid case from surviving letters that from his student days he was torn between a strong desire to take holy orders, serving the church either through parish ministry or theological scholarship, and the equally strong desire for secular preferment and a prestigious career at court. …