A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century ed. by Robert H. Ellison
Abstract
Reviews 447 A New History ofthe Sermon: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Robert H. Ellison. Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2010. xiv + 571. ISBN 978-9-00418572 -2 Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to have had an insa tiable appetite for words. This much mav he said of most eras, of course, but certain forces conspired during our period to raise and distribute this hunger in distinctive w avs. Advances in literacy and printing technology, ex panding boundaries of public life, and the professionalization of authorship contributed decisively to this phenomenon. The result was an efflorescence of public literature broadly conceived, oral and written, polite and polemical. Among the many genres in which such growth is evident was the sermon. Here was a rhetorical form notable for its appeal to audiences of quite nearly all classes, its sheer ubiquity, its expression in written and oral venues, (fre quently in both), and its willing embrace of occasional as well as spiritual matters. Of the latter tendency, it is well to be reminded how sharply the ser mon was defined not only by theological trends, but also by shifting cultural developments, foreign and domestic affairs, and newly emerging exigencies across the social landscape. Little surprise, then, that students of rhetorical history, theory, and criticism have found in the nineteenth-century sermon an uncommonly rich subject for exploration; greater surprise that so little has been done to bring together leading specialists in the field and to offer up in one volume their respective research, insights, and arguments. Robert H. Ellison's A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century rectifies this shortcoming, and then some. An edited work including sixteen original essays, it aims to "examine the theories, theological issues, and cultural developments that defined the 19th-centurv Anglo-American pulpit (4)." The reader will find herein neither grand theory of the sermon, for which we may be thankful, nor any superintending methodology driving the analyses (ditto). We are provided, rather, with a genuinely multi-disciplinary set of investigations from scholars across the humanities, hailing from England, The United States, Canada, and Scotland. This ecumenicism is more than geographical: the authors take up an impressive array of issues associated with the sermon (about which, more below), and are keenly alive to the many and diverse ways in which the sermon both shaped and was shaped by its cultural milieu. Although I cannot do justice here to the range of contexts addressed by the authors, something of the spectrum may be suggested by a brief survey. Theologically, we learn of the sermon's place in High Church efforts to rein in its centrifugal forces; Methodist attempts to wrest it free from such conservative strongholds; Catholic and, inevitably, anti-Catholic variations; Jewish work in salvaging a place of its own; and Mormon sermonic practices in the Great Basin. Social issues of the day given expression by the form are treated with respect to, among other pressures, slavery, evolution, dueling, civil rights, and women's leadership in the WCTU. It is worth observing, too, how several of the authors locate sermonic forms and influences in 448 RHETORICA various other genres, including didactic literature, the novel, and protest rhetoric. Again, we are reminded of the protean character of the form, of its adaptability to vernacular interests, abstract theorizing; and even popular entertainment. So much is not to suggest a free-for-all. On the contrary, the collection grounds itself upon a set of shared aspirations and commitments that give to the project a degree of coherence not often expected of edited volumes. Each of the authors holds in common the following: 1) the value of detailed and well-documented historical recovery; 2) the importance of observing the interplay of form and content in the creation of meaning; and 3) the view that sermons cannot plausibly be extracted from their context, but are explicable only with reference to the material and symbolic forces within which they operate. The volume is accordingly designed to give both these differences and commonalities their optimal reach: most essays run from 3050 pages; documentation and footnoting is extensive and purposeful; and a splendid compilation at volume's end belies my suspicion...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2013-09-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2013.0005
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