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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
William Perkins, the late sixteenth-century Cambridge theologian and one of the best-selling authors of his time, wrote the first major English book on preaching. During his ministry in Cambridge, as a fellow of Christ’s College and lecturer at Great St Andrew’s Church, he also preached a large number of sermons, which illustrated the art he taught. Historians of preaching have generally seen him as the chief proponent of the puritan ‘plain style’, a way of preaching sometimes contrasted with the learned, elaborate, ‘metaphysical’ style of preaching fashionable in the Established Church during the early seventeenth century. Recently it has been argued that preachers like Perkins were so insistent on the moral demands of the Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, that they became increasingly unpopular in the English Church. According to Christopher Haigh, preaching of the kind favoured by Perkins and like-minded ministers - morally demanding, hortatory and focused on predestination - was deeply resented and strongly resisted by many English parishioners, who helped to fashion what he describes as a more relaxed, ‘anglicised’ Protestantism that they found more congenial. Peter Iver Kaufman has written that Perkins, like other members of what he calls ‘the Protestant opposition to Elizabethan religious reform’, aimed to shame his hearers, and that ‘at Cambridge, [he] taught the next generation of dissident preachers to shame and thus save their parishioners’. Some parishioners were no doubt made uncomfortable by Perkins and preachers influenced by him. But these recent assessments of Perkins and his place in the history of preaching are misleading and inadequate. They underestimate the character and extent of his influence on preaching. Moreover, many commentators have failed to recognize the effect of Perkins’s views on the development of English prose. This essay will show what Perkins taught in his treatise on preaching, and argue for its lasting significance for modern prose style.
1 The fullest account of Perkins as theologian, writer and preacher is that of Breward, Ian, ed., The Work of William Perkins, Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics 3 (Abingdon, 1970), 1–131 Google Scholar. For recent scholarship, see Schaefer, Paul R., ‘Protestant “Scholasticism” at Elizabethan Cambridge: William Perkins and a Reformed Theology of the Heart’, in Trueman, Carl R. and Clark, R. Scott, eds., Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle, 1999), 147–64 Google Scholar; Spinks, Bryan D., Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham, MD, 1999), 1–92 Google Scholar; Ferrell, Lori Anne, ‘Transfiguring Theology: William Perkins and Calvinist Aesthetics’, in Highley, Christopher and King, John N., eds, John Foxe and His World (Aldershot, 2002), 160–79 Google Scholar; Bruhn, Karen, ‘Pastoral Polemic: William Perkins, the Godly Evangelicals, and the Shaping of a Protestant Community in Early Modern England’, Anglican and Episcopal History 72 (2003), 102–27 Google Scholar; Patterson, W. B., ‘William Perkins as Apologist for the Church of England’, JEH 57 (2006), 252–69 Google Scholar. For the popularity of Perkins’s books, see McKitterick, David, A History of Cambridge University Press, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1992–2004), 1: 125–9, 133, 139, 231–3 Google Scholar; Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), 8, 17–18, 106, 211, 215, 223, 241, 266, 308, 311, 479, 498, 556, 647–8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am extremely grateful to David Parry of Cambridge University and William Engel of the University of the South for their advice on the subject of this essay.
2 Blench, J.W., Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Study of English Sermons, 1450 - c. 1600 (Oxford, 1964), 58, 64, 101–2, 169 Google Scholar; Davies, Horton, Worship and Theology in England, 1: From Cranmer to Hooker, 1534–1603 (Princeton, NJ, 1970), 72, 257, 272, 305, 308–10, 312–13, 320–3 Google Scholar; Davidson, Edward H., ‘“God’s Well-Trodden Foot-Paths”: Puritan Preaching and Sermon Form’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25 (1983), 503–27 Google Scholar; Pipa, Joseph A., ‘William Perkins and the Development of Puritan Preaching’ (Ph.D. thesis, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1985)Google Scholar; Davies, Horton, Like Angels from a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers, 1588–1645 (San Marino, CA, 1986), 47 Google Scholar; Ford, James Thomas, ‘Preaching in the Reformed Tradition’, in Taylor, Larissa, ed., Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2001), 65–88 Google Scholar, esp. 75–9.
3 Haigh, Christopher, ‘The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, History 85 (2000), 572–88 Google Scholar; for Perkins, see 572–3, 577–8, 581, 583–4. See also idem, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2007), 124, 130, 206–7.
4 Kaufman, Peter Iver, ‘The Protestant Opposition to Elizabethan Religious Reform’, in Tittler, Robert and Jones, Norman, eds, A Companion to Tudor Britain (Oxford, 2004), 271–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quotation at 280.
5 Perkins, William, Prophetica: siue, De sacra et unica ratione concionandi tractatus (Cambridge, 1592)Google Scholar; The Arte of Prophecying: or, A Treatise Concerning the Sacred and Only True Manner and Methode of Preaching, transl. Tuke, Thomas (London, 1607)Google Scholar. Tuke was an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge, during the time that Perkins taught there. After ordination, he served several parish churches in London: ODNB, s.n. ‘Tuke, Thomas (1580/81–1657)’.
6 Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 168–239 Google Scholar; idem, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley, CA, 1979), 219–82 Google Scholar. See also Kaufman, Peter Iver, ‘Prophesying Again’, ChH 68 (1999), 337–58 Google Scholar. Kaufman argues that the queen feared that substantial numbers of the laity would be attracted to the prophesyings, threatening the stability of church and state.
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8 Collinson, Patrick, ‘Lectures by Combination: Structures and Characteristics of Church Life in 17th-century England’, in idem, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), 467–98 Google Scholar; Collinson, Patrick, Craig, John and Usher, Brett, eds, Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St Edmunds, 1582–1590 (London, 2003), xxi^#x2013;cxvi Google Scholar. See also Seaver, Paul S., The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford, CA, 1970)Google Scholar. Seaver’s contention that lectureships were generally a source of religious and political dissent, however, is doubtful; see Collinson, ‘Lectures by Combination’, esp. 497.
9 Leader, Damian Riehl, A History of the University of Cambridge, 1: The University to 1546 (Cambridge, 1994), 32, 113–21 Google Scholar, 236–42, 304–6, at 236–7. See also Howell, Wilbur Samuel, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ, 1956), 64–145 Google Scholar.
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12 Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996, repr. 2004), 19–65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the importance of rhetorical education for teaching and religious writing, see Mack, Peter, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002), 253–92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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17 Brilioth, Yngve, A Brief History of Preaching (Philadelphia, PA, 1965), 125 Google Scholar; Hyperius, Andreas, The Practise of Preaching, Otherwise Called the Pathway to the Pulpet Conteyning an Excellent Method How to Frame Diuine Sermons, & to Interpret the Holy Scriptures According to the Capacitie of the Vulgar People (London, 1577)Google Scholar.
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