Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (review)

272 Reviews authoritative texts for 'a paying public' seeking 'tuition' in the 'amorous epistolography that was at the heart of Chaucer's impact on the early Tudor court'. This book offers as m u c h to historians of the Tudor period as to literary critics, yet neither would condone the incorrect citation (p. 153) of James V as Margaret Tudor's half-brother, when in fact she was his mother. (He was the half-brother of Margaret Douglas.) Lerer's notes, properly supportive of his allusive text, require (but are not given) an accompanying list of Works Cited. For all the book's riches, moreover, the index is disappointingly lacking in entries for literary terms ('dialogue', 'epitaph', 'verse epistle', 'imitation', 'burlesque', 'flyting'); in entries for ethical terms ('trust', for example, which has an important place in the arguments of Chapter Five); and for key states or conditions, such as 'voyeurism'. Janet Hadley Williams Department of English The Australian National University McCullough, Peter E., Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. 256 and diskette; 9 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. £35.00. Considering that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an age of religious turmoil, it is a curious and somewhat sobering fact that studies of the royal court in Early Modern England have been remarkably secular in their focus. Although there has been some work in recent years on music in the Chapel Royal and the quasi- Reviews 273 sacred dimensions of royal ceremonial, scholars have largely ignored the m a n y religious activities which actually helped to structure life at court. Inevitably, those w h o study the past tend to concentrate on subjects that have a strong resonance in their o w n cultural milieu, but it is important to remember that this tendency can distort our understanding of the past. One of the fundamental themes of Peter McCullough's book on preaching at court is to warn against the dangers of our modern secular focus, reminding us that 'the sermon—not Shakespearean drama, and not even Jonsonian m a s q u e — w a s the pre-eminent literary genre at the Jacobean court' (p. 125). More specifically, McCullough seeks to show that preaching at court w a s regular, often politically important and broadly demonstrative of key features of the personalities and regimes of Elizabeth I and James I. McCullough begins his study with a discussion of the physical and institutional environment in which court preachers delivered their sermons. Anyone interested in the architectural and symbolic milieu of court should read this chapter. W h e n he turns to sermons at court during Elizabeth's reign, McCullough produces a portrait which is already rather familiar: most of the queen's tart responses to clerics w h o irritated her have been recycled m a n y times before. The most interesting material in this section concerns the appointment of court preachers. Frustrating gaps in the evidence clearly restrict what McCullough can say about the sermons themselves (with the salient exception of Richard Fletcher's sermon after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots). The book seems to gather steam once it turns to the reign of James I. Sufficient evidence survives for this period to throw light upon how Whitgift and Bancroft sought to forestall influence on religious matters by Scottish Presbyterian ministers at the time of James' accession and h o w this helped to elevate James Montagu 274 Reviews and Richard Neile. Although conventionally seen as the age of drama and the court masque, James' reign witnessed a staggering number of sermons coram rege. Even when the king was away hunting (accompanied by a battery of ministers to give him his daily fix of preaching), all members of the court were dragooned into attendance at sermons twice a week, quite apart from those delivered at Lent, holy days and the new anniversaries of Gowrie Day and the Gunpowder Plot. McCullough suggests that such demands lessened attendance by courtiers and office-holders at sermons elsewhere, gradually weakening a key link between the...