Listening to Sermons in the 17th Century
The Art of Listening in the Seventeenth Century
Ceri Sullivan
Modern Philology, volume 104 (2006), pages 34–71
There is an uneasy awareness among some earlier Tudor rhetoricians that countering boredom in a congregation is one of the less glamorous and more necessary uses of rhetoric. Leonard Cox, for instance, sighs that “for lacke of invencion and order with due elocucion [in the preacher]: great tediousnes is engendred . . . the speker is many tymes ere he have ended his tale: either left almost aloon to his no litle confusion: or els (which is a lyke rebuke to hym) the audience falleth for werynes of his ineloquent language fast on slepe”; Thomas Wilson tuts that “it behoveth a man, that must talke muche, evermore to have regard to his audience, & not onely to speake so muche as is nedefull, but also to speake no longer than thei be willyng to heare . . . the preachers of God, mynd so muche edefiying of soules, that thei often forget, we have any bodies.”1 However, such modesty does not appear in many Tudor-Stuart pedagogical and style manuals. In their excitement over ever more sophisticated technical skills of speech, Fraunce, Clement, Fenner, Kempe, Ascham, Blount, Rainolde, Mulcaster, Hoskyns, Sherry, and Puttenham largely ignore any glassy eyes before them.
Particularly noteworthy, therefore, is the emergence at the start of the seventeenth century of a new genre about oratory: advice addressed to adults on how to listen to sermons. Around thirty manuals on this topic were published between 1599 and 1661.
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