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William Perkins’s The Arte of Prophecying: A Literary Manifesto
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
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.
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References
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