Preaching and Politics in Early-modern Britain

CALL FOR PAPERS

A two-day international conference at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 3-4 November 2006.

The sermon properly considered as theatrical, as fundamentally occasional, as literary art inextricably engaged in the public sphere stands poised to take a wholly new place in literary study, and a better understood one in historical study.
(Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, 2000)

How far have we come in the six years since Ferrell and McCullough‚s prediction?

This conference seeks to gauge the current state of studies in early-modern British sermons by providing a forum for the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including literary, historical, and religious studies. Focussing on sermons Œas literary art inextricably engaged in the public sphere‚, potential areas of interest will include: the occasional nature of sermons; pulpit censorship; preaching and ecclesiology; types of auditory (e.g. the royal court, the universities, assizes, Paul‚s Cross, country parishes, sermons commissioned by trading companies); women and sermons; varieties of exegetical method; allusion to current affairs via scriptural typology; links with continental European preaching; sermon preparation, delivery, publication, and reception; rhetorical and oratorical traditions of homiletic prose; the literary representation of preachers in plays, poems and pamphlets; the historiography of sermons.

Confirmed plenary speakers include:
Dr Peter McCullough (Oxford University)
Professor Jeanne Shami (University of Regina, Canada)

Prospective speakers are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers by 1 July 2006 to the conference organisers, Dr Hugh Adlington and Dr Emma Rhatigan, either by e-mail (hugh@adlingtonc.freeserve.co.uk or emma.rhatigan@magd.ox.ac.uk), or by post:
Dr Hugh Adlington
CRASSH
17 Mill Lane
Cambridge CB2 1RX

Dr Emma Rhatigan
Magdalen College
Oxford OX1 4AU