Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English preachers and their audiences, 1590-1640), which recalls a time and place long, long ago when certain audiences truly listened to the speaker addressing them:
Hunt's book ... [is] a brilliant and original re-examination of the importance of preaching in later Reformation England. Strictly, Hunt's subject is not preaching but hearing: it is in the relationship between a preacher and his congregation (their "interpretative collaboration") that the true meaning lies. This requires imaginative reconstruction of venues and audiences: at Sunday parish sermons, weekday "lectures", and such set pieces as court sermons, assize preaching, and orations from the London pulpit of Paul's Cross. Hunt finds preachers tailoring the message to the audience in front of them, aware that listeners might vote with their feet. ...
Particularly valuable is Hunt's insistence on going beyond the published text in search of the spoken event. Printed sermons tended to be tidied up: eloquent and learned, but politically and theologically cautious. By contrast, the manuscript sermons Hunt has assiduously ferreted out show preachers employing homely language, and shamelessly tugging at the heart strings. In fact, unlike modern academics, desperate to get their thoughts into print, many preachers were deeply suspicious of the press, only gradually coming around to appreciation of its importance during the seventeenth century. The most committed preachers were Puritans, and for the "godly", the "Word of God" was not the bare text of Scripture, but a "latent force" to be activated in the hearts of believers by the living words of the preacher. In late sixteenth-century England, it was the deaf, not the illiterate, who had cause to worry about their prospects for salvation [my emphasis]. Hunt argues that it was an insistence on hearing the Bible expounded in preaching, rather than merely reading the text privately, that formed the key ideological fissure between Puritans and conformist Protestants.
Some ironies ensued: the notion that reading was insufficient without preaching looked alarmingly analogous to the Catholic position that the Bible was insufficient without tradition; "Anglicans" like Richard Hooker stressed the unique authority of Scripture more than their Puritan opponents. ...
Hunt finds pastoral sensitivity, and even empathy for popular culture, in the sermons of godly clergymen. Their task was not to "convert" the people to Protestantism, but to make more committed Protestants out of laypeople who already had some grasp of theological basics.
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