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The Art of Hearing : English preachers and their audiences 1590-1640

This book, which took over 5 years to research, collects and analyses an extensive body of sermons and responses to sermons in order to generate a novel thesis about how late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century churchgoers listened to their preachers. Its central critical insight, established through this large body of primary sources, is that that sermons were seen as performances but were at the same time understood within a broader cultural framework than the strictly religious one to which they appealed.