The Village Sermon: Contexts and Contents

In the call for papers for its 127^th annual meeting, the American Historical Association encourages prospective participants to explore the theme of ‘Places’ and placed-based contexts. It reminds us that past events occur in a series of ‘nested hierarchies’ beginning with the village.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of the ‘village sermon’ in nineteenth-century England: these are published homilies which had started life being preached in village contexts. This homiletic genre was remarkably popular and well understood at the time, but has been totally neglected since. At least 150 volumes of such sermons have been identified in the catalogue of the British Library, and it appears that they represent just a small portion of a larger body of literature.

In exploring the village sermon in its nineteenth-century context, the paper will seek to explain more about this literary and homiletic genre. How did an author of village sermons visualise his village? What did he expect of the villagers, and how did he approach them? How were village sermons typically constructed? How did preachers use the Bible, and what reference did they make to theological themes, and the seasons of the Church’s year? Most significantly, why did this genre appear to become so popular, just at the time when ‘the village’ was coming under immense pressure from the powerful forces of urbanization, industrialization and migration? It will be argued that ‘the village’ burned brightly in the minds of many clergy, and this continued, even as Britain accelerated into an urban and suburban transformation, leaving ‘the village’ as more of an imagined community than an actual reality for many of those who read the village sermons.