In Robert Greene's steady-selling Qvip for an vpstart courtier, a ‘vickar that … did oftner go into the alehouse than the pulpit’ declares defensively that although he was no great scholar, he could still ‘read an homilie euery sundaye and holiday’.Footnote ¹ Such attributes are also common to Edmund Spenser's corrupt and incapable priest in Prosopopoia, whose ‘easie life’ consists of performing the simple duty of reading ‘Homelies vpon holidayes’ and attending plays.Footnote ² As these contemporary sources indicate, by the late Elizabethan period the status of the homily in England had altered significantly. Originally a respected part of the medieval Roman Catholic mass, the homily had been subsumed into the Protestant ritual of the administration of the Lord's Supper.Footnote ³ However, this kind of homily, encapsulated within the two volumes of Official homilies published during the reigns of Edward vi and Elizabeth i in 1547 and 1563 respectively, gained an unfortunate reputation as a text designed for preachers who were not competent enough to compose their own sermons.Footnote ⁴ There also existed other homilies written by official Elizabethan figures following this mode and published in quarto format which were issued with orders for occasional days of prayer; in particular, for specific crises such as the major outbreak of plague in London in 1563.Footnote ⁵ Later defined by Thomas Blount as ‘a kind of Sermon, properly of an inferior kind, such as is delivered out of a Book or Manuscript, by those that are not able to preach otherwise’, the homily lacked ‘topicality or cutting edge’.Footnote ⁶

It was also the case that the word ‘homily’ carried lingering associations with popery in an age of increasing antagonism towards Catholics following the break with Rome.Footnote ⁷ In The troublesome raigne of Iohn king of England, a staunchly Protestant play which addresses the eponymous protagonist's conflicts with the Roman Church, a distressed friar's macaronic doggerel makes crude references to intercessory prayer, saints and the homily:

On the other hand, in his sermon advocating James i’s Directions concerning preachers, John Donne responded to those who, aghast at the term ‘Homelies’, ‘suspect the [Official] Homilies of declination towards Papistrie’ by putting forward similar arguments expressed by John Whitgift half a century earlier.Footnote ⁹ Whitgift had stated that ‘Homilies readde in the Churche haue alwayes bin commendable, and vsuall euen from the beginning, looke Augustine, Chrysostome and others.’Footnote ¹⁰ According to Donne, the practice of reading homilies went back to the days of Cyril of Alexandria.Footnote ¹¹ Taking into account such a convoluted history, what did the homily truly stand for in post-Reformation England?

As ‘the most important and characteristic form of communication for Protestants’, much scholarly attention has been lavished upon the rise to prominence of the sermon in early modern religious and political culture.Footnote ¹² On the other hand, although a similar study exists for the postil in early modern Germany, meticulous enquiry into the homily's place in post-Reformation England, which traces the origins of the ‘homely’ Official homilies back to one of the most ancient traditions in the Christian Church and considers its adaptation from Catholic liturgical address to printed text for use in Protestant communal worship, is lacking in current scholarship.Footnote ¹³ While Siegfried Wenzel has recognised the crucial distinction to be made between the ‘homily’ and ‘scholastic sermon’ in medieval preaching, such has not been the case within histories of early modern English preaching.Footnote ¹⁴ Instead, failing to question whether its usage may have developed and taken on different meanings in post-Reformation England, scholars have frequently depicted the homily as being synonymous with the sermon.Footnote ¹⁵ This is perhaps understandable given that the first volume of Official homilies, in addition to various other religious titles published in this period, identifies itself as ‘certain sermons or homilies’.Footnote ¹⁶ Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dictionaries define the homily as ‘ghostly teaching, preaching, or sermon’; ‘[a] talking together: a speech, or a Sermon’; and ‘a speech or Sermon, common discourse or Communication’.Footnote ¹⁷

However, the English short title catalogue (ESTC) reveals only fourteen works featuring the title ‘homily’, ‘homelye’, ‘homylye’, ‘homelie’ or ‘homilie’ between the advent of printing and 1640 (see appendix), in stark contrast to Ian Green's estimated totals of 1,000 printed sermons for the period 1558–1603, and at least 2,000 for 1603–40.Footnote ¹⁸ Although scholars have cautioned against relying too heavily upon resources such as the ESTC and Early English books online for a systematic analysis of the frequency with which certain words were used on title pages, it is not the purpose of this paper to delineate exact numerical counts but rather to underscore the disparity between the printed sermon and the printed homily in post-Reformation England.Footnote ¹⁹ If ‘homily’ and ‘sermon’ were truly perceived to be interchangeable terms, why did ‘homily’ as a title not lend itself to many more texts in manuscript and print, by divines, devotional writers and laypeople alike?Footnote ²⁰ Or, if the word ‘homily’ carried such negative connotations, why is it the case that titles (which presumably sought a readership) outside of the Official homilies are in existence at all? In an age in which patristic theology was studied intensely by clergymen across the confessional divides, was the term ‘homily’ paradoxically imbued with a particular gravitas?Footnote ²¹

The scope of this study is outlined by a sample of five homilies which were printed as stand-alone works with named authors.Footnote ²² The sample comprises vernacular translations of homilies by two Church Fathers, John Chrysostom (1544) and Origen (1565), a homily by the Catholic controversialist John Harpsfield (1556), an English translation of a homily by the French Huguenot Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1615) and a homily by the Laudian writer Anthony Stafford (1635). Published across a century which witnessed considerable turbulence in the religious landscape, they span the first age of print and the beginnings of the Henrician Reformation until the imminent collapse of ecclesiastical censorship of texts in the 1640s.Footnote ²³ While certainly unable, in themselves, to provide a definitive account of the homily's journey in post-Reformation England, they offer multifaceted and changing perspectives on the ‘homily’ in printed form. Indeed, contrary to the dictionary definitions, the homilies by Duplessis-Mornay and Stafford did not originate as oral texts. The homilies will be examined, in chronological order, within the historical and religio-political contexts from which they emerged. It will be argued that their language, structure and format provide evidence of their unique characteristics as homilies, thus challenging the tendencies of scholars and cataloguers to categorise them as part of the substantial body of early modern printed sermons.Footnote ²⁴ Ultimately, it will be shown that ‘homily’ was an unstable term in this period, and that its definition cannot merely be confined to that of a state-sanctioned ‘inferior sermon’.

The homily's earliest troubles can perhaps be dated to the Henrician Reformation, when the structures which had been in place in communal worship since the early fifteenth century began to break down, albeit gradually and not without resistance.Footnote ²⁵ As Susan Wabuda has observed, since 1408 the homily had been part of a ‘mature three-tier program of instruction’ as ‘a parish address that was part of the Mass’.Footnote ²⁶ After the reading of the Epistle and Gospel verses, the priest or deacon moved from behind the rood screen and stepped up to the pulpit, speaking directly to the people in the homily. This was the part of the service where the priest proceeded to explain in English the texts which had just been presented in Latin. The pericopes were expounded and their relevance to daily life was elucidated.Footnote ²⁷ In the 1530s this organised programme of preaching was under threat; by Henry's death, defence of the Roman-rite mass had become a contentious topic and bookstalls were replete with attacks directed towards it.Footnote ²⁸

What, therefore, was to be the fate of the homily? Translations of homilies composed by, or at least attributed to, the Church Fathers maintained a stable presence in the religious print market.Footnote ²⁹ Protestant divines studied patristic homilies to support their arguments in the pulpit; these were subsequently cited in the margins of the published versions of their sermons. On the Catholic side, Germen Gardynare's Letter of a yonge gentylman provides an example of a patristic homily in written form being used to authorise Catholic doctrine. The heretic John Frith, who had published a number of tracts against popery and purgatory, is supposedly proved wrong on several points concerning the sacrament by a homily of Chrysostom, which had been ‘commaunded … to be wryte[n] out before for the nones’.Footnote ³⁰

Thus, in the early years of Reformation England, the homilies of the Church Fathers were repeatedly cited and circulated, supplying both Protestants and Catholics with an historical pedigree.Footnote ³¹ In 1543 John Cheke translated Chrysostom's homily on 1 Thessalonians iv.13 from Greek to Latin as a gift for Henry viii. It was published as part of D. Ioannis Chrysostomi homiliae duae (London 1543; RSTC 14634).Footnote ³² For Aysha Pollnitz, Cheke's rendering of this homily attested to ‘his hearty support for the Henrician Church's reform of the doctrine of purgatory by urging against elaborate displays of grief during funerals’.Footnote ³³ The homily was subsequently translated from Cheke's Latin version into English by Thomas Chaloner, and was published in 1544 as An homilie of Saint John Chrysostome.Footnote ³⁴ In the early years of the English Reformation, it was common practice to print patristic and humanist works which had been supplied with a ‘reformist twist’, and it is possible that Chaloner translated Cheke's version in order to conform to its emphatic authorisation of Henry's transformation of the English Church.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, if the principal role of a pre-Reformation homily was to function as a translated text into English expounded for the auditors’ edification, Chaloner's act of converting Cheke's translation into the vernacular seems to represent a similar kind of transmission of approved doctrinal teachings for the benefit of readers, as opposed to auditors, who did not understand Latin. The dissolution of the monasteries, for instance, can be clearly read in the English version, with the landlord ‘purposing to reedifie an olde and ruinous house’ by destroying the old building and ‘raysyng it more stately the[n] euer it was’, which correlates with God dissolving the bodies of the deceased: ‘to thend the same beyng ones new repayred, he may with greatter glory repossesse the[m] again therin’.Footnote ³⁶

What are the characteristics which distinguish this printed homily from a contemporary printed sermon? In terms of bibliographic presentation, the two cannot be placed in the same category. As Rosemary Dixon has shown, printed sermons ‘shared a set of generic conventions that made them a recognizable category for contemporary readers: they were headed by a scriptural text, and consisted of its exposition and application’.Footnote ³⁷ The prescribed model does not fit this homily, in which the chosen biblical verse is notably absent.Footnote ³⁸ Furthermore, a ‘discourse vpon Job, and Abraham’ constitutes a major part of the work.Footnote ³⁹ According to Peter McCullough's definition of the early modern sermon, which implies a focus upon a single biblical text, the homily does not conform to this format and cannot, strictly speaking, be classified as such.Footnote ⁴⁰ An homilie of Saint John Chrysostome can therefore be best understood as a product of the Henrician Reformation, presenting itself as a small devotional octavo volume (a ‘SMALE gifte’) which could communicate with the reading public in the vernacular without the intrusion of marginalia, conveying Henrician doctrine that was validated by its ties with patristic tradition.Footnote ⁴¹

A homily published during the reign of Mary i also displays evidence of the propagandistic deployment of simple language, enhanced by a typographical layout devoid of marginalia. In A notable and learned sermon or homilie, the Roman Catholic priest John Harpsfield articulates the ‘miserable and parilous case’ of the previous twenty years, setting forth ‘the excedinge greate benefite of oure reconciliation to … the catholike churche’ and exhorting readers to return ‘in gret multitudes … to the Masse’.Footnote ⁴² Contrary to previous accounts which argued that Mary did not take as much advantage of the press as her siblings, recent scholarship has suggested that it was ‘with the printed word that the Marian Church sought to revivify and define its faith’.Footnote ⁴³ Entirely representative of these reforming efforts, this text was promptly published after its delivery on 30 November 1556, the second anniversary of the reconciliation of England with the papacy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Its title page displays the words ‘Vltimo Decembris. 1556’, indicating the priority accorded to it for the purposes of ‘educating the people in the doctrines of ecclesiastical unity and the Petrine ministry of the papacy’.Footnote ⁴⁵

At first glance, one might be led to believe that the work is no different from a printed sermon as described by Dixon. The biblical verse is printed above the principal body of text, albeit with no precise reference to its place in the Vulgate Bible; there is only a vague citation of the ‘hundreth and xvii. psalme’ of David.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet the ‘homilie’ in the title should not be ignored completely.Footnote ⁴⁷ As revealed in Chrysostom's homily, unlike a sermon, Harpsfield's work does not merely focus on one biblical text but incorporates extensive narratives from the Old Testament, using the example of Moses and Aaron in their respective hierarchies to legitimise the pope's standing. It is ‘the lawe of Moyses’ which Harpsfield is particularly keen to ‘set furth’.Footnote ⁴⁸

In further contemplating the ‘Sermon or homilie’ of the title, it is necessary to consider the impact that Edward vi’s Certayne sermons, or homilies, to which Harpsfield himself contributed, may have had upon the religious printed works of the Marian era. Marian Catholic writers ‘promoted a purified version of traditional religion, more solidly based on the Bible and the sacraments and less dependent on ingrained habits and popular superstitions’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This is epitomised in Edmund Bonner's Homelies (London 1555; RSTC 3285), a project in which Harpsfield was also involved.Footnote ⁵⁰ Harpsfield's ‘Sermon or homilie’, carefully backed up by the authority of Scripture and the Church Fathers, therefore represents a quintessential response to the Sermons, or homilies of the previous reign.Footnote ⁵¹ In its very title, Harpsfield's ‘sermon or homilie’ constitutes a celebration of a return to the mass, yet directly acknowledges a reformed Catholic stance which had to account for the previous two decades of religious upheaval. But there is little evidence to suggest that, like Bonner's Homelies, Harpsfield's work was used as a printed model sermon produced for ‘priests who could not preach themselves’.Footnote ⁵² Rather, this ‘Sermon or homilie’ conflates three textual categories: modelled as a thematic and occasional homily after the Official homilies; delivered as a sermon; and distributed, in octavo format, as a proselytising pamphlet rather than as a text to be placed upon pulpits and read aloud.

Returning to patristic translation, An homilie of Marye Magdalene, attributed to Origen, stands out as another distinctive mirror of the contestations between Catholic and Protestant doctrine. This tiny sextodecimo professed on the title page to be ‘newly translated’ and was published by the Protestant printer Reyner Wolfe in 1565.Footnote ⁵³ The work's publication history in England can be traced back to the octavo Omelia orige[n]is de beata maria magdalena.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1555 an English edition of the work had been published as An homelie of Marye Magdalene, declaring her ferue[n]t loue and zele towards Christ, also in octavo format.Footnote ⁵⁵

The motivations for the renewed interest in this homily, and the perceived need for a new translation, may be viewed in the context of the religious climate of the early 1560s, a period which encompassed the delivery of John Jewel's controversial ‘Challenge sermon’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the sermon, Jewel listed a number of Roman Catholic practices, including services conducted in Latin, challenging Catholics to prove that any of them could be validated by ‘any old general council, or out of the holy scriptures of God, or any one example of the primitive church’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Catholics took to the press in response to Jewel's attack with great zeal, referring in particular to patristic homilies to defend the contested points against their faith. Thomas Stapleton traced the significance of the homily as an integral part of the church service back to Origen:

An homilie of Marye Magdalene thus held a potent currency in light of the innumerable patristic arguments made against Jewel's ‘Challenge sermon’, with lucrative scope for the printer.Footnote ⁵⁹ But it is difficult to understand why this homily could be categorised as a sermon. Although the text (John xx. 11–17) is printed at the beginning, the structure of the work is uncharacteristic of a sermon in that it moves swiftly between narration of the unfolding events within the biblical passage, a running commentary, and a crafted inward narrative of the biblical characters. An interior monologue evokes Mary's state ‘without life, without sence’ (‘O wofull Woman that I am, what shall I do? whether shal I go? and whether is my beloued gon?’).Footnote ⁶⁰ A vivid characterisation of Mary as Christ's ‘louer’ unfolds at the heart of the homily: ‘O amiable, O delitable, geue againe to me the gladnes of thy comfortable prese[n]ce. Shew me thy countinaunce, let thy voice sounde in mine eares, for thy voice is sweete, and thy visage is beutiful.’Footnote ⁶¹

Elements of Catholicism and Protestantism work in tandem in the text, reflecting the ‘curious ecclesiastical hybrid’ of religion brought about by the Elizabethan Settlement.Footnote ⁶² Deliberating upon the recurrence of the phrase ‘Where haste thou layd him?’ in Mary's speech, Origen states the weight of these words of Scripture: ‘This word wareth exceding swete in her heart that so abou[n]deth in her mouth … bycause shee reme[m]breth that [Christ] saidst once of her brother [Lazarus], Where haue ye laid him? for sithens … she heard this word of [Christ's] mouth, she hath kept it diligently in her heart, and hath delighted to vse it in her speache.’Footnote ⁶³ None the less, while the importance of Scripture is emphasised, the doctrine of transubstantiation could potentially be read in Origen's reference to the ‘bread’ of Christ's body which filled Mary with his ‘fragments of the basket of her heart’ to ‘feede her hungry sowle’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Origen's homily strikes an uneasy synthesis of Protestant and Catholic elements; it is difficult to conclude which of the two faiths would most approve of the manner in which Origen appealed to readers to ‘desire’ the presence of God and ‘to loue Jesus’.Footnote ⁶⁵

The works explored thus far have hinted at their origins as oral texts, using imperatives such as ‘herke[n] ye’ and ‘Let vs therefore (bretherne)’; rhetorical devices which were also present in printed sermons.Footnote ⁶⁶ In contrast, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay's homilies could claim no such origins whatsoever, possibly indicating a shift towards an understanding of the genre as a text purely designed for stimulating a reader's religious contemplation.

The works of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay enjoyed considerable popularity in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Brenda M. Hosington has noted that a number of English and continental translators ‘sought to spread his thinking on issues central to the Reformed faith’; as a result, in England, ‘over ten translators published no fewer than 14 individual works between 1576 and 1608’.Footnote ⁶⁷ None the less, there is limited scholarship on the English reception of Duplessis-Mornay's translated works.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Huguenot soldier-councillor gained notoriety for his huge anti-Catholic polemical tract entitled De l'Institution, vsage et doctrine dv sainct sacrament de l'evcharistie (La Rochelle 1598). The reaction to this work could be viewed as the French equivalent of the sustained spate of printed works rebutting Jewel's sermon, with various counter-attacks from Catholic writers asserting that Duplessis-Mornay had ‘falsified or even invented his citations to support his own point of view’ against the eucharist, which had included numerous patristic sources.Footnote ⁶⁹ At a public disputation held at Fontainebleau on 4 May 1600, Duplessis-Mornay was disgraced and forced to retire from court.Footnote ⁷⁰

This episode was well known in England, and both Protestants and Catholics were prolific in their attempts either to defend Duplessis-Mornay or to promote his fall from grace.Footnote ⁷¹ It is therefore unsurprising that his works received correlating publicity. Among the last works to appear in England as translations from the French during Duplessis-Mornay's lifetime and shortly after his death are the little-regarded homilies, which serve as unusually pithy statements, in duodecimo format, of his advancement of Protestantism to the exclusion of Catholicism.Footnote ⁷² Three translations of Duplessis-Mornay with the word ‘homily’ or ‘homilies’ in the title are recorded in the ESTC: Two homilies concerning the meanes how to resolue the controversies of this time; An homily vpon these words of Saint Matthew, chap. 16. v. 18; and Three homilies.Footnote ⁷³ None of these translations uses the word ‘sermon’ to describe their content. In Two homilies, the term ‘homily’ is immediately deemed worthy of mention by the anonymous translator, who writes, ‘Thou hast here (gentle Reader) two homilies (for so the authour himselfe … entitleth them)’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Anthony Ratcliffe, translator of the Three homilies, refers to the works as ‘Treatises’ or ‘Tracts’ as opposed to ‘sermons’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the homily of 1615, the reader is invited to partake in ‘this holy catechisme’.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, despite the ostensibly pious nature of this ‘little booke’, the homily digresses extensively from the specified text of Matthew xvi.18. The work contains much vitriol against papal primacy and bitterness against the French Catholic monarchy, which sought to ‘dispense against the Gospell, and against the Apostle, to make new articles of faith’, and in so doing dragged ‘men by thousands into hell’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Operating behind a veneer of biblical exegesis and patristic scholarship, An homily vpon these words of Saint Matthew, chap. 16. v. 18 proffers intriguing insights into Duplessis-Mornay's interpretation of the genre, and also allows for an engagement with the homily through the additional prism of continental translation.Footnote ⁷⁸ The fluid approach to the homily, considered as something other than a book to be placed on the pulpit and read aloud as a substitute sermon, was prevalent in France in the early seventeenth century.Footnote ⁷⁹ Duplessis-Mornay was never a preacher but adapted this hortatory form in his later years, after public political intervention became more difficult owing to his compromised position, to continue his stand for the victory of the word of God over papal idolatry. Accordingly, he was described to Jacobean readers as ‘a true Champion of the Militant-Reformed-French Church’, who ‘valiantly fought both with pen & sword’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Finally, Anthony Stafford's The day of salvation: or, A homily upon the bloody sacrifice of Christ is unlike the other homilies in that it claims to have originated as a private work for just one ‘Noble and Vertuous Lady’, Lady Theophila Coke.Footnote ⁸¹ As a vicesimo-quarto, ‘small in Bulke’ but ‘great in Value’ and packaged with an engraved title page depicting Christ's torture and Resurrection, the homily purports, above all, to be a devotional gift.Footnote ⁸² By this point, it seems that the homily had the potential to bear very little resemblance to its original liturgical function.Footnote ⁸³ Stafford states that the subject of his book calls more for ‘the teares of the faithfull, then the Eloquence of Oratours’, and that ‘[a] holy Extasie is heere more seemly, then a curious Inquisition’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The epistle ‘To the Penitent Reader’ underlines the work's function as a reminder for the reader not to ‘loose the interest wee have in [Christ's] Crucifixion’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, the work abounds with imperatives such as ‘Call to minde againe, oh my soule’, ‘Meditate also’, ‘weigh withall’ and ‘Contemplate’, as opposed to the dialogic characteristics of the first three homilies discussed in this article.Footnote ⁸⁶ It is important to remember that Stafford, like Duplessis-Mornay, was not a preacher. In terms of defining the homily, Stafford seems to have followed the lead of Anthony Ratcliffe in depicting his work as a ‘Treatise’, and never as a ‘sermon’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The ‘limits of a Homily’, as Stafford understood it, was to stimulate contemplation in private for the lay reader.Footnote ⁸⁸ Unlike a sermon, the work is not an analysis of one specific passage from the Bible, but rather a précis of the life of Christ.

Anthony Stafford's homily needs to be understood within the context of Laudian attitudes towards the Official homilies. It has been beyond the limits of this article to engage with the reception and use of the Official homilies as fundamental sources of doctrinal authority in ecclesiastical disputes, particularly from the Laudian era onwards.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, it is important to observe that the Official homilies were indeed prominent within Laudian preoccupations, and that there was an attempt to justify their use and redefine their relationship with the sermon. Robert Shelford, minister of the church at Ringsfield in Suffolk, rejected the opinion that the Official homilies were ‘dead sermons, because they are onely read’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Yet, any Laudian ‘revival’ or transformation of the homily genre was evidently short-lived; Stafford's work remains the only Laudian printed work bearing this specific title.

Scholars have barely begun to consider the evolving nature of the homily in post-Reformation England, when words were ‘charged with potential conflict’ and religious works were prone to intense scrutiny.Footnote ⁹¹ The word ‘homily’, unlike ‘sermon’, was used extremely rarely within titles published in England from the early sixteenth century until 1640 (see appendix). Historians and literary critics alike have overlooked crucial questions regarding the infrequent use of the label and the contentious nature of the word in post-Reformation England. While the ‘homily’ could invoke popery because of its central role within the Catholic liturgy, the argument was also made for its illustrious origins from antiquity by Whitgift, Donne and other defenders of official Church doctrine. The term was not, therefore, one to be applied lightly, and the phenomenon of the ‘homily’ subsequently occupied minimal space within post-Reformation English print culture.

The above notwithstanding, this article has argued that, while the homily was a marginalised genre in post-Reformation England, it persisted nevertheless in a variety of forms. It was not limited to the Official homilies and other similarly sanctioned homilies prepared to be read from the pulpit. Contrary to popular perception of the ‘homely’ homily, the works examined in this article reveal that it did not always serve as the substitute sermon which had been denigrated by Robert Greene and Edmund Spenser. This paper has thus illuminated some of the ways in which the ‘homily’ could be appropriated by clarifying a multi-layered taxonomy of early modern printed homilies. During the Henrician Reformation, patristic homilies remained acceptable while the traditional homily of the Catholic mass was under threat; Chaloner's English translation of Chrysostom's text was issued, under the guise of a devotional book, to disseminate approved Henrician doctrine. The ‘sermon or homilie’ of Harpsfield was a celebration of England's return to the mass in Mary's reign, but in a distinctly reformed Catholic mode in which the homily could be transformed into a propagandistic pamphlet. The ‘new’ translation of Origen's homily was produced in a period in which the conflicting claims to patristic authority became a particularly protracted matter. This tiny book nevertheless reflected the problematic symbiosis of the two rival faiths in light of the Elizabethan Settlement. For Duplessis-Mornay and Stafford, the homily was not an oral text; in the case of the former, it was a means to distribute incendiary views against the French Catholic monarchy under the pretext of a small religious treatise, while the latter constituted a devotional ‘life’ of Christ.

None of these homilies resembles a traditional early modern English sermon, which would imply a per verbum style of exegesis. Biblical texts, if specified, were used chiefly as a means to unify the works thematically, rather than as the sole anchor. Bibliographically, these homilies contrast with sermons which were most frequently printed in quarto, ranging from octavo to vicesimo-quarto.Footnote ⁹² Closer examination of their formats calls into question their suitability for being read aloud, like the Official homilies, from the pulpit to large congregations.Footnote ⁹³ Of the thirteen post-Reformation homilies within the ESTC, it appears that only those which were specifically stipulated for use in the pulpit and printed after the publication of the two volumes of Official homilies follow their quarto format.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such considerations situate this article within the body of a burgeoning literature which applies book-historical approaches to key religious texts of the English Reformation, giving due attention to the significance of their formats as well as continuing to acknowledge their status as vital sources of evidence surrounding the concerns of the Church of England.Footnote ⁹⁵

There is certainly scope for further investigation into the life of the homily beyond the period surveyed in this article.Footnote ⁹⁶ For the present occasion, however, it has been the aim of this study to shed light on the instability and ambiguity of the term, its distinctive application within post-Reformation English print culture outside of the Official homilies, and the manner in which writers and translators across different confessional divides adapted and interpreted the genre. The printed homily in post-Reformation England was not always a simple sermon for unskilled preachers, but was fluid in its function as doctrinal pamphlet, polemical treatise and devotional text.