The Voice in the Church

This chapter shifts attention from the private reading of the Bible to its public reading in church. It explores complaints about the ‘bare reading’ of the liturgy from the 1570s, and its defence by defenders of the established church. It explores the guides that promoted rhetorical delivery, and which explained the Bible as a series of affecting stories that congregants could relate to. It recognizes that complaints about bare reading in the 1570s had a second phase in the late 1580s and 1590s when a style of oral reading as protest was launched to defend preaching by a group of puritans writing as ‘Martin Marprelate’. It explores an unusual riposte from an unexpected quarter, Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares over Jerusalem, arguing he set out to give readers the experience of live preaching in book-form. And it invites us to think differently about how books in this period were experienced.

Rhetorical Delivery for Renaissance English: Voice, Gesture, Emotion, and the Sixteenth-Century Vernacular Turn

In the sixteenth century, perceptions of the English language changed from one of barbaric inadequacy to that of rare eloquence. Accounts for this shift tend to focus on literary or textual production, but this essay shows how these very linguistic concerns were motivated by the nonlinguistic practices appropriate to Latin rhetorical delivery(pronuntiatio et actio). The emotional contagion, legitimization of the inarticulate, cultural contextualization, and overcoming of natural physical defects that all stand at the heart of delivery here situate vernacular uplift at the corporeal level. The essay ends with an illustrative reading of William Shakespeare’sTitus Andronicus.