William Perkins (1558–1602) is generally acknowledged as one of those baffling little-studied figures in Tudor ecclesiastical history. Despite asserting a seminal influence upon the Reformed divinity of the seventeenth century, his being one of vanishingly few Elizabethan divines to enjoy an international reputation in his own lifetime and his having a strong claim to the distinction of being the first systematic theologian to write primarily in English, scholarly works dealing with his life and thought remain few and far between. Thus, whenever a volume with Perkins as its principal focus does appear, it is to be accounted something of an occasion. This is doubly true when such a volume purports to contain original and heretofore unpublished material by Perkins. Certainly, the publication of posthumous works by this short-lived but prolific divine is a time-honoured practice: H.C. Porter wrote memorably of the ‘local industry’ which Perkins's students made in Jacobean Cambridge of editing and printing the many manuscript works which their late hero had left behind.Footnote 1 The labors of a godly and learned divine stands very much within this tradition of scholarship: Payne and Yuille make little secret of their admiration for Perkins, at one point referring to him as the ‘fountainhead of a rich Puritan succession’ (p. 306). Intended as a companion volume to the recent republication of Perkins's complete works by Reformation Heritage Books (RHB), this book is the result of diligent archival work, bringing together occasionally-cited but little-studied transcriptions of Perkins's sermons with material from virtually unheard of manuscript sources.
All told, there is a record made by Perkins's protégé Robert Hill of a sermon on Revelation xiv.8, two addresses on John iii.16 culled from a commonplace book, three from a notebook mainly containing jottings on lectures by Laurence Chaderton, seven sermons transcribed by James Tomlin, then a sizar at Sidney Sussex, and, by far the largest section of the book, forty-one sermons on an eclectic variety of texts, most likely recorded by Thomas Hutton, younger son of the then archbishop of York. Particularly interesting is the final item, the sermon preached at Perkins's funeral by James Montagu, his closest friend, not only because it illustrates the tremendous regard in which Perkins was held in Cambridge and further afield at the time of his death, but also because very little of Montagu's own oeuvre, beside his introduction to the collected writings of James i, has survived. Perhaps his reputation might benefit from the same kind of intensive archival trawling that has been undertaken here for Perkins?
In one sense, this is all terribly exciting – it ought not to be understated that the book contains the first new works by Perkins to be published in more than three centuries. That much alone is a considerable feather in the caps of Payne and Yuille. In another respect, however, the value of these sermons does not lie in their novelty. They deal with familiar Perkinsian topics: God's sovereign mercy upon the elect, the mediatorial work of Christ, prayer, rightly-ordered family life. One will find neither Perkins's hidden thoughts on matters which he never publicly addressed, such as the ever-controversial matter of church government, nor any departure from his established body of teaching. Indeed, the editors are to be commended for their introductions to each transcript, in which they seek to situate their content within Perkins’ existing corpus, and to identify those of his previously published works that have the greatest resonances in content.
Of especial value is the editors’ opening essay on the process by which Perkins's works were published, both before and after his death. Crucially, Payne and Yuille seem to have realised here that the real worth of the sermons they are prefacing is not as sensational ‘lost wonders’ of Perkins’ literary catalogue, but as sources which provide an unusually intimate perspective on how one of the Elizabethan period's leading preachers prepared and delivered his sermons, and upon the manner in which these were then edited for publication. This essay, ‘Publishing Perkins’ works’, asks all the right questions of this new material: how much can Perkins's unique ‘voice’ as a preacher be recovered? To what extent did his dialectical method, taken from the French logician Petrus Ramus (c.1515–72), so evident in his written output, order his spoken sermons? What form did the process of editing take, and to what extent did it alter the structure and content of the material? The strategies used to answer these questions are encouragingly inventive: at one point an interlinear comparison is made between three extant transcripts of Perkins’s sermon on Jude vv.3–4 in order to best determine the composition of the original; judicious use has also been made of printed advertisements by Perkins's posthumous editors, Perkins's will and one of his recorded prayers to better contextualise the ways in which Perkins went about preparing an address, and how his editors gathered and collated material for publication. Payne and Yuille's verdict is that, overall, Perkins's devotees made only minimal alterations to his addresses, and that therefore his printed posthumi are generally representative of his pulpit ministry.
Attention is also drawn to how Perkins's transcribers experienced the delivery of his preaching. Appropriate stress is placed upon preacher and auditors’ shared background in the logical forms of Ramus. Perkins's educated hearers typically recorded his discourses in a distinctively Ramist structure of successive topics and subtopics, displaying the particular ‘art of hearing’ which they had been taught in their colleges, and indeed which Perkins had learned there a generation prior. The critical apparatus to the sermons themselves is generally helpful and unobtrusive and, overall, the insights presented in Labors of a godly and learned divine situate it within the growing field of literature concerned with the expatiation and reception of the Tudor and Stuart sermon. The perspicacious manner in which our authors interrogate their source material makes this volume a worthy addition to the genre, and a useful accompaniment to the works of Peter McCullough, Emma Rhatigan, Arnold Hunt and Mary Morrissey, among others.
Payne and Yuille have, perhaps, made some leaps of logic in their analysis. The most serious of these is the identification of the sermon on Revelation xiv.8 transcribed by Robert Hill, and appended to the first edition of Perkins's commentary on Revelation, as an authentic work by the latter. Hill's transcription only states that the sermon was preached ‘long since by a famous Divine’ during the lifetime of Ambrose Dudley (c.1530–90); if it had been a sermon of Perkins's, it would make little sense for Hill not to identify it as such, given that he was printing it in a volume of Perkins's sermons.Footnote 2 While excitement at having potentially found a little-circulated Perkinsian text is understandable, Payne and Yuille really ought to have taken more care here, especially given that they address at several points works erroneously attributed to Perkins in the seventeenth century. Over-keenness here may well have unwittingly introduced a cuckoo to the Perkinsian nest. Additionally, Henry Smith, preacher at St Clement Danes, might have something to say about Payne and Yuille's uncritical assertion that Perkins was ‘late-Elizabethan England's most famous preacher’ – in fact, Smith was the only author whose works outsold Perkins's domestically in the last decade of the sixteenth century (p. 19).
If one might be permitted to append some closing quibbles: the complete bibliography of Perkins's known output, in which every work is listed alphabetically and the various editions of each are enumerated below, would perhaps have been better structured chronologically, so that the reader might more easily get a sense not only of the order in which Perkins's publications emerged, but also of which works remained popular for longest in the rapidly changing ecclesiastical climate of the seventeenth century. It is a pity that the original spellings from the manuscripts have been modernised, as something of the original is always lost in so doing. In fairness, however, Payne and Yuille's hands seem to have been tied in this matter by the conventions of the RHB edition of Perkins's works which this book was designed to accompany. The volume's title is also something of a mouthful, and perhaps inevitably, some typographical errors have also crept in: most notably, Paul Seaver's name is rendered ‘Sever’ in a note on p. 10. But quibbles these are. This book is a valuable contribution both to the long-starved field of Perkins studies and to the wider scholarship of early modern homiletics. It is also proof that contemporary academia disregards serious works from confessional presses like RHB to its own hurt.
