Abstract
In their endeavors to persuade their readers and hearers to conversion and godly living, Puritan writers and preachers in early modern England make use of the three modes of persuasion identified by Aristotle: logos (appeal to rational argument), pathos (appeal to emotion), and ethos (appeal to the perceived credibility of the speaker). Although deploying rhetorical techniques, Puritan writers seek to manifest a Spirit-wrought sincerity, understood as earnest expression flowing from doctrinal conviction, inward spiritual experience, and a heartfelt desire to persuade others. This article explores these dynamics in the works of William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter, and John Bunyan.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.Aristotle. The “Art” of Rhetoric . With trans. by John Henry Freese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/London: Heinemann, 1926. Loeb Classical Library. Print .
2.Ball, Patricia M. “Sincerity: The Rise and Fall of a Critical Term.” Modern Language Review 59:1 (January 1964): 1–11. Print .
3.Barbee, David M. “The Allurer of the Soul: The Holy Spirit in Puritan Preaching.” The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: Historical, Interdisciplinary, and Renewal Perspectives . Ed. Wolfgang Vondey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 109–24. Print .
4.Baxter, Richard. A Christian Directory, or, A summ of practical theologie and cases of conscience directing Christians how to use their knowledge and faith, how to improve all helps and means, and to perform all duties, how to overcome temptations, and to escape or mortifie every sin . London, 1673. Print .
5.Baxter, Richard. Gildas Salvianus; the Reformed Pastor. Shewing the nature of the pastoral work; especially in private instruction and catechizing. London, 1656. Print .
6.Baxter, Richard. A Treatise of Conversion Preached, and now published for the use of those that are strangers to a true conversion, especially the grosly ignorant and ungodly . London, 1657. Print .
7.Baxter, Richard. The Vain Religion of the Formal Hypocrite, and the mischief of an unbridled tongue (as against religion, rulers, or dissenters) described, in several sermons, preached at the Abby in Westminster, before many members of the Honourable House of Commons, 1660; and The fools prosperity, the occasion of his destruction: a sermon preached at Covent-Garden . London, 1660. Print .
8.Bennett, Jill. “A Feeling of Insincerity: Politics, Ventriloquy, and the Dialectics of Gesture.” The Rhetoric of Sincerity . Ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 195–213. Print .
9.Breen, Quirinus. “John Calvin and the Rhetorical Tradition.” Church History 26:1 (March 1957), 3–21. Print .
10.Bunyan, John. Come, and Welcome, to Jesus Christ . Ed. Richard L. Greaves. In The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan . 13 vols. Gen. ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94. VIII: 229–392. Print .
11.Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners . Ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Print .
12.Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to Come . Ed. James Blanton Wharey; rev. ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Print .
13.Bunyan, John. The Strait Gate . Ed. Graham Midgeley. In The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan . 13 vols. Gen. ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94. V: 65–130. Print .
14.Burton, John. “To the Reader.” In John Bunyan, Some Gospel-Truths Opened According to the Scriptures , ed. T.L. Underwood. In The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan . 13 vols. Gen. ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94. I: 7–12. Print .
15.Calvin, John. A Commentarie vpon S. Paules Epistles to the Corinthians . Trans. Thomas Tymme. London, 1577. Print .
16.Camden, Vera J. “‘Most Fit for a Wounded Conscience’: The Place of Luther’s ‘Commentary on Galatians’ in Grace Abounding .” Renaissance Quarterly 50:3 (Autumn 1997): 819–49. Print .
17.Conley, Thomas M. Rhetoric in the European Tradition . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Print .
18.Crockett, Bryan. “Thomas Playfere’s Poetics of Preaching.” The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 . Ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 59–83. Print .
19.Davies, Horton. Like Angels from a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers, 1588–1645 . San Marino: Huntington Library, 1986. Print .
20.Davies, Michael. Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print .
21.Dixon, Leif. Practical Predestinarians in England, c. 1590–1640 . Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Print .
22.Ferrell, Lori Anne, and Peter McCullough, eds. The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print .
23.Frith, John. A Boke made by John Frith Prisoner in the Tower of London answeringe vnto M Mores lettur which he wrote agenst the first litle treatyse that John Frith made concerninge the sacramente of the body and bloude of Christ vnto which boke are added in the ende the articles of his examinacion before the bishoppes of London, Winchestur and Lincolne, in Paules church at London, for which John Frith was condempned and after burnet in Smith felde with out Newgate the fourth daye of Juli. Anno 1533 . N.p., 1533. Print .
24.Greaves, Richard L. Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Print .
25.Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism; or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643 . New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Print .
26.Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. “Practical Divinity and Spirituality.” The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism . Ed. John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 191–205. Print .
27.Harris, Jonathan C. “Richard Sibbes: A Moderate in Early Seventeenth Century Puritanism.” MA thesis. University of Melbourne, 1978. Print .
28.Henderson, Judith Rice. “Must a Good Orator Be a Good Man? Ramus in the Ciceronian Controversy.” Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honor of Heinrich F. Plett . Ed. Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloane. Leiden: Brill, 1999. 43–56. Print .
29.Hillman, David. Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print .
30.Horace. Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica . With trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/London: Heinemann, 1929. Loeb Classical Library. Print .
31.How, Samuel. The Sufficiencie of the Spirits Teaching, without Humane-Learning . [Amsterdam,] 1640. Print .
32.Hunt, Arnold. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print .
33.Johnson, Galen K. “‘Be Not Extream’: The Limits of Theory in Reading John Bunyan.” Christianity and Literature 49:4 (Summer 2000): 447–64. Print .
34.Keckermann, Bartholomaeus. Rhetoricae Ecclesiasticae: sive, Artis formandi & habendi conciones sacras; libri duo methodice adornati per Praecepta & Explicationes . 3rd ed. Hanau, 1606. Print .
35.Keeble, N. H. Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Print .
36.Keeble, N. H. “John Bunyan’s Literary Life.” The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan . Ed. Anne Dunan-Page. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 13–25. Print .
37.Keller, Timothy. Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism . New York: Viking, 2015. Print .
38.Kennedy, George A., Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Print .
39.Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. “Sincerity, Reliability and Other Ironies – Notes on Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius .” Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel . Ed. Elke D’hoker and Gunther Martens. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 107–128. Print .
40.Lake, Peter. Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Print .
41.Lares, Jameela. “Bunyan’s Progress and Glanvill’s Stand: Narration and Stasis in Later Seventeenth-Century English Religious Discourse.” New Chapters in the History of Rhetoric . Ed. Laurent Pernot. Leiden: Brill, 2009. 565–73. Print .
42.Lares, Jameela. “Classical and Christian Conflicts in Keckermann’s De rhetoricae ecclesiasticae utilitate .” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 3 (1998), 57–66. Rept. in Advances in the History of Rhetoric: The First Six Years . Ed. Richard Leo Enos and David E. Beard. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2007. 199–208. Print .
43.Lares, Jameela. Milton and the Preaching Arts. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press/Cambridge: James Clarke, 2001. Print .
44.Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Print .
45.Litfin, Duane. Paul’s Theology of Preaching: The Apostle’s Challenge to the Art of Persuasion in Ancient Corinth . Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015. Print .
46.Mack, Peter. A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print .
47.McCullough, Peter, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print .
48.Milnes, Tim, and Kerry Sinanan, eds. Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity . Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print .
49.Mitchell, W. Fraser. English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson . London: SPCK/New York and Toronto: Macmillan, 1932. Print .
50.Morrissey, Mary. Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print .
51.Myatt, Chin Hwa. “Richard Sibbes and the Performance of the Plain Sermon.” The Glass 28 (Spring 2016): 26–35. Print .
52.Nuttall, A. D. Shakespeare the Thinker . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Print .
53.Nuttall, Geoffrey F. Richard Baxter . London: Nelson, 1965. Print .
54.Patterson, W. B. William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Print .
55.Perkins, William. Of the Calling of the Ministerie: Two Treatises, Discribing the Duties and Dignities of that Calling . London, 1605. Print .
56.Perkins, William. Workes of that Famous and Worthie Minister of Christ in the Vniversitie of Cambridge, M. W. Perkins . 3 vols. Cambridge: John Legate, 1608–9. Print .
57.Pooley, Roger. “Language and Loyalty: Plain Style at the Restoration.” Literature & History 6:1 (Spring 1980): 2–18. Print .
58.Pooley, Roger. “Plain and Simple: Bunyan and Style.” John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays . Ed. N. H. Keeble. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 91–110. Print .
59.Reid, Steven J., and Emma Annette Wilson, eds. Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World . Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Print .
60.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark . Ed. Frank Kermode. In The Riverside Shakespeare . Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans with J.J.M. Tobin. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Print .
61.Shuger, Debora K. Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Print .
62.Sibbes, Richard. The Bruised Reede, and Smoaking Flax. Some sermons contracted out of the 12. of Matth. 20. At the desire, and for the good of weaker Christians . London, 1630. Print .
63.Sibbes, Richard. The Soules Conflict with it selfe, and Victory over it self by Faith. A treatise of the inward disquietments of distressed spirits, with comfortable remedies to establish them. London, 1635. Print .
64.Sibbes, Richard. Bowels Opened, or, A discovery of the neere and deere love, union and communion betwixt Christ and the Church, and consequently betwixt Him and every beleeving soule . London, 1639. Print .
65.Smith, Nigel. Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Print .
66.Spargo, Tamsin. “Bunyans Abounding, or the Names of the Author.” John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing . Ed. N. H. Keeble. Bern: Peter Lang, 2002. 79–102. Print .
67.Taylor, Jane. “‘Why do you Tear me from Myself?’: Torture, Truth, and the Arts of the Counter-Reformation.” The Rhetoric of Sincerity . Ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 19–43. Print .
68.Tertullian. De Praescriptione Haereticorum . Ed. R. F. Refoulé. In Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina , vol. I. Ed. Dom Eligius Dekkers. Turnhout: Brepols. 187–224. Print .
69.Thiselton, Anthony C. First Corinthians: A Shorter Exegetical and Pastoral Commentary . Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006. Print .
70.Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity . Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. Print .
71.Van Alphen, Ernst, and Mieke Bal. “Introduction.” The Rhetoric of Sincerity . Ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 1–16. Print .
72.Winship, Michael P. “Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s.” Church History 70:3 (September 2001): 462–81. Print .