ABSTRACT
To propagate the faith of the newly separated Church of England, the leaders of the episcopates of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I found it expedient to provide preachers with a ready-made set of homilies. 1 The two volumes of Homilies were to become one of the pillars of the established Church of England, along with the legislation on supremacy and uniformity, the Book of Common Prayer, Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and the Authorized Version of the Bible. The Homilies implicitly propound an original system of doctrinal authority, based on the Fathers and on Scripture. Though such sermons were supposed to be read to wide audiences, sophisticated references to the patristic tradition were offered for the meditation of the congregations. Scripture, whose presence was meant to emphasize the Protestant nature of the new Church, is used in a variety of ways, often changing the rhetorical status of biblical references in the Homilies. Scripture can be quoted, paraphrased, interpreted, or - more surprisingly in the case of prose meant to be vocally delivered - merely referred to in the marginalia of the book. To approach this very complex nexus of problems, I shall first set the Homilies in their historical context, then analyse the homilies that take the Bible as their subject matter, then examine the argumentative uses of Scripture, and finally
look at some extra-biblical exempla. Behind these rhetorical questions, a double sociological and cultural question looms: in the deepest recesses of rural England in the Elizabethan era, were there many parishioners with the culture required to catch the subtleties of the patristic and biblical erudition of these landmarks of English prose? And as far as those endowed with the proper culture were concerned, could their consciences be properly edified, when the said masterpieces were droned from the pulpit by some semi-literate 'dumb dog', certainly baffled by the matter he was asked to read?
