The Art of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century English Sermons

ABSTRACTThis article suggests that the early modern English sermon teaches an art of feeling through rhetorical efforts to arouse emotion. Since “natural” emotions were understood to be contaminated by original sin, preachers saw it as important that their sermons teach their audiences how to feel godly emotions, emotions that the preacher himself was supposed to feel as he preached. The sermon genre, therefore, offers a mimetic theory of the emotions to its hearers and readers, a theory that we can understand more fully through the concept of intersubjectivity. By reading or hearing a sermon, individuals could understand themselves as constituted within a faithful and feeling community of Christian believers, and selfhood itself as defined by the process of relating one’s inside views and emotions to outward experiences and teaching.