University of Virginia Library

1. Andrewes's Lost Whit-Sunday Sermon

On 23 May 1602, when Lancelot Andrewes preached at Westminster on John 16:7, John Manningham was in the audience. This Whit-Sunday sermon

was delivered by a preacher who was at least as prominent as two others who receive considerable attention in the Diary, John Spenser, rector of St. Sepulchre's, Newgate, and John King, one of the Queen's chaplains and rector of St. Andrew, Holborn. Beginning in the 1580s, Andrewes had delivered hundreds of sermons, many at court, and hundreds of lectures.[2] In mid-1602, he was, as Manningham noted, Dean of Westminster, someone who had preached before the Queen on many occasions and who would deliver her funeral sermon less than a year later.[3] Andrewes's fortunes, which were to soar under King James, were already on the rise, so it is not surprising that Manningham took extensive notes—about 1,500 words covering six pages in his Diary (fols. 21b-24)—on a Pentecost sermon delivered by a highly regarded preacher.

Contemporary listeners and modern scholars have long acknowledged that Andrewes quotes, paraphrases, and alludes to his own sermons. The contemporary court gossip John Chamberlain recognized the connection between Andrewes's 1621 Easter sermon and the one he preached the previous year,[4] and modern scholars refer to the echoes and repetitions that occur between canonical texts in XCVI Sermons (1629), recollections that are almost certainly based on the preacher's direct examination of a manuscript while preparing a new one.[5] However, by neglecting to look beyond XCVI Sermons —that is, by consistently overlooking manuscripts and posthumously printed texts attributed to Andrewes—scholars have underestimated the extent to which he echoes his own writing and failed to recognize some of the uses of this evidence when dealing with important textual questions, including those of authenticity or authorship. Attributed to Andrewes on the title

page and in the Preface, ΑΠΟΣΟΑΣΜΑΤΙΑ SACRA; Or, A Collection of Posthumous and Orphan Lectures (1657) contains over one hundred lectures on every verse in Genesis 1-4 and a few other scriptural passages, all delivered at St. Paul's and St. Giles from 1590 to 1592 and 1598 to 1600. A number of the Orphan Lectures include quotations and paraphrases from other pieces in the volume, material that is sometimes echoed or repeated from a lecture delivered only a few days earlier.[6] Similarly in XCVI Sermons, the Orphan Lectures, and attributed lectures and sermons whose manuscripts are located in the Emmanuel College Library and Lambeth Palace Library—texts separated by a few years or even a full decade—clear echoes and repetitions appear in Andrewes's discussions of the "congruities" between a church and a sheep-fold, the journey of the Magi, the pain expressed in Lamentations 1:12, and the debate of the Four Daughters of God in Psalm 85:10-11.[7] As these examples illustrate, it would not be difficult to make a case for the authenticity of the various manuscripts and Orphan Lectures by developing an argument based on a suitably large number of parallels between the canonical XCVI Sermons and texts that are candidates for being accepted as authentic. Because Andrewes's practice of self-echoing is somewhat more extensive than previously thought, there are more opportunities to use this evidence to resolve questions of authorship or to determine the reliability of notes taken on a sermon.

Although no printed version of Andrewes's 1602 Whit-Sunday sermon exists for purposes of comparison with Manningham's notes, one can begin to assess his account by examining various ideas, images, and words in a later Whit-Sunday sermon Andrewes preached, specifically one before King James at Windsor on 12 May 1611 that subsequently was printed in XCVI Sermons. Doing so in turn requires some sense of what that printed form represents. Contemporary evidence suggests a close similarity between the texts as they appeared in Andrewes's manuscripts, spoken words, and printed works. In the Epistle Dedicatorie to XCVI Sermons, editors William Laud and John

Buckeridge explain not only that they follow King James I's mandate to print all of Andrewes's works that were complete but also that the full sermon notes which they are publishing are nearly identical to what his congregation actually heard:

John Sparrow's general description of preaching in Stuart England indicates that Andrewes's habits of composing, memorizing, and preaching were by no means unusual. The "approved method of preaching" in the first half of the seventeenth century "was to speak a sermon with as little dependence on manuscript as possible. Yet a sermon was not given ex tempore: the preacher when he entered the pulpit would have it in his head, and he might have copied it out in full."[9] In fact, so conscientious was Andrewes about creating a finished, polished manuscript that he could follow when speaking from the pulpit that on four occasions when he was too ill to preach, the texts were already fully prepared and, after his death, given to the printer so they could appear in XCVI Sermons in a final form identical to that of the other sermons in the volume.[10] Manuscript evidence from Andrewes's 1620 Easter sermon further demonstrates that what appeared in print in the 1629 collection is nearly identical to the manuscripts from which he preached and, as Andrewes's preeminent modern editor has explained and as I have argued elsewhere, to the words he spoke from the pulpit.[11] In the case of the 1611 WhitSunday sermon, no apparent textual irregularities or unusual historical cirsumstances cast doubt on the conclusion that the posthumously printed text in XCVI Sermons accurately reflects what he preached and thus can serve as a reliable basis for comparison with his sermon nine years earlier.

Themes and wording in the published Whit-Sunday sermon of 1611 indicate that Andrewes was there revisiting the sermon Manningham heard in 1602. In 1611, Andrewes chooses an appropriate passage for the day, John 16:7, in which Christ calms his disciples by explaining that he departs so a "Comforter" may come, the same passage Manningham heard him explicate on 23

May 1602. Connecting Whit-Sunday, 1602, and the scriptural passage, according to Manningham's notes, Andrewes states:

When the 1611 sermon was printed in 1629, the text presents the same point in similar words:

Referring to 2 Timothy 4:10 in both sermons, Andrewes shows the relationship between Demas's defection from Paul and Christ's leaving his disciples:

That Christ makes the effort to explain his departure calls for praise in both sermons:

In 1602, Andrewes uses a lengthy observation to demonstrate the necessity for Christ's departure, an argument that he echoes in 1611:

Near the end of the Diary's entry on this sermon, Andrewes uses striking imagery to present the application of his various points:

These passages demonstrate Andrewes's ability to rework images and phrases to suit different emphases, the 1602 sermon focusing on the recipients of the Holy Ghost's power and how that power reveals itself, the 1611 sermon on the types or manifestations of the Holy Ghost. Quoted at length because they contain echoes and repetitions that are clear and numerous, these passages constitute some of the most compelling evidence that I have located from the point where Manningham's and Andrewes's lives intersect. As is the case with all of the pairs of quotations I have presented, and as I will now argue is typical of the Diary's notes from various kinds of sources, the similarities between these passages about the Holy Ghost illustrate Manningham's skill at taking notes—in this case, while the preacher speaks—probably with some compression and summarizing. I will now turn to other evidence about his habits of transcription to assess further the nature of Manningham's notes on the 1602 Whit-Sunday sermon.