He being dead, yet speaketh: the preacher's voice in early seventeenth‐century posthumous sermon collections

Recent studies of the early modern sermon argue that we need to read them in their historical context, but these studies often define context to mean, primarily, the original performance of the sermon, emphasizing how the paratexts of printed sermons preserve information about the time, place, and occasion of original delivery. Although I agree that understanding the conditions of the preached sermon is important, I suggest that the authority of the sermon event is less important to justify the printed sermon than we tend to assume. In this article, I focus on the paratextual means by which early seventeenth‐century sermon collections were framed, especially by editors of posthumous works, as the living voices of dead preachers. As I show, such collections do not preserve information about the original sermon event so much as they focus on print's ability to preserve the words, ideas, and wisdom of the dead.