Funeral sermon

A Christian funeral sermon is a formal religious oration or address given at a funeral ceremony, or sometimes a short time after, which may combine elements of eulogy with biographical comments and expository preaching. To qualify as a sermon, it should be based on a scriptural text.[1] Historically such sermons were very often prepared for publication, and played a significant part in Lutheran, and later in Puritan, presbyterian, and nonconformist literary cultures, in Europe and New England. They also were and are common in Christian denominations generally.

A trend in funeral sermons of the Renaissance and Reformation was a move away from the thematic sermon closely allied to scholasticism, towards an approach based on Renaissance humanism.[2] In Spain, for example, the two were combined, the analytical and verbal style joined to humanist epideictic.[3] While the contemporary assumption may be that a funeral sermon contains a significant element of life writing on the subject, in the past the inclusion of life writing was in tension with religious messages. The funeral sermon is a mixed genre.[4] Patrick Collinson used a "cuckoo in the nest" metaphor to describe the Protestant reformer's predicament when funeral sermons were given: classical rhetoric of exemplars was used, while radical evangelicals could not accept the sermon form as suited to the lives of the godly.[5]

That said, the early modern funeral sermon was structured around and began with explication of a biblical text.[6] It in that way was distinguished as a genre from the eulogy and other types of funeral orations and obituary addresses. For women, in England at least, "exemplary eulogies" would be constructed from female Biblical figures, sometimes displacing the subject's agency outside domestic life.[7]

  1. ^ Winslow, Donald J. (1 January 1995). Life-Writing: A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography, and Related Forms. University of Hawaii Press. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-8248-1713-8.
  2. ^ McCullough, Peter; Adlington, Hugh; Rhatigan, Emma (4 August 2011). The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon. OUP Oxford. p. 27. ISBN 978-0-19-923753-1.
  3. ^ McManus, Stuart M. (8 April 2021). Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World. Cambridge University Press. p. 65. ISBN 978-1-108-83016-4.
  4. ^ Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer (8 March 2015). Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode. Princeton University Press. p. 174. ISBN 978-1-4008-7005-9.
  5. ^ Peters, Christine (15 May 2003). Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England. Cambridge University Press. p. 199. ISBN 978-0-521-58062-5.
  6. ^ Goodland, Katharine (2006). Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 108. ISBN 978-0-7546-5101-7.
  7. ^ McCullough, Peter; Adlington, Hugh; Rhatigan, Emma (4 August 2011). The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon. OUP Oxford. pp. 171–172. ISBN 978-0-19-923753-1.