For nearly three centuries the Books of Homilies were the appointed preaching of the Church of England — read aloud, Sunday by Sunday, in the many parishes that had no preacher of their own. The First Book, set forth in 1547 by Thomas Cranmer and his circle, was a missionary book: a quarter of it given to the single disputed doctrine of justification by faith, addressed to a people not yet persuaded. It is the Reformation's argument, preached.
This is the first clean modern critical edition of the First Book. The twelve homilies are given in modernized spelling and punctuation, with their Tudor syntax kept intact — obsolete words retained and glossed rather than silently replaced. Beneath the text a full scholarly apparatus traces every source the homilists drew on — scriptural, patristic, and Continental — each one verified against a primary text rather than a secondary report. The long silence of earlier editions about the homilies' debts to Luther and the Reformed divines of the Continent is, here, broken.
The volume opens with a general introduction to the homilies and their place in the English Reformation, gives a headnote to each sermon, and closes with a complete index.