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 Second Book, set forth under Elizabeth I in 1563 and largely the work of John Jewel, is the work of a Church that had, for the moment, won: its twenty-one homilies teach a settled people how to worship, pray, give, marry, and obey. If the First Book is the Reformation's argument, the Second is its settlement.
This is the first clean modern critical edition of the Second Book. The 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 — scriptural, patristic, and Continental, including the homilies' substantial debts to Bullinger and Gualther of Zurich — each one verified against a primary text. The volume ends, as the Elizabethan Church ended it, with the homily added in 1571 against disobedience and wilful rebellion, printed in full and set in its occasion.
The volume opens with an introduction to the Second Book and the original 1563 Admonition to ministers, gives a headnote to each sermon, and closes with a complete index.