After Edward VI’s coronation in 1547, the radical group of English reformers known as the Puritans took every opportunity to complain to the young king—that “blessed ympe”—about the “Dumme Doggs, Unskillful sacrificing priestes, Destroying Drones, or rather Caterpillars of the Word” who occupied the pulpits of England. As they attempted to recapture the ethos of the primitive church, these Puritans focused on the importance of the spoken word, beginning with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. They reminded themselves that the greatest of the church fathers, such as Augustine, had been powerful preachers. And they invoked the admonition of St. Paul, echoed by John Calvin, “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? . . . So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

In particular, the Puritans were outraged that so many ministers of the established church substituted affected eloquence for sound scriptural knowledge and indulged themselves in “fonde fables to make their hearers laughe, or in ostentation of learning, of their Latin, their Greke, their Hebrue tongue, and of their great reading of antiquities.” Instead, the Puritan clergy aligned themselves behind the “plain style” of the Cambridge divine William Perkins. As followers of Perkins, they wore simple Geneva gowns and delivered sermons that were straightforward explications of scripture, divided into three sections: an expanded reading of