The period 1689-1901 was 'the golden age' of the sermon in Britain. It was the best selling printed work and dominated the print trade until the mid-nineteenth century. Sermons were highly influential in religious and spiritual matters, but they also played important roles in elections and politics, science and ideas and campaigns for reform. Sermons touched the lives of ordinary people and formed a dominant part of their lives. Preachers attracted huge crowds and the popular demand for sermons was never higher. Sermons were also taken by missionaries and clergy across the British empire, so that preaching was integral to the process of imperialism and shaped the emerging colonies and dominions. The form that sermons took varied widely, and this enabled preaching to be adopted and shaped by every denomination, so that in this period most religious groups could lay claim to a sermon style. The pulpit naturally lent itself to controversy, and consequently sermons lay at the heart of numerous religious arguments. Drawing on the latest research by leading sermon scholars, this handbook accesses historical, theological, rhetorical, literary and linguistic studies to demonstrate the interdisciplinary strength of the field of sermon studies and to show the centrality of sermons to religious life in this period.

"In 1979 A South African bibliography to the year 1925 (SABIB), compiled under the auspices of the South AFrican Library, was published in four volumes by Mansell of London. It was essentially a revision and continuation of Sidney Mendelssohn's South African bibliography (London, 1910), which recorded literature about South Africa from earliest times to 1909, regardless of place of publication. For the new bibliography the period was extended to 1925, but for practical reasons the scope was limited to the geographical area south of the Limpopo, and certain material, for example books in African languages, sheet music, maps and periodicals, was excluded."--Preface to Supplement.