Preaching at the St Paul's Cross

Happy New Year, everyone. I’ll start the year with something lighter – after a fashion: a sermon held by John Donne in 1622 commemorating the Gunpowder Plot. It’s a virtual acoustic model created by the literature and architecture researchers at the North Carolina State University that is meant to demonstrate how the sermon would have sounded from different vantage points within the St Paul’s courtyard.

The sermon is long – for a modern audience, but often Donne’s sermons could take hours – and somewhat difficult to hear. But it’s not the content that I find interesting. It’s the setting. A courtyard filled with people who are milling about, trying to fit in, trying to get as close to the speaker as possible. One couldn’t see properly; one could barely hear a thing. One had to stand through the proceedings, perhaps in direct sunlight even – or rain, as the sermon was held in November. It must have made for an exhausting, uncomfortable experience.

The congregation is politely quiet in this virtual reconstruction, but I seriously doubt they were so at the time. There would have been some commentary from the congregation that the others would have shushed. Scuffles and fights would have erupted, and children would have been crying or making other noises. All the natural sounds of a busy city are absent, iron rims of wheels clacking against cobblestones on the nearby streets for example, as are the birds and the wind. On top of that, St. Paul’s was notorious for the low-lives that filled the cathedral’s galleries. More than likely they wouldn’t have quieted for the sermon but would have continued to sell their wares.

An open air sermon was therefore a challenge for the congregation and for the preacher too. Donne was a popular preacher so he must have handled these occasions well enough. Also, as the virtual model revealed to its creators, the courtyard space allowed sound to reverberate, which amplified the voice of the speaker, making the task a little easier.

I can’t help wondering though, what it must have been like, standing in the middle of a large crowd, delivering a sermon that wasn’t necessarily popular in order to allay fears over the Spanish marriage of Charles I. Was the audience hostile, interrupting the sermon, or were they, as the virtual model suggests, reverent, barely making a sound. For an eight-minute piece, it gives quite a lot of food for imagination.