1. For a survey of the critical literature, see Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, ‘Revising the Study of the English Sermon’, in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 2–21.
2. The most important book examining sermons along literary lines is James Downey, The Eighteenth Century Pulpit: A Study of the Sermons of Butler, Berkeley, Secker, Sterne, Whitefield and Wesley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Most historical work on the eighteenth-century political sermon is contained in short articles.
3. See: Henry P. Ippel, ‘British Sermons and the American Revolution’, Journal of Religious History, 12 (1982), 191–205;
4. Gerd Mischler, ‘English Political Sermons 1714–1742: A Case Study in the Theory of the “Divine Right of Governors” and the Ideology of Order’, British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies, 24, 1 (2001), 33–61;
5. Bob Tennant, ‘Sentiment, Politics, and Empire: A Study of Beilby Porteus’s Antislavery Sermon’, in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 158–74.