Lancelot Andrewes was born in 1555 and died in 1626. His life, therefore, spanned a period in which the Church of England established its identity in the wake of the Reformation and Mary I’s Counter Reformation, as a Church that shared both Protestant and Catholic elements. Not only did he live through those times – as Chaplain to Elizabeth I, Dean of Westminster, bishop (successively) of Chichester, Ely and Winchester, and court preacher to James I,1 he was one of those who influenced the shape that Anglicanism would take.
Andrewes was renowned as a master of the pulpit, a ‘star of preachers’ according to his contemporaries.2 After his death, King Charles I ordered that 96 of his sermons be collected and published. The collection is arranged liturgically. There are seventeen sermons for Christmas Day, all of which were preached before King James I and his court; then follow fourteen sermons preached in Lent, three for Good Friday and eighteen for Easter Day. Like those on the nativity, the Easter sermons were preached in successive years before James I, as was the series of fifteen on Pentecost. Andrewes was explicitly a preacher of the liturgical year.
