¹ Ashe, Simeon, Living Loves betwixt Christ and Dying (London, 1654), 54Google Scholar (italics original).

² For references to Whitaker ‘racked with pain’ while sermonizing, see Clarke, Samuel, A Collection of the Lives of Ten Eminent Divines (London, 1662), 164Google Scholar; Newcome, Henry, The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, ed. Parkinson, Richard, 2 vols (Manchester, 1852), 2: 284Google Scholar; Wild, Robert, Iter Boreale with Large Additions (London, 1668), 32–3Google Scholar; Wade, John, Redemption of Time (London, 1683), 450Google Scholar.

³ Ashe, Living Loves betwixt Christ and Dying, 51, 52.

⁴ Whitaker preached twice weekly at St Mary Magdalen, once a week at Christ Church, Newgate, and provided one of the weekly early morning lectures at Westminster Abbey: Paul S. Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent 1560–1662 (Stanford, CA, 1970), 270.

⁵ Ashe himself was a long sufferer of ‘fits of the Gout’: Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), 430.

⁶ Ashe, Living Loves betwixt Christ and Dying, 51.

⁷ For the importance of preaching within English puritanism, see Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620–1640 (Cambridge, 1997), 96–100.

⁸ See David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004); Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation England (Oxford, 2013); Francis Bremer, Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (New York, 2015).

⁹ See Eric Josef Carlson, ‘The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540–1640’, in Larissa Taylor, ed., Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2001), 249–96; Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010), 1–18; Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford, 2011), 329–422 (sermons from 1500–1660), 423–516 (sermons from 1660–1720). While there are good reasons for these divisions, the contiguities in preaching styles and habits that occurred across these periods are largely left unobserved.

¹⁰ For a study of conformist and nonconformist attitudes to illness, see Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998), 160–82.

¹¹ This is not to suggest, however, that puritan ministers were alone in emphasizing the import and impact of regular preaching.

¹² See Alun Withey, Physick and the Family: Health, Medicine and Care in Wales, 1600–1750 (Manchester, 2011); Olivia Weisser, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT, 2016); Hannah Newton, Misery to Mirth: Recovery from Illness in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2018); Robert W. Daniel, ‘“My sick–bed covenants”: Scriptural Patterns and Model Piety in the Early Modern Sickchamber’, in Elizabeth Clarke and Robert W. Daniel, eds, People and Piety: Protestant Devotional Identities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2020), 241–58.

¹³ See Lucinda McCray Beier, ‘In Sickness and in Health: A Seventeenth Century Family's Experience’, in Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre–Industrial Society (Cambridge, 1985), 101–28; David Harley, ‘The Theology of Affliction and the Experience of Sickness in the Godly Family, 1650–1714: The Henrys and the Newcomes’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, eds, Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1996), 273–92; Tim Cooper, ‘Richard Baxter and his Physicians’, SHM 20 (2007), 1–19; David Thorley, Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain (London, 2016), 27–112.

¹⁴ For examples of layfolk attempting to work while ill, see Newton, Misery to Mirth, 221–2.

¹⁵ See Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘The Puritan Death-bed, c.1560–c.1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), 122–44; Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth–Century England’, in Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners, 55–100; Mary Ann Lund, ‘Experiencing Pain in John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)’, in Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A. E. Enenkel, eds, The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden, 2009), 323–46; Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge, 2011), 63–71.

¹⁶ See Alison Searle, ‘“A kind of agonie in my thoughts”: Writing Puritan and Non–Conformist Women's Pain in Seventeenth–Century England’, Medical Humanities 44 (2018), 125–36.

¹⁷ Ibid. 136.

¹⁸ George Herbert, The Country Parson (London, 1652), 21, 61–2.

¹⁹ See Lancelot Andrewes, A Manual of Directions for the Sick (London, 1642); Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (London, 1651). Perkins, in particular, would not have deemed sick clergymen acceptable in the pulpit. He was adamant that proper sermon gestures were for the ‘stalke of the bodie being erect and quiet’, and the voice should be ‘not jagged and abrupt’, not easy to do when ill. William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying (London, 1607), 143, 147.

²⁰ Edward Lawrence, Christ's Power over Bodily Diseases (London, 1672), sigs B1v–B2r.

²¹ See Robert Bolton, The Foure Last Things (London, 1632), sig. C8v; Clarke, Ten Eminent Divines, 81; Wade, Redemption of Time, 248; Edmund Calamy, A Funeral Sermon for Mr. Love (London, 1651), 1; Lawrence, Christ's Power over Bodily Diseases, 102.

²² See Kevin Killeen, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2017), 95–6.

²³ Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London, 1976), 121–2. ‘Looseness’ was one of the commonest terms for diarrhoea at this time: ibid. 58 n. 1.

²⁴ Isaac Archer, ‘The Diary of Isaac Archer, 1641–1700’, in Matthew Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729 (Woodbridge, 1994), 41–200, at 157.

²⁵ Thomas Jolly, The Note-Book of the Rev. Thomas Jolly, A.D. 1671–1693 … , Chetham Society n.s. 33 (Manchester, 1894), 57.

²⁶ Josselin, Diary, 45.

²⁷ Jolly, Note-Book, 86; see also Henry Newcome, The Diary of the Rev. Henry Newcome, from September 30, 1661, to September 29, 1663, ed. Thomas Heywood, Chetham Society o.s. 18 (Manchester, 1849), 87, 89, 91.

²⁸ In 1668, Philip Henry confessed in his diary: ‘Ill of ye cold, which provok't other distempers, insomuch that for a time I despayr'd even of life’: Philip Henry, Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, M.A. of Broad Oak, Flintshire, A.D. 1631–1696, ed. Matthew Henry Lee (London, 1882), 217.

²⁹ Early modern ‘agues’ were no light afflictions and tended to describe a multitude of ailments. On 27 September 1670, Samuel Jeake, the namesake and son of a nonconformist minister, recorded his experience of an ague as ‘shaking, giddiness, drowziness, headach & inclination to vomit’. Over weeks the malady came and went in ‘fits’ whose symptoms usually included: ‘first cold, then shaking, then giddiness, lastly headach’. Samuel Jeake, An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1652–1699, ed. Michael Hunter and Annabel Gregory (Oxford, 1988), 108. For this reason, the symptoms of an ‘ague’ resembled those of influenza, malaria, or an intermittent fever.

³⁰ Henry, Diaries and Letters, 285 (italics mine).

³¹ Newcome, Autobiography, 1: 48.

³² Jeake, Diary, 207. Jeake, like other nonconformist ministers who suffered with gout, presumably sat rather than stood when he delivered his sermonic exhortations: see Edmund Calamy, The Nonconformist's Memorial, ed. Samuel Palmer, 3 vols (London, 1775), 1: 367.

³³ Josselin, Diary, 584.

³⁴ Calamy, Nonconformist's Memorial, 1: 302. Italics original. The New England clergyman John Cotton preached with the same illness: see Clarke, Ten Eminent Divines, 81.

³⁵ Similarly, in 1692, Evelyn recorded that one minister, a ‘Mr Smith’, had ‘such a Cold as he hardly could be heard’ by the congregation: John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford, 2012), 5: 84. A sick minister's coughs and splutters were part of the wider soundscape of early modern churches. For the groaning prayers of godly congregants during service time, see John Craig, ‘Psalms, Groans and Dogwhippers: The Soundscape of Worship in the English Parish Church, 1547–1642’, in Will J. Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds, Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), 104–23, at 109–13.

³⁶ Josselin, Diary, 18.

³⁷ E. C. Vernon, ‘Twisse, William (1577/8–1646)’, ODNB, online edn (2004), at: <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27921>, accessed 11 March 2020.

³⁸ Heywood, Works, 1: 29.

³⁹ N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, eds, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 2 vols (Oxford, 1991), 2: 324. The exact date of this sermon is unknown. From February 1687, Baxter acted as Matthew Sylvester's assistant preacher to his congregation in Rutland House, Charterhouse Yard, every Sunday and Thursday morning, where he continued ‘for about 4 Years and Half’, that is, until the summer of 1691: ibid. 4: 376. From then on, Baxter was quite ‘disabled from Publick service by his Growing weakness’, and only continued to preach ‘in his own House … Morning and Evening every Day’: ibid. This must therefore have been one of the last (perhaps the last) public sermons Baxter gave. I am grateful to N. H. Keeble for this information.

⁴⁰ Richard Baxter, The Practical Works of Richard Baxter, 4 vols (Ligonier, PA, 1990–1), 3: 1030. Such imagery also gives new meaning and poignancy to the skulls that appeared in the portraits that fronted the printed funeral sermons of some godly ministers: see Ann Hughes, ‘Print and Pastoral Identity: Presbyterian Pastors Negotiate the Restoration’, in Michael Davies, Anne Dunan–Page and Joel Halcomb, eds, Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2019), 152–71, at 157.

⁴¹ In 1616, ‘John Boulte’, an unbeneficed clergyman of Ludham, Norfolk, was said in Great Yarmouth to have ‘supplied the place during the time of their preachers sicknes, which was nye about 20 weeks’: H. W. Saunders, ed., The Official Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon (London, 1915), 195. Occasionally, however, a suitable replacement could not be found in time: see Evelyn, Diary, 2: 389.

⁴² See Crawford Gribben, ‘The Experience of Dissent: John Owen and Congregational Life in Revolutionary and Restoration England’, in Davies, Dunan–Page and Halcomb, eds, Church Life, 119–35, at 126; Newcome, Autobiography, 1: 96, 112; Calamy, Nonconformist's Memorial, 3: 276; Heywood, Diaries, 4: 140; John Rastrick, The Life of John Rastrick, 1650–1727, ed. Andrew Cambers (Cambridge, 2010), 123.

⁴³ Quoted in William Gibson, ‘The British Sermon 1689–1901: Quantities, Performance, and Culture’, in Keith A. Francis and William Gibson, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689–1901 (Oxford, 2012), 3–30, at 13.

⁴⁴ See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 281–325; Kate Armstrong, ‘Sermons in Performance’, in McCullough, Adlington and Rhatigan, eds, Early Modern Sermon, 120–37; Hunt, Art of Hearing, 187–228; Mary Morrissey, ‘Ornament and Repetition: Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern English Preaching’, in Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith and Rachel Willie, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700 (Oxford, 2015), 303–16.

⁴⁵ See Newcome, Autobiography, 1: 10. William Perkins, the influential puritan lecturer of Great St Andrew's Church, Cambridge, made similar recommendations: see Raymond A. Blacketer, ‘The Rhetoric of Reform. William Perkins on Preaching and the Purification of the Church’, in Maarten Wisse, Marcel Sarot and Willemien Otten, eds, Scholasticism Reformed: Essays in Honour of Willem J. van Asselt (Leiden, 2010), 215–37, at 225–7, 229–31. Such instructions were tempered by frequent references to St Paul's plain-style preaching, his ‘bodily presence weak, and his speech contemptible [or ineloquent]’: Francis Smith, Symptomes of Growth & Decay to Godlinesse (London, 1660), 29.

⁴⁶ ‘Introduction’, in Storey, ed., Diaries, 1–38, at 23–4. Although Archer was a Church of England clergyman, he only read the Prayer Book out of bare necessity and, tellingly, he obtained a licence to hold a Presbyterian meeting at his home in Chippenham after the short-lived Declaration of Indulgence in 1672.

⁴⁷ Newcome, Autobiography, 2: 209.

⁴⁸ Jolly, Note-Book, 53.

⁴⁹ Samuel Blackerby, Sermons Preached on Several Occasions (London, 1674), sig. A4v.

⁵⁰ Clarke, Ten Eminent Divines, 34.

⁵¹ Heywood, Diaries, 4: 34. See also Jolly, Note-Book, 97. By contrast, the godly antiquarian Ralph Thoresby pointed out the tendency for some congregants to be fair-weather sermon attenders, exclaiming in his diary: ‘will not an ill morning keep thee from church’: Ralph Thoresby, The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, 1677–1724, ed. Rev. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols (London, 1830), 1: 209. Ralph Josselin confirmed such behaviours, recording that on the first Sunday of February 1662, ‘a snow covering the ground. gods worship is most sadly neglected’: Josselin, Diary, 495.

⁵² Richard Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, CA, 2002), 597–9. Italics original.

⁵³ During the 1660s, Henry Newcome, then in his early thirties, caught a cold from his ‘journey to Warrington in so sharp a season in January’, forcing him to observe the next Sabbath at home. Venturing out later that month he records there ‘being a thin sharp wind, I had a sharp fit of an ague, and was gotten much out of health … was forced to keep in two Sabbaths’: Newcome, Autobiography, 1: 119. See also Henry, Diaries, 188; Archer, ‘Diary’, 154; Adam Martindale, The Life of Adam Martindale, ed. Richard Parkinson (Manchester, 1845), 236.

⁵⁴ Alice Thornton, The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton (Durham, 1875), 132.

⁵⁵ Josselin, Diary, 116. These examples modify Arnold Hunt's assertion that ‘attendance at sermons tended to be highest on winter evenings, which may suggest that many people who could not afford fuel in their own houses went to church in order to keep warm’: Hunt, Art of Hearing, 205–6. Though this may have been true for London parishes, rural and more northern regions were a different matter.

⁵⁶ Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 430.

⁵⁷ See Jolly, Note-Book, 86; Archer, ‘Diary’, 173. This also applied to high-ranking Church of England clerics. Tobie Matthew, archbishop of York, then in his seventies, recorded in his diary that he could not preach for several months over the winter of 1621–2 because he was ‘sore afflicted with rheum and cough, diverse months together’: quoted in Rosamund Oates, Moderate Radical: Tobie Matthew and the English Reformation (Oxford, 2018), 235.

⁵⁸ Clarke, Ten Eminent Divines, 144.

⁵⁹ See Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England, ed. John Freeman (London, 1952), 394.

⁶⁰ Quoted in Gribben, ‘Experience of Dissent’, 131.

⁶¹ Vincent Alsop, A Reply to the Reverend Dean of St. Paul's (London, 1681), 12.

⁶² Jolly, Note-Book, 103.

⁶³ Evelyn, Diary, 3: 282. Whichcote, who had sided with Parliament during the Civil War, but conformed after the Restoration, died the next year in 1683. The connection between infirmity and inaudibility when preaching was something ministers were all too aware of. In 1701, due to a harsh winter, the seventy-one-year-old Oliver Heywood recorded being ‘greatly afflicted with shortness of breathing’, but was thankful that when he ‘got into the pulpit, I could pray and preach audibly, a long time together’: Heywood, Diaries, 4: 168.

⁶⁴ Heywood, Works, 2: 167. Another example may have been John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, who died shortly after having given a sermon at Lacock, Wiltshire, in September 1571. Though no friend to puritans, Jewel's will noted ‘my werye bodie broken and consumed in his werye laboures’ of preaching: Kew, TNA, PROB 11/53, fols 309v–310r.

⁶⁵ Oliver Heywood, The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A., 1630–1702; His Autobiography, [and] Diaries, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 4 vols (Brighouse: 1882), 3: 146.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ This was part of a wider cultural and medical belief in the curative properties of movement, fresh air, and exercise: see Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Wheatley, H. B., 10 vols (London, 2008), 7: 208Google Scholar; Newton, Misery to Mirth, 87.

⁶⁸ Josselin, Diary, 113.

⁶⁹ Archer, ‘Diary’, 163.

⁷⁰ Cooper, ‘Richard Baxter and his Physicians’, 14.

⁷¹ This supports scholarship on the ‘double cure’ God's healing was thought to produce: see Newton, Misery to Mirth, 131–64.

⁷² See Harley, ‘Theology of Affliction’, 278.

⁷³ See Rastrick, Life, 60–1; Franklin, Mary, ‘The Experience of Mary Franklin’, in Camden, Vera J., ed., She being Dead yet Speaketh: The Franklin Family Papers (Toronto, ON, 2020), 131–2Google Scholar, at 151; Clarke, Ten Eminent Divines, 506, cf. 429.

⁷⁴ Calamy, Nonconformist's Memorial, 3: 389.

⁷⁵ For the heavy pastoral and parish workload of conscientious divines, see Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, 131–2.

⁷⁶ See Heywood, Diaries, 3: 225; Richard Baxter, A Breviate of the Life of Margaret … Wife of Richard Baxter (London, 1681), 101–2.

⁷⁷ See Martindale, Life, 104; Newcome, Autobiography, 1: 73; Henry, Diaries, 94. There is no room here to discuss the mental-wellbeing of ministers. There are suggestive examples of godly clergymen suffering from bouts of depression and mental anguish: see Heywood, Diaries, 4: 166, 170; Newcome, Autobiography, 1: 112, 181–2; Rastrick, Diary, 101–2.