Lancelot Andrewes | Biography

In his own age Lancelot Andrewes was well known as a churchman, a controversialist, and, above all, an extraordinary preacher at the courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James I. With Richard Hooker he was the architect of the Church of England, steering a middle course between Roman Catholicism and Puritanism, and he defended the position of his church and monarch in his works of controversy. He was esteemed by his contemporaries as Stella Praedicantium (the star of preachers), but after his death his style of preaching was rejected as extravagant and old-fashioned. In the twentieth century Andrewes would have been forgotten if T. S. Eliot had not paid him tribute in his essay "Lancelot Andrewes" (1932) and had not quoted from Andrewes's second Wise Men sermon in the first five lines of his poem "The Journey of the Magi" (1927). Although Andrewes's works of controversy have long been forgotten,...
(read more)