SOURCE: Wabuda, Susan. “Bishops and the Provision of Homilies, 1520 to 1547.” Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 3 (fall 1994): 551-66.

In the following excerpt, Wabuda describes how Cranmer's Certain Sermons, or Homilies gradually replaced sermons and doctrine from the Middle Ages with what he regarded as more scripturally based addresses.

Of all the king's “grete clerkes,” no bishop spent more time devising homilies after the breach from Rome than Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Starting in 1534, the preparation of homilies was one of his most important concerns. His earliest effort was the Bidding Prayer Order. Almost every sermon during the Middle Ages and the first half of the sixteenth century was preceded by an invocation which, before the breach from Rome, had asked for God's blessing upon the pope, bishops, clergy, and the king. It was also said for all Christian souls, especially the dead, in the belief that it would help them through...