A Godly and Fruitfull Sermon Preached at Grantham, Oxford, 1595

This 1592 Elizabethan Protestant sermon on lsaiah 24 1-3 offers an economic, social and moral portrait of Lite Tudor England stressing the need for equity. Trigge attacks enclosures as he was to do from a different perspective in his Humble Petition of two Sisters (1604). He analyses and condemns usury, the hoarding of corn, "great rents and excessive fines", conspicuous spending and the sale of benefits.
He also intends the sermon to he "a glasse [wherein] every degree may plainly see their spots and staines : and may bee thereby made indeede bcautifull (if they doe not lutte to be reformed) against the appearance of Jesus Christ." He discusses vocation in the Commonwealth, expounding the duties of servants and masters, ministers and people. The numerous shortcomings that he detects in his Society are interpreted as tokens of the Second Coming, an event which forms the prophetic background of his preaching, its imminence being further stressed hy signs in the physical world.
The Godly and Fruitfull sermon shows Trigge's mastery of rhetorical techniques, combining the parenetic and protreptic genres, bath warning and encouraging his readers to reform their ways in view of the impending judgmnent. This 1595 printed version offers a lcarned sermon with a close reading of the Vulgate collated with new Latin translations of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint and supported hy references to Josephus, the Sibylline Oracles and other humanist and more traditional sources.
Manv of the references and quotations are traced in the footnotes providing insights into the reading of an Elizabethan preacher.