Matthew Sutcliffe, the longtime dean of Exeter, was most notably an Anglican controversialist and the founder of the failed polemical college of Chelsea, but he also published a short Latin art of preaching (De concionum ad populum formulis, 1602) that has been almost completely overlooked in the history of rhetoric, even though it demonstrates important continuities with the distinct model of preaching developed by the Continental Reformation and adapted in England by William Perkins.

Sutcliffe was born in about 1550 in Mayroyd (or Melroyd), Halifax, Yorkshire, the second son of John Sutcliffe and his wife, Margaret Owlsworth of Ashley, Yorkshire. Much of Sutcliffe's remaining early biography is drawn from entries on official records. On 30 April 1568 he was admitted as a scholar to Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1571. He was elected a minor fellow of the college on 27 September 1572 and then a major fellow on 3 April 1574, the same...