It is often assumed that Renaissance preachers considered their art a form of rhetoric. Certainly, by modern definitions of preaching, the use of the arts of speech to influence a listener's opinions is rhetorical. Yet, this assumption misses the complexities of Renaissance views of preaching, and in particular it ignores the preacher's stated aims, to interpret scripture and teach its doctrines. William Chappell's Ramist approach to preaching is instructive in this respect. Chappell presents the arts of grammar and dialectic as tools essential to the preacher's task, to the exclusion of almost all treatment of rhetorical matters. His preaching manuals are, therefore, primarily methods of exegesis and exposition, not of persuasion. This emphasis suggests that for Chappell, and perhaps for other early-modern instructors in the art of preaching, the preacher's primary tasks are interpretation and instruction. Persuasion, therefore, becomes merely the consequence, not the aim, of the preacher's...