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Chapter 1

Unauthorizing the Sermon

In a letter written to his old friend and colleague John Cotton in 1650, John Davenport requests advice regarding a sermon he is preparing for the press. Some time ago, Davenport had lent his own copy of notes on a sermon on “the knowledge of Christ” to “Brother Pierce,” a lay auditor who took notes at the delivery of the sermon.¹ Davenport comments: “The Forenamed brother dilligently wrote, as his manner was, but finding that his head and pen could not carry away some materiall expressions, he earnestly desired me to lett him have my notes, to perfect his owne by them.”² After some delays, Davenport sends the requested notes to Brother Pierce in New Haven, extracting two promises. Number one, that Pierce will return his copy when done via “a safe land=messenger” (four years earlier, Davenport had lost an entire manuscript sermon series on board a vessel known as the “phantom ship”).³ Number two, that when Brother Pierce “had transcribed them, he would shew them unto [Cotton], and make no other use of them then privatly for himselfe but by [Cotton’s] advise.” “This I added,” explains Davenport, “because I feared that he had a purpose for the presse, from some words that I observed now and then to fall from him.”⁴ Brother Pierce fears that he may have missed some fundamental points of Davenport’s argument—what he calls “materiall expressions.” In turn, however, the very materiality of those incomplete notes enables Davenport’s argument about “the knowledge of Christ” to circulate. The materiality of expression—created by his own hand as well as by Brother Pierce’s—makes Davenport’s preaching portable, accessible, and also vulnerable.

At first glance, Davenport’s letter seems simply to confirm the conventional sense of anxiety over unauthorized publication associated with Puritan print sermons. Complaints about unauthorized publication are ubiquitous. Thomas Shepard, for example, complains in a letter about the unauthorized publication of The Sincere Convert (a series drawn from his English preaching) that “it was a Collection of such Notes in a dark Town in England, which one procuring of me, published them without my will or privity; I scarce know what it contains, nor do I like to see it, considering the many [typographical errors], most absurd, and the confession of him that published it, that [it] comes out gelded and altered from what was first written.”⁵ Such disavowals (found in private writing as well as in the prefaces to subsequent editions and responses to unauthorized publication) are common among seventeenth-century clergy, especially (but certainly not limited to) New England ministers who may have felt the distance from the London publishing world even more keenly than their transatlantic brethren.⁶ Laity of all denominations took notes, but the practice was particularly common among those auditors with Puritan leanings who sought to privilege the primacy of the Word in the work of redemption.⁷

Davenport’s letter to Cotton complicates our notion of the relationship between the publishing minister and the well-intentioned lay notetaker (and, perhaps, even the less well-intentioned notetaker). His letter suggests that manuscript notes, by ministers and laity alike, might be kept in circulation, be used to check and confirm each other, and ultimately provide a complex network of authorship that might enable clerical publication. In his letter, Davenport’s primary concern is neither the return of his notes nor the suppression of any publishing ambitions on the part of Brother Pierce. (If Brother Pierce had succeeded in getting Davenport’s preaching into print, however, Davenport’s name, not his own, would be on the title page. In terms of both the notetaker and the publisher, there would be some combination of economic and pious motive rather than what we now may think of as personal, authorial ambition.) Davenport desires foremost that Cotton will comment on his explication. Cotton apparently takes up this request immediately and begins to draft his response to Davenport’s scriptural interpretation directly in the white space on Davenport’s letter.⁸ The letter as artifact becomes a palimpsest of communal interpretive endeavors. This particular shared endeavor implicates Davenport, Cotton, and Pierce in various overlapping roles. Davenport, of course, serves as the primary author or instigator of the text, while Cotton serves as the collegial advisor on matters of scriptural interpretation. Pierce serves primarily as messenger, bearing his own and Davenport’s notes. But Pierce’s own notetaking, his perception, and his transmission of Davenport’s text are all part of the larger context of circulation, comment, and revision. Given an environment in which publishing ministers are so explicitly anxious about publication based solely on auditor notes—and given the fact that Davenport specifically suspects Pierce of having such designs—it is surprising that Davenport should send his notes abroad to Pierce in New Haven. The entire incident suggests the vital importance of manuscript networks in sermon publication, involving, in this case, the publishing minister, the clerical colleague, and the attentive, interested lay auditor. We can easily imagine this peculiar “communications circuit” also including lay readers of circulating manuscripts, printers, and the travelers who conveyed manuscripts to and from their various destinations.

This chapter in part addresses the processes through which the spoken words of sermons come to be printed texts. More significantly, this chapter demonstrates the many ways in which the processes of publication are not simply linear. In practice, there is not a single movement from oral to manuscript to print forms, even though we tend to see a hierarchical relationship between these media (supposing oral texts to be spontaneous, manuscripts to be “authentic” expressions of authorial intent, and printed texts to be fixed) or as inevitable progression (the displacement of “orality” by “literacy,” for example, or the presumed decline of manuscript culture upon the advent of print).⁹ Davenport’s letter illustrates similar lessons that can be found throughout the entire archival record: the vital interdependence of sermons in print, manuscript, and oral forms, as well as the manifold, often hybrid, ways by which sermons circulated. Not only do manuscript forms—including auditor sermon notes, drafts meant for publication, manuscripts prepared for circulation, and reader annotation—provide links between oral and print manifestations of preaching, but they constitute their own categories of publication.¹⁰ Because preached sermons in this period were often prepared for the press from auditor notes, this Puritan genre provides an ideal opportunity to challenge common assumptions about the authorship of texts and the authority of printed books. The complicated hybridity of sermon literature (auditor notes, printed books, circulating manuscript, handmade books of all sorts) reveals yet another aspect of Davenport’s passing phrase “material expressions.” With so many variant versions of the same sermon circulating simultaneously, the site of textual production—and the authority of expression itself—is disseminated throughout the entire community of readers, writers, auditors, and transcribers.¹¹ Ultimately, this disseminated authority that is rendered so visible in the material record demands that we, as modern-day readers, fine-tune our sense of what sermons say, to whom they speak, and how they convey ideas.

The initial—and the most elusive—question may be: What does clerical authorship entail? Since Perry Miller notoriously took “the liberty of treating the whole literature as though it were the product of a single intelligence” and “appropriated illustrations from whichever authors happen to express a point most conveniently,”¹² generations of scholars have rushed in to distinguish what makes Cotton “Cotton,” or Shepard “Shepard,” or Hooker “Hooker,” and so on.¹³

While these scholars have not always agreed with one another, they all have tended—implicitly or explicitly—to explicate the biographical, the theological, and the political to reveal the minister as author. Even so, the minister-author often resists attempts to characterize his pulpit style, since few publish with regularity and because so much publication is polemic rather than pastoral. In most cases, each publishing minister becomes defined by his circumstances and by his reaction to circumstances. (So, for example, the Antinomian Controversy looms large in the authorial production of the first generation of New England Puritan ministers, while subsequent generations seem defined in relation to the English Civil Wars, the Half-Way Covenant, King Philip’s War, and other assorted declension narratives.) In Orthodoxies in Massachusetts, for example, Janice Knight demonstrates how political circumstance, theological leanings, personal experience, and stylistic preferences correlate. In Knight’s application of the terms “Intellectual Fathers” and “Spiritual Bretheren,” English contexts continue to guide New England habits of thought and expression.¹⁴ Delineating something akin to a two party-system, this explanation of competing “orthodoxies” still provides convincing, coherent categories of clerical authority. While paying attention to such broad affiliations, Michael J. Colacurcio shifts focus in Godly Letters to the individual authorial profile, patiently working his way through what he deems to be the representative “big books” for each major figure of the first generation. Colacurcio presents us, for example, with two Thomas Shepards—one the autobiographical man disciplining his grief (for lost wives and for sin) and the other the pastor of a potentially unruly flock who, in the wake of the Antinomian Controversy, must have sanctification explained to them over and over again via a years-long explication of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in Matt. 25:1–13.¹⁵

Close treatments of clerical authorship, in other words, take for granted the singularity of authorship. Thomas Shepard’s writing is taken to be completely Thomas Shepard’s writing, for example. As themes and emphases reveal themselves over the course of a minister’s publishing career, those themes and emphases come to represent the minister as author. When the distinctive traits of the minister-author are sought solely on the basis of his print publication, the object quickly becomes to identify what is distinctive about him as minister-theologian or minister-polemicist. Accordingly, we expect to hear about Sanctification from Shepard, Preparation from Hooker, and uncompromising Calvinism from Cotton.¹⁶ Shepard’s career as author (to take just one example) looks different, however, if we think of him as a single-minded cleric reconciling traumatic personal experience with pastoral duties or if we see him as an engaged cleric who fine-tunes his ongoing preaching and written work to respond to challenges and ideas from colleagues and laity alike. Shepard’s authorial presence in the lay narratives known as the “Cambridge confessions” is easy to identify even by first-time readers. He serves as the transcriber of the oral narratives, for which he has provided spiritual guidance; accordingly, his pastoral (and, arguably, his personal) influence is legible throughout. His role as transcriber, after all, is an extension of his role as spiritual guide.¹⁷ Indeed, the authority of his presence in these recorded oral narratives verges on authorship itself. But while scholars recognize this clerical intervention and shaping of lay texts, they do not recognize as easily the ways in which the laity, conversely, come to affect Shepard’s preaching, the emphases of his publication, and the shape of his authorial career overall.

All authors write in context, and Puritan ministers prove no exception. As a class of writers, they often hold a particular authoritative (sometimes authorial) sway over their immediate communities and an expanded, transatlantic readership. The notation “lately of New England” by a minister’s name on the title page of an English publication establishes an authority that is virtually indistinguishable from simple sales promotion. The reputation of a “godly” Puritan preacher in England only increased upon his migration to New England. The tag “lately of New England” might also indicate that the printing is likely unauthorized, based on auditor notes rather than the minister’s own manuscript draft. Indeed, much mid-century printing of the first generation of New England ministers seems simultaneously to take advantage of the celebrity associated with migration and the lack of control over printing that the transatlantic distance created. Yet ministers and their publishers likely overstated the frequency and egregiousness of unauthorized preaching. On the one hand, publishers had economic reasons to promote the difference of new, “authorized,” and “corrected” editions of works; on the other hand, “the myth of the pirated version is fairly common in seventeenth-century letters as a method for distancing the author from a work not quite as elegant or polished as the preacher thinks it should be.”¹⁸ It is also important to note the prevalence of claims to “popular demand” in prefatory material—the idea that a congregation responded so strongly to a delivered sermon that they either pressed for its publication or aided its publication by circulation of sermon notes. Akin to similar disclaimers found in other genres of writing (in poetry, for example), clerical demurrals were conventional expressions of the publishing minister’s humility in offering his preaching to a wider public. If publishing secular work is necessarily considered an act of hubris, how much more fraught might clerical publication be, since the minister’s work must compare not only to other productions of this world but to the divinity of Word itself, the pious intent of sermon publication notwithstanding. Unauthorized publication based on auditor notes was clearly a problem for many ministers, but the practice was also a tangible sign of the efficacy and popularity of an individual minister’s pulpit work.

These qualifications to conventions of clerical demurrals do not delegitimize some of the very real problems of unauthorized publication in the period. John Cotton provides a prime example of the precarious conflicts that sometimes existed between manuscript, oral, and print manifestations of a minister’s words. The distance between New England and the publishing hub of London meant that few ministers of the first generations ever published on their home turf. Accordingly, as Jonathan Beecher Field argues, a “lack of authorial control is the rule, rather than the exception” for most publishing ministers, particularly Cotton, a man who found himself buffeted by more than one controversial tempest. Factors such as “unreliable transcription, untimely publication, and unauthorized publication” stymie an accurate representation of Cotton’s thought in extant print sources, and his entry into the infamous pamphlet war with Roger Williams might ultimately be characterized as “involuntary authorship.”¹⁹

The friction between Williams and Cotton may represent one kind of worst-case scenario of a minister’s loss of authorial control, but even a well-intentioned auditor might offer just as strong (if more subtle) a challenge to the publishing minister’s authorial prerogative. In many ways, the proliferation of multiple print versions of Thomas Hooker’s preaching—taken almost exclusively from devoted notetakers and put into print by publishers with personal and theological sympathies—raises even more fundamental questions about the means of clerical authorship than do the cases of controversial writings by Cotton. Hooker, who had in print only two sermons (The Poor Doubting Christian and The Soules Preparation) when he emigrated to New England in 1633,²⁰ may not have had any significant amount of his preaching published had it not been for the unauthorized publications of his English preaching based on auditor notes. The year 1637 saw the publication of thirteen sermons or sermon collections by Hooker, all likely unauthorized and based on auditor notes, and those thirteen titles provided the basis for a total of six subsequent editions under the same or similar titles over the next eight years.²¹ In 1656 (almost a decade after Hooker’s death), the printer Peter Cole published the first two volumes of The Application of Redemption in England, introduced by Hooker’s former colleagues and continued allies in England, Thomas Good-win and Philip Nye, apparently part of a planned three-volume sermon cycle.²² This is Hooker’s magnum opus, and tradition holds that he had preached his way through the entire sequence of the stages of redemption (particularly the preparatory stages) at least three times—once in England and twice in New England, presumably refining and expanding the years-long sequence each time.²³ Goodwin and Nye affirm that this posthumous publication is based on Hooker’s own prepared draft, an assertion that has been corroborated by the painstaking stylistic and content analysis of modern scholarship.²⁴ Nevertheless, basic similarities of doctrine, scriptural explication, and even wording suggest that the English preaching—as preserved by the unauthorized early publications—provided the foundation upon which subsequent articulations were based. Hooker’s publication history is extraordinarily complicated. The combined bibliographic efforts of George Huntston Williams, Norman Pettit, Winfried Herget, and Sargent Bush Jr. in their edition of Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633 is no doubt the most comprehensive, conclusive treatment possible for such a tricky authorial career. Thanks to Bush’s painstaking bibliographic endeavors, for example, we can see the complex genealogy of Hooker’s lifelong preoccupation with the stages of redemption.²⁵ (See figure 4.)

In one way, the complicated Hooker canon is a simple bibliographic conundrum—either intriguing or tedious, depending on one’s patience and point of view. But the vagaries of “establishing the Hooker canon”²⁶ do as much to reveal the minister as self-conscious author as they do to unauthorize that authorial coherence. Clearly legible in Hooker’s nearly obsessive preaching and publication patterns is his “activist aesthetic” and what others (from Anne Hutchinson to current-day scholars) have characterized as disproportionate “preparationism” (emphasis on what one might do while awaiting justification through free grace or, arguably, what one might do to seek justification).²⁷ Tellingly, The Application of Redemption is a two-volume, posthumous tome that, at more than a thousand total pages, is yet incomplete. The first eight books of The Application of Redemption were published in one volume in 1656, and the ninth and tenth books in a subsequent volume that same year. Hooker organizes the redemption process via Ramist branching, with each extant book addressing one specific aspect of the whole system: Redemption implies both the Purchase (Book I) and its Application; Application in general (Book II) and in its parts, Preparation and Implantation; Preparation may be considered in general (Book III) and in its particulars; Preparation is both Free (Book IV) and Fit (Book V); Preparation is required because we are Asleep (Book VII) and Unwilling (Book VII) and accordingly require Holy Violence (Book VIII). The second volume of The Application of Redemption includes Book IX (a brief summary of the case for preparation so far) and the disproportionately lengthy Book X on “Contrition.” Although the concluding books of the sequence are advertised by the publishers, they never come out in print as such. Hooker’s Application is final, we suspect, only because it is posthumous. For the scholar aware of Hooker’s preparationist reputation, his explication of redemption is comically incomplete. In a Puritan version of Zeno’s paradox, the sinner always approaches redemption but, like the book itself, never arrives.

Figure 4. A visual overview of the genealogy of Thomas Hooker’s print sermons on the stages of redemption, culminating in the posthumous publication of The Application of Redemption in 1656 and 1657.

By the same token, the grandiose incompleteness of Hooker’s sermon cycle instructs us that neither is the print version so static as we might imagine nor is the author so much in control. The 1656 articulation merely records one version of an ongoing and communal dialogue about the nature and likelihood of that elusive conclusion, redemption. In his attempts to bring bibliographic certainty to Hooker’s complicated publication history, Herget offers in the same exemplary volume (Writings in England and Holland) parallel passages from the earlier English preaching on redemption (printed from auditor notes) and the later print version of The Application (presumably prepared by Hooker himself). Where the earlier version asks, for example:

Men and Brethren, what shall we doe to be saved? as if they had said, The truth is wee have heard of the fearefull condition of such as have killed the Lord Jesus, and we confesse whatsoever you have said, he was persecuted by us, and blasphemed by us, we are they that cryed, Crucifie him, crucifie him; we would have eaten his flesh, and made dice of his bones; we plotted his death and glorified in it; these are our sins, and haply a thousand more that they revealed[,]

the later version declares:

Men and brethren you have discovered many sins and the dreadful condition of the sinners who are guilty thereof, loe we are the men, thus and thus we have done. By us the Lord was opposed and persued, by us he was derided, rayled upon and blasphemed, by us it was he was murthered, and we are they that have embrewed our hands in his most precious blood: we are they that cryed and desired it, Crucified him, away with him, not him, but Barabbas. Nay they roundly, readily told al[.]²⁸

Herget offers many such parallel passages, characterizing Hooker’s own elaborated rendition as “not necessarily more readable.” While stopping short of expressing a preference for the earlier English preaching, he suggests: “With the greater attention it pays to logic and exactness, with its self-conscious effort to have a more balanced syntax and a greater copiousness of words, [The Application of Redemption] seems more labored where the earlier version is more direct and livelier, more ‘oral.’”²⁹ Although Herget does not elaborate, the characterizations he uses for this judgment conform largely to classical (even contemporaneous) rhetorical criteria; qualities of syntactical balance and copia are those that Hooker—with his Cambridge-educated plain prose style—would have cultivated. In Herget’s estimation, these very qualities impede what we might call the “oral readability” (an oxymoron?) of the print sermon.

Even without a background in seventeenth-century prose preferences, a modern-day reader might concur with what difference Herget finds in these two sermonic explorations between “logic and exactness” and a style that is “more direct and livelier.” Whereas the earlier version based on auditor notes begins the passage literally giving voice to anxiety (“Men and Brethren, what shall we doe to be saved?”) and then elaborating in paraphrase (“wee have heard of the fearefull condition. … we confesse whatsoever you have said”), the latter version offers the precision of simple declarative statements (“Men and brethren you have discovered many sins and the dreadful condition of the sinners who are guilty thereof”), substituting the auditor’s imagined confession with “thus and thus we have done.” The repeated imperative of “Crucifie, Crucifie” is likewise converted into statements of narrative precision, that “we are they that have embrewed our hands in his most precious blood: we are they that cryed and desired it, Crucified him, away with him, not him, but Barabbas.” Most strikingly, though, Hooker’s latter version shows preference for a series of simple but powerful verbs (“opposed,” “persued,” “derided,” “rayled upon,” “blasphemed,” “murthered”) where the earlier (presumed) auditor version mentions only “persecuted” and “blasphemed,” apparently preferring the lurid imagery of Passion (“we would have eaten his flesh, and made dice of his bones; we plotted his death and glorified in it”). Where the latter version summarily refers to the fuller revelation of sins against Christ that the Passion implies (“Nay they roundly, readily told al”), the earlier version seems bursting to reveal the ever propagating list of offenses (“these are our sins, and haply a thousand more that they revealed”). Because the 1656 version is presumed to be the work of Hooker’s own pen, it is taken necessarily to be the more accurate, authentic text. Ironically, that authenticity comes at the cost of traces of the powerful orality for which Hooker (a preacher who, proverbially, could “put a king in his pocket”)³⁰ is best known.

All the essays and scrupulously edited “Documents” in Writings in England and Holland exhibit a similar preoccupation with establishing the authoritative (and authorial) Hooker. Following earlier work on Hooker’s English sermon The Danger of Desertion, for example, George Williams creates a definitive, “composite” text based on two different print versions (one published under a different title) with the aid of a lengthy explanatory introduction, copious notes on variant readings and other textual matters, and parallel passages when the two sources are most divergent.³¹ Williams proves through topical references that the sermon must have been preached by Hooker in April 1631 and argues convincingly that two different sets of auditor notes, both taken at the same delivery, serve as the sources for the two competing print versions. Hooker’s sermon of April 1631, Williams elaborates, “was transcribed and printed twice, Version T and Version F. We shall refer to the imprint of 1641 as the Traditional version (T). There is some evidence that T, transcribed by a somewhat less attentive listener, was a woman. … At least references to wives, women, and children come out more amply in T than in F. The other version of the sermon is entitled ‘The Signes of God’s Forsaking a People.’ It was printed in London as nineteenth among twenty-nine sermons of William Fenner and expressly ascribed to him by the editor, London, 1657. We shall refer to this as version F.”³² For Williams, concerned primarily with establishing an authoritative text of Hooker’s sermon, neither the subjective conjecture regarding the gender of auditor T nor the blatant piracy associated with edition F seems to raise questions about the fundamental nature of the bibliographic endeavor. For our purposes, the “special circumstance” of this bibliographic problem provides a rare opportunity to consider not the competing accuracy of auditor versus minister but the competing experience of auditor versus auditor. Williams cites “lapses in the auditor’s original notation,” the “conscious decision of the auditor or transcriber or printer to let go or summarize,” “divergent deciphering by the printer of manuscript problems,” and “stylistic preferences of the original notator or transcribers” as possible reasons for discrepancies in the record of what two auditors heard at Hooker’s delivery of the sermon in April 1631.³³

These explanations open up a series of provocative questions, the possible answers to which only seem to pose further occasion for contemplation. We may ask, for example, why one version tends toward summary while the other tends toward elaboration, but first we must consider whether the difference reflects the attention span of the two different auditors or simply the preference of the printer or transcriber. If we think that differences of detail and emphasis are attributable to the individual auditor, how far are we willing to conjecture as to the subject position of those auditors and the presumed inclination to amplify Hooker’s “references to wives, women, and children”? If one version uses the term “beloved” while the other prefers “brethren,”³⁴ should we assume that one or both auditors mishear? Might we instead read in the divergent transcriptions the likelihood that variant readings reflect the aural experience more accurately than they aid in the determination of definitive, authoritative texts? T says, “Though my meat seem sour, yet my mind is the will of God”; but F says, “Though my meat seem bitter, yet it is the mind of God it should be so.”³⁵ We must posit the competing subjectivities of any two auditors of any one speech. Yet we might also marvel that the vagaries of unauthorized publication in the seventeenth century can produce even this much consensus regarding what Thomas Hooker might have said.

At some point, the knotty problem of establishing “authentic” texts of ministers such as Thomas Hooker becomes instructive. The ambiguities in establishing authenticity grow directly out of the ambiguities involved with producing these texts in the seventeenth century. If we think of authenticity as rooted in written, authorial originals, the task becomes impossible. Sermon literature in the seventeenth century was primarily oral. Written accounts of that orality, whether in print or in manuscript, serve only as approximations—useful because of their portability but inherently limited in their accuracy (our concern) and efficacy (the Puritan concern). The materiality of these records produces further ambiguities. On the one hand, the creation and transmission of these “materiall expressions” inevitably propagate any number of errant readings. Bibliography seeks to discipline these errancies by identifying (or compositing) authoritative texts. On the other hand, for all their limited literal accuracy, the material expressions of preaching (for example, auditor notes, variant print versions, and manuscript copies) might represent the real experience of hearing, recording, reporting, circulating, and reading rather well, producing an alternative form of accuracy with regard to sermon literature. The rest of this chapter explores this alternative accuracy glimpsed via the material expressions of the manuscript record, particularly in the form of manuscript sermons as written by lay auditors. The varied styles of these manuscript books reveal a mode of textual production and dissemination driven by entire communities of auditors and readers. In such a discursive community, idiosyncratic texts claim authoritative status, speaking simultaneously to the fact of delivery and the experience of hearing and reading. In this context, the print sermon—whether authorized or unauthorized—must be understood as just one iteration within the broader frame of creating and consuming sermon literature.

While Perry Miller depicted New England ministers who “‘sacrificed their health to the production of massive tomes’ and ‘counted that day lost in which they did not spend ten or twelve hours in their studies,’”³⁶ subsequent scholarship has uncovered quite a different reality: “Far from sacrificing their health to write long and scholarly books, a full 66 percent of the practicing clergymen in New England never published anything, an additional 11 percent of them wrote only a single publication, and a mere 5 percent published ten or more tracts during their lives. … Actually, only a few prominent men in each of the five generations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ministers are responsible for the impression that New England pastors were publication-oriented, because an elite group of only twenty-seven pastors (out of a total of 531) wrote 70 percent of all ministerial treatises.”³⁷ With only five out of 122 first-generation ministers in this “elite group,” about three-quarters of first-generation publishing was non-sermonic.³⁸ And because early publication that was sermonic tended to be either sermon cycles (with individual sermons occasionally discernible within the larger structure) or occasional sermons, there are very few examples of “ordinary” preaching in print. While sermon cycles are based on “ordinary” preaching, and occasional sermons have much in common with their ostensibly non-topical counterparts, a complete picture of New England sermon literature cannot be achieved though print sources alone.³⁹ Simply put, for every sermon that circulated via authorized or unauthorized print publication, many more sermons circulated via manuscript both as notes and as more fully realized prose worked up from notes.

David D. Hall has described an entire body of Puritan writing that he categorizes as scribal publication. Adding to scholarship by Harold Love and others, Hall reminds us that in the early modern period, the advent and spread of printing did not stop the production and circulation of manuscripts.⁴⁰

Rather, both modes of “publication” coexisted. Love has shown that manuscript circulation was, in fact, preferred for certain kinds of texts and in certain literary circles. Hall is hesitant to include all categories of manuscript circulation, however, pointing out that even the reading aloud of a letter (a common practice of the period) might be considered a form of publication. Rather, Hall suggests that scribal publication be limited to manuscripts that are produced, usually in multiple copies and often by a single transcriber, for dissemination beyond a single corresponding group. Most of the modes of scribal publication he has identified are non-sermonic.⁴¹

While there is evidence that sermon notes were shared, either by individuals circulating notes or by notebook owners reading aloud,⁴² there are also instances in which the notes seem to be prepared for the express purpose of preservation and circulation on a more limited scale than the one that Hall describes. In 1660, for example, Nan Foster created a small ten-leaf booklet, hand-sewn with large thread stitches along the spine. An additional piece of paper folded around the main pages of the booklet functions as a title page, declaring the work (in what appears to be a different hand from that inside) “A Sermon, Delivered By the Rev^d M^r. John Roger Of Ipswich August y^e 16^th 1660.” Likely based on Foster’s own auditor notes, the manuscript seems to be reworked in the attempt to create a full and fair copy of a sermon that she has heard. Even though there are cross-outs and irregularities of penmanship throughout, the sermon booklet has been prepared for circulation, perhaps specifically as a gift. Close examination of the handmade books can reveal not only how individuals created such idiosyncratic artifacts but also what individuals understood books themselves to be. The vertical orientation of chain lines in the leaves of the main booklet suggest an octavo gathering. Curiously, leaves three through ten are conjugate and nested while leaves one and two appear to be single sheets, suggesting an improvised method of construction. Horizontal chain lines and the position of the watermark on the outer wrapper suggest a separate sheet of paper that was added in a final, separate step to make a cover for the main octavo gathering of the oddly constructed booklet. Nan Foster does not simply copy out a sermon on paper to disseminate it; she conceives her handmade artifact as a book object.

At the end of the book, Foster appends this explanation and apology:

Dear Brother there may Be some & is

^Errors _^ ^& Blunders in the Transcribing of this But

But I trust you will Be able to

Correct’em [characters scribbled out] & free to Excuse ’em for it

has been a tedious piece of work to me

to pick it out &c

Nan ffoster⁴³

This prepared manuscript sermon does not constitute scribal publication in Hall’s sense of the term, but it does indicate more casual, contingent forms of manuscript circulation. That is to say, Foster does not set about to “publish” the sermon with the intent to step in where the use of the press is impractical or otherwise undesirable. Rather, Foster’s main objectives seem to be the preservation of the text in a slightly more worked-up form than notes usually afford and the sharing of that text with another single individual. In offering the personal and spiritual gift of a hard-earned transcription, Foster advertises both the difficulty of the process and the irregularity of the product but offers no apology. These “Blunders” testify to the importance of the project and, in a sense, even add to the value of the gift. “Preservation circulation” and even “gift circulation” might more accurately express the intent of a manuscript creator like Foster.

The roots of a circulating economy of godly preaching did not originate in New England but can be seen in Elizabethan England, where the dearth of university-educated ministers made “godly preaching” a vital, pious commodity.⁴⁴ In

1605, for example, Henry Borlas compiled notes on ten sermons he had heard while a student at Oxford. (See figure 5.) The volume of copied transcriptions is a gift to the young man’s mother—a pious woman who has inculcated a sense of religion in her son but who presumably has no direct access to good university preaching herself. Although Borlas now has superior access to preaching and takes upon himself the authority to disseminate that pious message, his gift to his mother is one of pure reciprocity. The mother’s piety, the dedicatory epistle implies, has initiated the son’s spiritual journey. In turn, he contributes materially to her access to “godly preaching.” Like Foster, young Borlas reveals the affections that drive him forward through the tedium of manuscript creation. He apologizes in his dedication for any “unskillfulnes in handlinge” of the sermon notes, explaining that he had to find time for the project and also that he was simultaneously creating a separate copy for his grandmother.⁴⁵ The need to disseminate godly preaching—a self-conscious preoccupation of laity and clergy alike in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—is manifest in the proliferation of sermon notes, circulating manuscript copies, and print sermons. The desires and rationales for each of these circulating genres implicate themselves into the production of the others. Whether providing direct source material for publication or not, notetaking practices cannot be extricated from the larger context of print sermons in this period.

Although manuscript sermons prepared for circulation and preservation sometimes circulated in a kind of pious gift economy, their interpersonal, spiritual value was tied directly to their practical functionality. The production and circulation of manuscript sermons in Elizabethan England were certainly related to the paucity of well-trained ministers who could produce new scriptural explication on a weekly basis. Though such “godly preaching” became more available in print form throughout the early Stuart period, there were still inconsistencies in access and quality. (Sermons preached at prominent locations, such as Parliament, court, or important London churches, dominate print titles in this early period.)⁴⁶ The amount of print sermon literature could never approach the frequency of actual oral delivery. Furthermore, the incidence of occasional publication outpaced the printing of “ordinary” preaching, especially in the first part of the century.⁴⁷ Manuscripts prepared for preservation (that is, those developed and written up from auditor notes) filled a significant gap for the serious connoisseur of sermon literature. The kinds of inscriptions and shelf markings that creators gave their own handmade volumes suggest that the manuscript texts could be interchangeable with print texts. The importance was the preaching that was represented rather than the contingent form through which that preaching was preserved.

Figure 5. Pages from a book of sermon notes on preaching at Oxford, created by Henry Borlas, ca. 1605. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The material appearance of manuscript sermons can give clues to the specific meanings for individual creators and readers. Foster’s single sermon, apparently reconstructed from auditing notes, presents a utilitarian aspect with its solid prose blocks and little marginal space of visual guides indicating sections or movement through the sermon. While acknowledging the imperfections of her transcription efforts, Foster nevertheless strives to (re-)create a text that reads like natural, delivered speech. Borlas, by contrast, offers his mother (and presumably, his grandmother, in some now-lost manuscript) “Certaine sermon notes breifely colleted out of diverse and sundry sermons.”⁴⁸ Paring ten sermons down to their main component parts, Borlas preserves ample white space on each large (roughly folio proportion) page, indenting and formatting in a manner that engages the eye. Borlas could have used this same space to elaborate each point more fully, but his goal seems, in part, to be elegance of presentation. Both Foster and Borlas make “Blunders” here and there that necessitate cross-outs, but each adheres to a sense of how the finished product should appear—a utilitarian booklet wasting no space, on the one hand, or a carefully crafted presentation copy with white space to spare, on the other. Despite these differences in surface appearance, each manuscript has conveyed its “material” points fully. That is, each conveys the essential elements of the sermon as the transcriber conceives it—as a prose articulation, in the case of Foster, and as an epitome of argument, in the case of Borlas. Furthermore, each transcriber presumes that his or her version of the sermon will be intelligible to the recipient, whether written out more fully in an approximation of the delivery or streamlined into a basic outline of sermon “heads.” The former attempts to re-create the aural experience to some significant extent, while the latter provides ample space for the reader to contemplate the possibilities of the main points of the sermon. The physical gift, in either case, communicates the requisite material expression of the original preaching according to each transcriber.

Especially in New England, the difficulty of acquiring godly books sometimes made it necessary to create manuscript copies of print texts as well as oral texts, so the practice of manuscript circulation of books already published was also relatively common. Edward Taylor, for example, carried over the common practice of Harvard College students making complete copies of textbooks, amassing a significant library of manuscript book copies for his library in remote Westfield. Norman S. Grabo’s description of Taylor borrowing books and “making manuscript copies of them for his own library, stitching, gluing, and binding more than a hundred such volumes with his own hands” highlights the “intellectual isolation” felt by the frontier minister,⁴⁹ but the leading ministers in Boston also acquired manuscript books and manuscript copies to round out their libraries. Indeed, clerical and even lay notebooks frequently include lists of books or authors that the individual wishes to acquire as well as memoranda of books lent and borrowed.

For modern archivists and scholars, manuscript copies create a bibliographical problem: How do we catalog and search for these volumes that, despite their unique character as artifacts, are created to give wider access to specific texts that, if in print form, might be identified in the English Short Title Catalogue or Evans’s American Bibliography? Whereas a seventeenth-century reader would probably have set a manuscript copy of a print book alongside actual print editions, current practice demands that manuscripts be cataloged and housed separately. Usually bound individually by the owner, imprint and manuscript copies could rest side by side with no particular difference in outward appearance on the shelf. The fact that archival libraries now primarily distinguish between imprint and manuscript volumes is perhaps a historical oddity. The curious bibliographical distinction leads to any number of challenges to modern-day rare-book catalogs as individual librarians balance the consistency of definitive imprint identification against the idiosyncrasies of artifactual description. Manuscript cataloging can be even more inconsistent, as each institution develops its own set of terms and practices that often change over time, according to the evolving principles of preservation and description.

A manuscript copy of a published work might amplify the role of the transcription and ownership in how we understand the meaning of print books. An item at the Folger Shakespeare Library, for example, is titled by its creator/owner, Joseph Hunton, “Certaine collections taken out of Dr. Sibbs his sermons preached by him att Grayes Inne in London and elsewhere,” a description consistent with auditor notes and other manuscript genres. The text of the manuscript, however, appears to be an attempted verbatim transcription of Richard Sibbes’s Divine Meditations and Holy Contemplations. What may have been simply a pragmatic solution to acquiring a desired published text to the original creator/owner has become, for the modern book historian, an intriguing conundrum. The owner and probable creator, Joseph Hunton, dates “his Booke” to 1634, predating Sibbes’s Divine Meditations (first known publication, 1638) by at least four years. A print engraving of Sibbes, probably taken from a copy of the collected Works, has been cut out and pasted in to create a frontispiece to the manuscript volume. In addition to altering the title and adding a frontispiece from another Sibbes collection, Hunton makes alterations to what is likely the print original, omitting the preface “To the Christian Reader” and the original numbering of each of Sibbes’s paragraph-long “contemplations.” Meticulous lettering and prominent initial capitals for each paragraph provide further idiosyncratic flourishes to Hunton’s manuscript volume. The creator of the artifact is not the author of the text. Rather, he authors the textual artifact through acts of copying, physical construction, and visual ornamentation and ultimately expands the textual implication of Sibbes’s work.⁵⁰

Those readers attempting to fill out their libraries on particular subjects did not limit acquisitions to print or manuscript copies of print books. Sometimes a book that existed only in manuscript might be the desired object. The creation and ownership of such volumes further complicate our notion of the early modern book. During his trip to London between 1688 and 1691 on colonial business, Increase Mather collected many titles to bring back with him, some of which seem to have been in manuscript form. One notable acquisition from his trip was an eleven-volume sermon series explicating Revelation, beginning with chapter 8. Increase Mather identifies the purchase in the flyleaf of the first volume:

Sermons preached by dr Wilkinson, taken

from him in shorthand by one mr Williams

from whose notes many of mr Burroughs ^s sermons

were published & printed.

I bought y^e 11volums of M.SS. of mr Parkhurst

Bookseller in London: In y^e year 1691.

I gave 10 ^£ for all those ^¹¹ volums.⁵¹

Mather’s detailed notation explaining how he acquired the manuscript book suggests how significant the acquisition of this unpublished anti-Catholic work by the English Puritan Henry Wilkinson (1610–75) was to him. Not only was Wilkinson’s preaching of particular interest to Mather, but the fact that the preaching was preserved by the shorthand recording of “mr Williams” seems also important. A skilled recorder could make money with his skill and, apparently, something of a name for himself. (A search for “shorthand” in the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reveals that many educated young men skilled in shorthand offered their recording services, especially early in their careers. A “teenage” Roger Williams, for example, was employed by Sir Edward Coke to take shorthand notes “of sermons and also of speeches in Star Chamber.”)⁵² This was no anonymous auditor/transcriber but the known source for many printed works by the prominent minister Jeremiah Burroughs (ca. 1601–46), a good friend to first-generation New England migrant ministers. Mather bought this slightly incomplete set from a London bookseller, which further suggests that the volume (which had been preached and, judging from content, also transcribed much earlier in the century) had been owned and possibly circulated within the English market before being purchased and transported to New England in 1691. Mather’s simple note reveals much about the ways in which manuscript sermons might be produced and circulated both in England and New England in the seventeenth century. The practice was not merely a necessary accommodation for Harvard students and frontier ministers; rather, it seems to have been a regular means of publishing spiritual and polemical works outside of the press.

Like transcriptions of lecture notes, manuscript copies of textbooks, and other hand-copied genres, manuscript sermons were often created to resemble printed books. In the current-day archive, the records for manuscript sermons are usually indistinguishable from those of other artifacts (such as auditor or clerical notes). Upon examination, however, a manuscript sermon created for preservation (and possible circulation) reveals common features, such as some kind of title page for the whole volume (rather than headings for each entry), consistent pagination, relatively legible handwriting, and the word “finis” at the end of the transcription (usually with a flourish and often with the date of completion and the creator’s name, providing a kind of manuscript colophon). Additional features include more idiosyncratic markers, such as verse or other personal additions framing the main text. One anonymous recorder of thirteen sermons preached in England by Robert Bragg in 1652 includes pious poetry throughout the volume, including this didactic epilogue to the transcription:

Finis.

Who e’re Thou art, that this dost read;

Make hast to Christ with all good speed;

Least thy poor soul hee one day find

^wandring [Among the goates] wandring behind

Let not the world now keep [page torn]

For what is all, if Christ [page torn]

If him thou hast, thou need’st [page torn]

Love him, serve him, & him [page torn]⁵³

Examples of idiosyncratic practices of bookmaking multiply, the longer one looks in the archive. Taken together, these curiosities reveal a range of practices, preferences, and assumptions on the part of early modern owners, readers, and creators regarding the nature of books.

One of the most instructive of these “bookish” features found in sermon manuscripts for preservation is the catchword: a single word appearing at the bottom right-hand corner of a page that corresponds to the first word of the following page. Explanations for catchwords proliferate, but it is generally thought that they are used in early print books to aid in the folding and assembly of sheets into a bound volume (although there is some disagreement over whether this is actually necessary to the bookmaking process). Whatever the origins of the practice, the presence of catchwords on the printed page in early modern England seems to have led to other conventions in reading and writing. Some conjecture, for example, that the catchword became an aid to the reader, especially to the reader who might be reading aloud to a small group. Letter writers sometimes used catchwords to help keep the ordering of pages clear. The use of catchwords in manuscript sermons (and other kinds of bound manuscript volumes) may or may not be necessary for assembling (indeed, some volumes appear to be bound before writing), but the very appearance of the catchword makes the created artifact more book-like. Moreover, whether the individual creator is aware of the fact or not, the use of catchwords in printing was actually adopted from the medieval practice of using catchwords in the creation of manuscript books before the advent of print. Even the features that make the manuscript appear more book-like have a deeper significance for the long-standing permeability between categories of print and manuscript.

Another volume apparently owned by Increase Mather, consisting of four works by Hugh Broughton brought together in one binding, demonstrates almost every possible way that print and manuscript works could overlap. The composite volume—quite likely assembled in England and purchased later by Mather—contains four titles by Broughton: a manuscript copy of Observations Upon the First Ten Fathers; a print copy of A Concent of Scripture, with tinted title page, several missing pages, heavy annotations throughout, multiple pages of manuscript notes interleaved in two locations, and variant foldout inserts; an unmarked print copy of Textes of Scripture, Chayning the Holy Chronicle, missing only the address “To the Christian Reader”; and a manuscript copy of “A Sermon Preached at Otelande Before the Most Noble Henry Prince of Wales,” incomplete and, in several places, altered from the only print edition.⁵⁴ If, as seems most likely, Increase Mather bought the volume already compiled, edited, and annotated, he bought a work of the (possibly anonymous) creator as much as the words of Hugh Broughton.⁵⁵ The collection of works by Broughton makes a coherent unit exploring eschatological scholarship, but the arrangement and alterations by the compiler provide both commentary on that scholarship and a distinctive sense of the collator as creator. The compiler is not precisely an author but certainly is a material and textual creator of the idiosyncrasy of the hybrid volume.

The permeable, overlapping categories of print, manuscript, and oral publication are a relatively new realization in contemporary scholarship, providing important adjustments to older paradigms that distinguish strictly between orality and literacy, for example, and manuscript and print with the advent of the printing press. Early modern readers and writers, though they might find such fluidity natural, nevertheless recognized the implications as different modes of material circulation reciprocally affected textuality. Puritan ministers—along with their readers and auditors—contemplated the particular dissemination of the divine Word through the material vagaries of human language, oral and written. A final return to the opening of John Davenport’s 1661 London printing of The Saints Anchor-Hold (discussed in the Preface to this volume) illuminates the complex, overlapping modes of sermon circulation in a transatlantic context. The sermon, originally preached for the gathered saints of New Haven, forges connections between the godly communities on two sides of the ocean. Davenport’s doctrine, based on Lam. 3:24—“The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in him”—offers assurance simultaneously to the local auditor and to the remote reader: God will support His true believers with faith and hope. The Lamentations verse in Davenport’s sermon becomes a mul-tivalent message of perseverance, equally applicable to the inhabitants of old or New England who find themselves anxious about the Restoration of Charles II or who simply seek personal spiritual assurance.

Citing Broughton’s suggestion that Lamentations is an “Abridgement” of Jeremiah’s sermons, Davenport continues to describe “that Book which God commanded Ieremy to write, and to cause Baruch to read it publikley, upon the day of a Fast, kept in the ninth moneth of the fifth year of Iehoikim, which afterward Iehudi read unto the King, sitting by a fire, in his winter house, who was so far from repenting, that, when he had read three or four leaves of it, he cut it with a penknife, and cast it into the fire, till all was consumed, and rejected the intercession of some of his Princes, that he would not burn it, and he commanded to lay hold upon Ieremy and Baruch; But God hid them. Whereupon the Lord commanded Ieremy to write the Book again, with Additions.”⁵⁶ As

discussed previously, this passage asserts the continuance of Davenport’s own New England sermon within a tradition of prophecy that is variously spoken, written, and rewritten across time and space. Davenport’s opening of the verse promises that the verbal means of hope (scripture, preaching) will survive current historical uncertainty. The word of God in Davenport’s description is indestructible. The king wields his “penknife” at cross-purposes to the tool’s primary function, destroying the manuscript rather than enabling the pen by keeping it sharp. Ironically, then, the king’s act finally enables Baruch’s pen, even writing the unrepentant king into the prophecy that he has sought to silence.

The word of God in Davenport’s analysis always touches upon the contingent circumstances of history, and the transatlantic dissemination of the sermon via the technology of the printing press allows him to align Restoration politics with biblical precedence, blending the language of scripture, the scholarship of Broughton, and the explication in New Haven. The respective roles of prophet and scribe, scholar and minister, auditor and reader cannot be easily disimbricated. The words of Lamentations, repeated and amplified first by Baruch and then by Davenport, circulate in written form to be read according to the interpretive agency of Jehudi’s court and later by the transatlantic seventeenth-century community. Davenport’s framing of the perseverance of the prophecy seems to anticipate the circuitous nature of sermon creation in Puritan New England, in which manuscript, print, and oral versions of preaching circulate simultaneously.

At the heart of this material phenomenon lies a second, more theoretical, consideration: the relationship between divine and human language. The Puritan sermon cannot be understood solely via its occasional iterations in print or as a static manifesto of theological viewpoints by a few elite ministers. Rather, the sermon permeates across print, oral, and manuscript forms, everywhere demonstrating its creation within complex interpretive communities. There is no direct line from the orality of the delivered sermon to an authoritative print edition. The route is circuitous and apt to produce multiple versions of texts. For every sermon that circulates via authorized or unauthorized print publication, many more sermons circulate via manuscript both as notes and as prose worked up from notes. Texts sometimes continue to evolve in manuscript even after they appear in print (through competing printings, manuscript transcriptions, and even such mundane practices as binding and annotation by book owners). Sermon notes and manuscripts circulate not only as reproduced and reproducible texts but as unique material texts created by individuals. The larger pattern that reveals itself is not, however, the indeterminate agency of book production, whether print or manuscript. The strong presence of the maker in the idiosyncrasies of individual book artifacts (of often anonymous origins) considered in relation to mass-produced print books (where a primary author can be identified, along with printers, booksellers, and other agents of publication) shed light on a surprising textual flexibility in sermon practice. The de-centering of the clerical author does not indicate indeterminacy of book production so much as it reveals iterative textual production throughout a community, between regions, and across time.