Jeremiah's Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England 9780812208726

Table of contents :
Contents
Note on Transcription
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Unauthorizing the Sermon
Chapter 2. Reading the Notetakers
Chapter 3. Publishing Aurality
Chapter 4. Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling
Chapter 5. Narrating the Soul
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Jeremiah’s Scribes

M at e r i a l T e x ts

Series Editors Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Jeremiah’s Scribes

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Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England

Meredith Marie Neuman

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Neuman, Meredith Marie   Jeremiah’s scribes : creating sermon literature in Puritan New England / Meredith Marie Neuman. — 1st ed.    p. cm. — (Material texts)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8122-4505-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. Sermons, American—New England—History and criticism. 2. Transmission of texts—New England—History—17th century. 3. Puritans— New England—Religious life.  I. Title. II. Series: Material texts. PS153.P87N48 2013 252’.0590974—dc23 2013012713

Contents

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Note on Transcription vii Preface ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1

Unauthorizing the Sermon 35 Chapter 2

Reading the Notetakers 59 Chapter 3

Publishing Aurality 101 Chapter 4

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling 140

vi   Contents Chapter 5

Narrating the Soul 173 Notes 205 Bibliography 239 Index 253 Acknowledgments 263

Note on Transcription

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hroughout my transcription of manuscript sources, I have erred on the side of minimal textual intervention, correction, and explanation. The visual experience of the manuscript page affects the interpretation of text. Short of providing photographic surrogates for every passage (which still might not be entirely helpful to anyone unfamiliar with seventeenth-century handwriting), something like a “pseudo-facsimile” record of the manuscript page has seemed most prudent. I have retained abbreviation and superscription throughout. The abbreviation “ye” is “the”; “yt,” “yn,” and “ym” are usually “that,” “then,” and “them,” respectively (although there is always the possibility for irregular abbreviation and superscription in auditor notes). Common “w” contractions include “wn” for “when” and “wt” for “with” or “what.” Abbreviations are often specific to a given notetaker and can be figured out through frequency and context (“Xt” for “Christ” or “L.” for “Lord,” for example). Similarly, I have refrained from correcting or modernizing spellings. Beyond illustrating the typical irregularity of early modern orthography, idiosyncrasies of notetaker, place, and occasion are useful in understanding the range of note­ taking practices. Even the most tortured phonetic renditions can usually be sounded out, but occasionally I have supplied my own marginal gloss in square brackets to the right of lines wherein particularly puzzling forms of words appear. Notetakers often developed their own set of symbols (sometimes drawn from shorthand, sometimes drawn from other sources or simply made up) to stand in for commonly recorded words. Whenever possible, I note and translate the symbol in square brackets (for example, [symbol: God]). Where I have been

viii   Note on Transcription unable to determine the meaning of a particular symbol, I have simply indicated [symbol]. Throughout my transcriptions of the sermon notes, I have preserved line endings and noted the ends of pages. (For in-line citation, I have adopted the conventions of quoting poetry, with a single slash to indicate line break.) Especially when recording in the meetinghouse, the notetaker’s recording is often constrained by the real space and configuration of the page. Accordingly, I have tried to describe the material page as a visual as well as textual field. In places, I have been unable to make out certain words and phrases. While eyes better trained than mine may yet be able to decipher where I have failed, it seems that messiness and indeterminacy might be considered textual features of notetaking, as anyone knows who has later found her own writing illegible, due to haste, carelessness, distraction, excitement, sleepiness, or other factors. There are many more details on the manuscript page than simple transcription can relate. Beyond such variables as character position on the line, ink variation, and stray marks, handwriting style itself can convey much. While I can include interlinear rules and notations such as [small cross-out] to indicate specific marks, other features are less easily conveyed in typographic transcription. Letters are loosely or tightly formed, the size of characters varies, spacing is generous or closed up, letters may be formed differently from moment to moment, and the size and orientation of the paper can affect what and how the notetaker records. To record all these details would obstruct the main line of argumentation, however, and quickly would become an exercise in diminishing returns. Nevertheless, without wishing to fetishize the manuscript page, I hope to emphasize all the factors that can bear upon interpretation of text. Illustrations in this volume will aid the curious reader in imagining the visual field of the notebook. In order to provide further examples, I am developing an online resource for images and transcriptions of sermon notebooks. The ultimate solution for the vagaries of transcribing the manuscript page rests in creating more access to surrogate images so that the individual reader can consider the interplay of visual and textual fields independently.

Preface

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n the 1661 London printing of The Saints Anchor-Hold (a sermon originally preached in New Haven, Connecticut), the minister John Davenport offered a simple message of perseverance in difficult times to his immediate congregation and to an imagined transatlantic readership. Based on Lam. 3:24 (given in the the print sermon as “The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in him”), the sermon begins with a contextualization of the entire Book of Lamentations: 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[.]

The history of the prophetic book includes too many agents and too many actions working at once, creating a permeable sense of authorship. Jeremiah’s words, given by God, pierce the hearts of the king’s court, even as they fail to penetrate the king’s conscience. Jeremiah is said “to write” these words, and yet it is Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah, who not only puts pen to scroll but who reads aloud the written words. The words of the book are both God’s and Jeremiah’s,

x   Preface and the respective roles of the prophet and his scribe, Baruch, blur together in this account of Lamentations. The earthly king might destroy the material book, but the combined endeavor of prophet and scribe ensures continuance of the Word in the world. The book is written again, “with Additions,” a textual rebuke to the king whose attempt to censor only makes the message more emphatic. Davenport’s own sermon explication constitutes further “Additions” to the textual presence of the original prophecy, especially as auditors and readers of his explication apply the prophetic message to their own lived experience. This book considers the creation of sermon literature as a discursive process that involves the entire community in the twined endeavors of scriptural explication and the material dissemination of that exegesis. Challenges to static notions of authorship, authority, and authenticity open up room for a reexamination of texts through material variation. Acts of hearing, notetaking, and applying the sermon implicate the auditor in the work of the pulpit. Like the king and his court, lay auditors shape the meaning of prophecy through their responses. Like Baruch, they become materially involved with the recording and dissemination of prophecy. Sermons depend not only on the divine efficacy of scripture, nor the conscientious efforts of the minister, nor the soul searching of the auditor; rather, the production of sermon literature—the composition of texts, the application of meaning, the material and textual preservation of words—becomes the shared goal of an entire community of Jeremiah’s scribes.

Jeremiah’s Scribes

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Introduction

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he distinguished scholar was absolutely correct when he quipped, “Indeed, ours has been a notably sermon-ridden literature from the beginning.”1 The Puritan sermon has long been the elephant in the room for many teachers and scholars of early American literature. We know that we have to deal with it, but we are often not sure how to do so. Historical- and cultural-studies approaches often explicate—and accordingly reaffirm—the dominance of sermon culture as a manifestation of theological, intellectual, or sociological idiosyncrasies. Literary approaches, by contrast, have particular difficulty gaining traction on the slippery slopes of shifting aesthetic judgment (we do not generally read like seventeenth-century readers) and seemingly insurmountable differences in faith perception (we do not generally believe like seventeenth-century Calvinists). Accordingly, when trying to account for the phenomenal popularity of sermons in seventeenth-century New England, literary scholars favor predominantly historical- and culturalstudies approaches or, alternatively, deflect focus toward more familiar genres, such as poetry and autobiographical writing. Early American literature may be “sermon-ridden,” but those sermons often remain at the margins of the literary canon. In retrospect, we should recognize that Puritan sermon literature has always been complicated by the fraught connotations of its peculiar rationale. Puritan ministers themselves struggled with the implications of sermon composition, eschewing rhetorical excesses and questioning the very efficacy of human language. The laity, in turn, articulated their own pious doubts in agonized dialogic responses to the experience of the meetinghouse. The question, finally, cannot simply be how modern readers can come to terms with a sermon-ridden literary past. We must instead begin by asking

2   Introduction how a modern critic might even phrase the question to which the conscientious Puritan writer, reader, or auditor would not object. Illustrations of sermon popularity rely upon anecdote. Cotton Mather reports in the Magnalia Christi Americana (“the great works of Christ in America”), for example, that upon John Norton’s taking up the Boston pulpit, a certain “godly man” of Norton’s former congregation in Ipswich would travel on foot to hear the weekly lecture.2 John Cotton’s famously “untrimmed sermons” must have achieved the rhetorical goals of plain style wonderfully, for John Wilson reports that he “preaches with such authority, demonstration, and life, that methinks, when he preaches out of any prophet or apostle, I hear not him; I hear that very prophet and apostle; yea, I hear the Lord Jesus Christ himself speaking in my heart.”3 John Wilson spoke as an apostle, according to Thomas Shepard, and his ex tempore skills were impressive enough that one of his few New England-based publications was based on a lecture that he had had only a day to prepare, owing to the absence of the expected speaker.4 Given the vicissitudes of such exemplary anecdotes, perhaps especially those preserved by the filiopious Mather, it is no wonder that explanations of sermon culture give way to a pathologizing instinct. That is to say, the question of what drove popular demand for preaching quickly becomes: What was wrong with people that they wanted to hear so many sermons? Part of the problem is that the Puritan sermon is a literature of disproportion. In practice, the proverbial Protestant principles of sola fide (by faith alone) and sola scriptura (by scripture alone) seem to be taken to curious extremes. The creators and consumers of Puritan sermon literature are a people who distinguished themselves by saying that faith alone is enough for salvation. So why, we might rightly ask, did they spend so much time in the pulpit and pew? (Harry S. Stout estimates that the average person would have spent 15,000 hours in his or her lifetime listening to sermons.)5 Their sermon compositions are referred to as “plain style.” So why would they spend months explicating a single verse of scripture? (Thomas Shepard spent four years explicating the Parable of the Ten Virgins to his congregation, and the print edition of that sermon cycle runs to more than 600 pages.)6 They also thought of the Bible as a perfect book—in a sense, the only book that really counted. So why did they make so many more books, written in their own imperfect human language? (Print sermons were often based on notes taken by individual auditors who transcribed their own sense of the minister’s expository pulpit explication.) Are such demonstrations of pious copia simply enactments of good piety, some

Introduction   3 inevitable excess in pursuit of elusive spiritual closure? Or might the very disproportions and excesses that so perplex the modern reader supply a clue to the sermon’s popular appeal? In the American tradition, the great pioneer of Puritan studies, Perry Miller, continues to delimit the scope of scholarship. His argument for the sermon was built upon an impressive foundation of intellectual history: an account of rhetoric and logic training in the English university, the fine points behind irresolvable theological controversies, and, throughout, a sense that the Puritan—that inimitable dinosaur of inflexible spirituality—was nevertheless the Ur-American. Subsequent generations have enacted their inevitable adjustments to Miller, but Miller’s explanation of the working of the “New England Mind” has always been plausible enough to remain foundational. The notion of a monolithic New England Mind has been shattered, thankfully, and replaced with a more accurate understanding of many New England Souls, not all white, not all male, not all elite, and not all Puritan. But this newer, savvier scholarship continues to explain away Puritanism as theological, sociological, and cultural idiosyncrasy. From Miller on down, Puritanism has often appeared as a puzzling historical chapter that, for better and worse, gives clues to future manifestations of American character and foible. By contrast, much scholarship on English Puritanism has traditionally focused on literary aspects of the phenomenon, although arguably not on the literariness of the sermon per se. Rather, as Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough point out in their introduction to The English Sermon Revised, studies of English Puritanism throughout the twentieth century served primarily to contextualize John Milton as the Poetic Puritan, on the one hand, and John Donne as the Metaphysical Poet Preacher (in opposition to plain style), on the other. The result has disproportionately featured, in their words, “the history of English prose style, antiquarian literary history, and a preoccupation with ‘the Metaphysical.’”7 For the past few decades, English scholarship has usefully blurred old theological and stylistic lines of distinction between the Anglican and the Puritan, and every new book, it seems, must begin by worrying the question, What is a Puritan? That question is perhaps easier to answer in New England, where one could argue that a Puritan is anyone who felt strongly enough about the current situation to get on a boat.8 Nevertheless, American scholarship could benefit from more regard to the ambiguities of doctrine and style. On either side of the Atlantic, however, a plausible claim to “the Literary” continues to elude the study of the Puritan sermon. We talk about experience,

4   Introduction about mourning, about social control and transgression, about piety and resistance. We speak about the many phenomena of Puritanism. Conveniently, then, we can remind ourselves that literature might consist of not only a poem or a play but a controversial pamphlet or a catechism or a report on missionary activity, as well. We can turn almost anything—from a visual image, to a historical event, to a devotional practice—into a text to read. Yet none of these necessary and illuminating expansions of Puritan literature has addressed recalcitrant resistance to that more traditional literary genre of the sermon for modern readers. Most of us still hate to read sermons—and Puritan sermons in particular. While we can argue that sermons are literature, we do not always feel the necessary truth of those arguments. We make a mistake when we concede the premise that Puritan writers are rote rhetoricians and dogmatists who are constantly responding to circumstances: to the curious exigencies of Reformation politics and culture, to the vicissitudes of the early Stuart regime, to exile, to migration, to heretical threats from within a community of Visible Saints.9 This premise characterizes Puritans as a reactive, proscriptive sort of people, led by an unwieldy theology and not enough latitude for creative innovation. They do not appear to us as constructive theorists of their own literary output; they are too busy justifying their untenable religious positions. And, in actuality, guidelines for sermon composition (such as William Perkins’s Arte of Prophecying and Richard Bernard’s The Faithfull Shepheard) do not offer particularly sophisticated theories of composition or language.10 On their surface, directions for plain-style preaching—enticingly called “prophesying”—come off rather like the instructions on a pastoral shampoo bottle: “Open scripture, present doctrine, apply doctrine, repeat. . . .” In the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practice, “prophesying” meant something much closer to basic textual explication (close reading scripture, that is) rather than inspired speech. Certainly, a good minister (or a “godly minister,” as he might be called) was understood to be specially enabled by God to speak, but he was also dependent upon years of training in the university disciplines of logic and rhetoric.11 Ironically, methodical plain-style preaching (straightforward scriptural explication that moves directly toward practical application and avoids rhetorical flourish for its own sake) is associated with those very theologians who reject other potentially rote practices (such as set prayer and prewritten homilies) as idolatry.12 Indeed, the reified, seemingly uninspired formula of prophesying or “opening scripture” in the plain style appears to be at odds with the radical potential inherent in the Reform commitment to the

Introduction   5 vernacular and the direct working of faith in the process of salvation. To the extent that Puritans are perceived as having literary theory, that theory is usually characterized as essentially antiliterary and hostile to familiar genres such as poetry and drama. Not only do Puritans close down all the theaters in England first chance they get, but they reject all the artful preaching of, say, John Donne or Lancelot Andrewes. To adapt H. L. Mencken’s dismissive formulation, the Puritan writer becomes someone who lives with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is spinning an extended metaphor with eloquence and wit. When Puritans write poetry, doctrine often seems to take precedence over eloquence, and so the Bay Psalm Book limps its way awkwardly across the page, and Michael Wigglesworth’s notorious Day of Doom parades its vision of final judgment in doggerel fourteeners. In such light, the famous claim from the preface to the Bay Psalm Book, reminding the reader that “God’s altar needs not our polishing,” seems more like an excuse than a poetic principle.13 In such light, the saving, textual vitality of the sermon seems lost forever beneath the implausible hyperbole of Puritan anecdote. Perhaps we must begin by conceding that the sermon is the controlling logic of all Puritan literature. Central to the lived experience of piety, sermon culture dictates not only habits of thought but habits of interpretation and expression as well. Illustrated perhaps most famously by John Winthrop’s Modell of Christian Charitie, this sermonic habit of thought manifests itself in civic discourse. Winthrop’s little speech aboard the Arabella and his closing explication of Matt. 4:15 (“a City upon a Hill”) inaugurate centuries of debate over the relationship between church and state as well as constantly evolving tropes of exceptionalism. Non-sermonic prose and poetry often appear distinctly inflected with sermonic tone, structure, and technique, adding to the distinct generic fluidity that characterizes much canonical Puritan writing. Notably, Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative demonstrates multiple literary genres simultaneously. The preface offered “Per Amicam” frames Rowlandson’s personal account of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God in terms of the covenantal relationship of the entire community with God. A minister’s wife and a member of a New England gathered church, Rowlandson did not need Increase Mather’s clerical instigation to appropriate features of the sermon for the narration of her experience. For Rowlandson—as for any New England Puritan attendant upon the sermon as the “ordinary means” to salvation—it would have been difficult not to have explicated biographical insight alongside scriptural revelation or to have sought resolution of unmanageable trauma without doctrine. Rowlandson

6   Introduction explicates Job, Daniel, and David into contiguous identity with her own experiential exposition of self. She systematizes what is perhaps the most irreconcilable aspect of her ordeal—her anger at the English army’s ineffectual attempts at rescue—through the familiar rhetorical technology of numbering “a few remarkable passages of Providence; which I took special notice of in my afflicted time.”14 Scripture and doctrine are not imposed upon Rowlandson’s experience from the outside; rather, they arise naturally in the course of exegetical habit. We might also recognize in Puritan poetry generally the sermonic logic and exegetical habits that help negotiate tensions endemic to a life of visible sanctity: between doctrinal resolution and contingent experience (as when Anne Bradstreet struggles to conform her response to the burning of her house according to the principles of “weaned affections”); between divine articulation and limping human language (as discovered in the rather wooden translations of the Bay Psalm Book); between the immediacy of grace and the decaying half-life of its recollection (as when Edward Taylor attempts through writing to recover past moments of spiritual certainty). Human poetic endeavor continually requires justification, especially in a Bible commonwealth. Accordingly, Taylor’s God’s Determinations Touching His Elect functions as casuistry (a work of practical divinity), and Michael Wigglesworth’s notorious Day of Doom and God’s Controversy with New-England both make the familiar arguments associated with the jeremiad. Poetic eulogies—typically offered by male elites for other male elites—fulfill a public, civic function, but the more personal, confessional poems of Bradstreet and Taylor demonstrate the contemplative mode and figurative sensibility that similarly inform clerical expression from Thomas Hooker’s vivid sermon imagery to Thomas Shepard’s agonized autobiographical scrutiny. The domestic poems that make up much of Bradstreet’s posthumously published works and Taylor’s miscellaneous verses—largely favored in undergraduate classrooms for their “relatability”—are not personal indulgences so much as they are consistent with the means of spiritual examination as modeled in sermons.15 Most explicitly, Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations deliberately blurs generic boundaries between poem and sermon. Each of these poems is an explication of a verse also used for a communion (Lord’s Supper) sermon. On the surface, Taylor’s Meditations appears to be anything but plain style; his extensive, decorum-breaching conceits have caused critics to worry the question whether he is simply a “burlap version of Herbert.” His openings of scripture verses, however, are examples of poetic explication that differ from some Puritan

Introduction   7 sermonic examples perhaps only by style and intended audience. Each poem proposes a doctrinal theory, which Taylor in turn attempts to answer with an intensely personal, figuratively extreme, and often deliberately absurd application. Furthermore, his continued reworking of single verses over the course of several poems recalls the common pulpit practice of sermon continua (the opening of a single verse or passage of scripture over the course of many weeks) and suggests similarities between the explication of scripture via shifting doctrinal and poetic vantage points. In many ways, Taylor’s poetry is somewhat sui generis, but the blurring of genres also reveals the overlap of pastoral and creative methodologies, illuminating not only this one minister’s poetic practices but a broader fluidity in Puritan genres.16 Sermonic habits of interpretation and expression lend coherence to both idiosyncratic and highly conventional Puritan literary production across genres. An understanding of the theory and practice of the sermon is necessary for a complete understanding of non-sermonic Puritan literature, and an understanding of the sermon requires an understanding not only of published works but also of such phenomena as the aural experience of the meetinghouse, the variegated modes of preservation and circulation of texts, and the lived application of doctrine over time. Sermon literature and the sermon culture where it originates should be distinguished. I construe the scope of sermon literature broadly, including not only the records of delivered sermons but closely related genres such as the conversion narrative. These ancillary genres provide insights into the experience of sermon culture, but, more important, they conform to the same ideas of language as do sermons. They are sermon-ridden not because theories for composing and receiving preaching intrude from the outside but because the logic and conventions that inform sermons also inform these other genres. Those genres we now consider to be more belletristic (for example, poetry and autobiography) often function, in the parlance of the seventeenth century, as “handmaidens” to the dominant genre of the sermon. Sermon culture, by contrast, is an entire set of practices that produce not only texts (sermons proper as well as non-sermonic writing, especially history, biography, and anecdote) but also material artifacts (printed sermons, notes, copies, and transcriptions). The production of sermon literature by both clergy and laity is material as much as it is textual.17 The aim of this book is to explore the experience of sermon culture in order to understand the phenomenon of sermon literature more clearly. By detecting traces of the aural experience of the meetinghouse, it is possible to delineate

8   Introduction much of the phenomenal event of the sermon and its subsequent dissemination in the lives and texts of the community. The relationship between auditor and sermon was far from passive. The experiential premises of the New England Way required scrupulous, active engagement with the explication and application of scripture. The lived religion of Puritan New England was anchored in a deeply textual sense of spirituality that crossed many generic boundaries and that left many material traces in print and manuscript. The phenomenal event of the sermon had a long and discursive afterlife as the entire community of saints spoke, wrote, listened, and contemplated their way toward spiritual apprehension and (they hoped) faith itself.

The greatest obstacle in understanding seventeenth-century New England sermon literature and culture is simply that we do not have easy access to the oral tradition that was its heart. Stout has gone far in delineating the contours of an oral preaching culture with his study The New England Soul. He transcends the obvious limitations of working with clerical and lay notes with the sheer volume of extant manuscripts that he has analyzed. Stout’s disciplinary foci are history, religious history, and American studies, however, leaving ample room for much needed literary analysis. Recent work by Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing, has provided an indispensable background not only of the history of English Reformation preaching but also of its roots in theological and interpretive arguments.18 Still, our sense of oral sermon culture remains rooted in anecdote and clerical accounts and records of their work. Manuscript sermon notebooks kept by lay auditors, by contrast, invite a synthesis of literary and cultural analysis that coincides with the material culture implications of the physical texts. These manuscript notebooks open up ways of understanding the complex relationship between the oral performances (no longer available to us) and published works (bearing some residue of the oral text in its imperfect reworking of the original).19 In his introduction to The New England Soul, Stout lays out his preference for clerical notes: “Not everyone in New England read sermons, certainly not routinely, but nearly everyone heard them, week in, week out. The most accurate guide we therefore have to what people actually heard are the handwritten sermon notes that ministers carried with them into the pulpit.”20 Lay auditor notes—precisely because they are less consistent and less “accurate”—render a clearer sense of what is necessarily subjective in acts of hearing. This indi-

Introduction   9 vidualized hearing experience might best be called “aurality” rather than “orality.” Furthermore, the material record of notetaking, manuscript circulation, and publication suggests that sermon literature is created not only by individuals but, significantly, by entire communities. The application of sermon hermeneutic strategies and composition methods to lived experience (and vice versa) further illustrates Puritan New England as a site of shared interpretive endeavors and common practice. While the material-textual record clearly demonstrates practice—how sermon literature is received, recorded, disseminated, and applied—the theoretical premises beneath these practices remain difficult to explain satisfactorily. Understanding how the sermon was received, disseminated, and applied may simply be easier to explain than why sermons were preached in the first place. If redemption comes only through faith (sola fide) and through scripture (sola scriptura), then lengthy, repetitive, human explication might be redundant at best. If human reason is—along with the soul itself—fallen, then human language might produce only impaired explications of the divine Word. And so the knotty questions that lurk uncomfortably beneath every revelation of practice remain: What essentially is a sermon, and what kind of efficacy can its necessarily impaired, contingent language have in contrast to the coherent perfection of scripture? The material conditions for sermon literature—from frequency and duration of preaching, to delivery conventions, to auditor practices, to the many variations of textual production by laity and clergy alike—are inextricably linked to textual meaning. Thanks in part to the obsessive self-scrutiny characteristic of Puritan piety, sermon literature leaves varied and instructive material traces, especially in the form of auditor notes and other fugitive, idiosyncratic textual records. Ultimately, the curious materiality of sermon literature reveals the theoretical and linguistic questions at stake. Put another way, the materiality of sermon literature returns us to central questions, not only about the pathology of the sermon (what made this tedious genre so popular?) but also to a set of questions to which the conscientious Puritan writer (or reader, or auditor) would not object. What did Puritans think language was? Specifically, what was the perceived relationship between human and divine language, and what did Puritans think they were doing when they composed a sermon (or heard, or read, or recorded one)? The questions are theoretical and linguistic, but the answers are drawn largely from the lived experience and material practices of sermon culture. Surely, the human endeavor of the minister alone does not con-

10   Introduction stitute the soul-saving efficacy of the sermon. Theological principles, rhetorical dictates, stylistic practices, communal engagement, and the material circulation of preaching combine to determine meaning and relevance. The controlling logic of the sermon—along with its theological and linguistic premises—is created discursively across gathered communities and disseminated through the hybridity of print, oral, and manuscript practices. In a common trope for pulpit eloquence, the minister is said to be merely a vessel. Two anecdotes about Thomas Hooker by Cotton Mather offer contrasting fantasies of the relationship between the divine Word and that human vessel. The first is typical of claims for the power of godly pulpit oratory generally: A profane person, designing therein only an ungodly diversion and merriment, said unto his companions, “Come, let us go hear what that bawling Hooker will say to us;” and thereupon, with an intention to make sport, unto Chelmsford lecture they came. The man had not been long in the church, before the quick and powerful word of God, in the mouth of his faithful Hooker, pierced the soul of him; he came out with an awakened and a distressed soul, and by the further blessing of God upon Mr. Hooker’s ministry, he arrived unto a true conversion; for which cause he would not afterwards leave that blessed ministry, but went a thousand leagues to attend it and enjoy it.21

Variations on mundane Pauline conversions abound: Paul’s instantaneous, unambiguous conversion as narrated in Acts provides a model for the sudden and irresistible striking down of the sinful conscience, particularly when the impious, mischievous, or resistant soul is converted in the immediacy of the preached word. In one proverbial feature of the above anecdote, conversion creates further desire for good preaching as the newly converted soul is drawn to the minister, the style, and the doctrine that it once avoided and disdained. Such desire for preaching purportedly fueled not only much migration within England but increasingly to New England as well, especially as Archbishop Laud continued to silence nonconformist ministers. The anecdote also reveals a delicate balance that Mather must strike in his praise: Hooker’s preaching pierces the profane man’s soul, but more precisely, “the quick and powerful word of God, in the mouth of his faithful Hooker” does the real work of conversion. The profane man could be saved sola scriptura and sola fide, but he will likely not

Introduction   11 turn to the Bible, or consider it properly, or apply it correctly to his own precarious case, without provocation. Technically speaking, the hard-line Calvinist position insisted that God’s grace alone could effectually save an individual. Nevertheless, it was also understood that individuals must seek “ordinary means” to salvation. Though not effectual in an absolute sense, such practices were considered necessary in the pursuit of faith.22 The ordinary means to redemption (regular attendance upon the preached word and the proper application of scripture explication) suggest an enabled partnership between the human activity of prophesying and the effectual truth of scripture. On the one hand, Protestantism fundamentally privileged the ordinary workings of salvation in the post-apostolic period, emphasizing preaching over the sacramental role of the minister, and English Puritan thought came to emphasize preached explication of scripture (sometimes, as critics such as Richard Hooker suggested, even over reading alone).23 New England ministers emphasized ordinary means as a spiritual-exegetical process with a penchant for sermon continua and prolonged explication of entire chapters and books. Sunday preaching tended to be pastoral in its goals, and Thursday lecture preaching focused more on theological concepts. Both kinds of preaching were part of ordinary means, and, ideally, the sense of explication as an ongoing process also made sermons applicable for auditors at any stage of spiritual development.24 The figures of spiritual “milk” and “meat” were often employed to distinguish between more elementary and more advanced spiritual lessons that might be gained from scriptural explication, such as Hugh Peters’s Milk for babes, and meat for men, or, Principles necessary, to bee known and learned of such as would know Christ here, or be known of him hereafter (London, 1630) and John Cotton’s much reprinted Spiritual milk for Boston babes in either England. Drawn out of the breasts of both testaments for their souls nourishment, but may be of like use to any children (Cambridge, Mass., 1656). Properly explicated, scripture could yield both easier and more difficult theological concepts, and depending on an individual’s spiritual-intellectual savvy, either “milk” or “meat” might be more appropriate and (to continue the seventeenth-century simile) spiritually nourishing. As one young notetaker puts the concept in what is probably a stock verse on the principle: Noe age so young noe witt so small which scriptur doth not fitt Ther is milke for babes & yett witthall Ther is meatt for stronger witt25

12   Introduction All auditors, however, no matter what stage of spiritual renewal, were necessarily dependent upon some accommodation for their naturally depraved intellect. In his study of the interaction between clergy and laity in their common pursuit of effectual salvation, Charles Lloyd Cohen privileges what he calls “original debility”—the broad implications of the premise of original sin, innate depravity, and postlapsarian limits to human understanding.26 Whereas Cohen emphasizes the psychological implications of the theological principle, the premise of debility lies beneath Puritan attitudes toward language and, by extension, scripture itself. Even a redeemed soul with enabled capacity to understand would continue to be impaired to some degree. Sermons and sermon literature seem always to acknowledge the limits of even the most enabled debility. Moreover, the lived experience of conversion usually proves to be less dramatic than Mather’s preferred anecdotes suggest, even when attributed to a particularly powerful pulpit experience. As Patricia Caldwell points out, most of the “Cambridge confessions,” which constitute a majority of extant conversion narratives, significantly highlight disappointment and ambiguity.27 The instantaneous efficacy of the preached word not only might fail the auditor but the minister, too. Mather uses the following anecdote (quoted here at length) to address those inevitable limits to human speech that even the most powerful minister might encounter: Though Mr. Hooker had thus removed from the Massachusetbay, yet he sometimes came down to visit the churches in that bay: but when ever he came, he was received with an affection like that which Paul found among the Galatians; yea, ’tis thought that once there seemed some intimation from Heaven, as if the good people had overdone in that affection: for on May 26, 1639, Mr. Hooker being here to preach that Lord’s day in the afternoon, his great fame had gathered a vast multitude of hearers from several other congregations, and, among the rest, the governour himself, to be made partaker of his ministry. But when he came to preach, he found himself so unaccountably at a loss, that after some shattered and broken attempts to proceed, he made a full stop; saying to the assembly, “That every thing which he would have spoken, was taken both out of his mouth and out of his mind also;” wherefore he desired them to sing a psalm, while he withdrew about half an hour

Introduction   13 from them: returning then to the congregation, he preached a most admirable sermon, wherein he held them for two hours together in an extraordinary strain both of pertinency and vivacity. After sermon, when some of his friends were speaking of the Lord’s thus withdrawing his assistance from him, he humbly replied, “We daily confess that we have nothing, and can do nothing, without Christ; and what if Christ will make this manifest in us, and on us, before our congregations? What remains, but that we be humbly contented? And what manner of discouragement is there in all of this?” Thus content was he to be nullified, that the Lord might be magnified!28

With this less typical anecdote, Mather delineates the double-edged sword of clerical success. Hooker’s great success as a preacher is surely a component of those New England magnalia (“great works”) that Mather details in his hagiographic history, but popular response has threatened to become a form of idolatry, “as if the good people had overdone in that affection.” Willing to blame neither Hooker nor the saints of New England, Mather imagines God’s check to clerical eloquence as a simple reminder that Hooker immediately comprehends and turns into an object lesson. Hooker’s “shattered and broken attempts” are no personal rebuke for vainglory (a sin that the minister Thomas Shepard sometimes ponders in his private journal entries). Rather, the incident is an emblem for all to remember that nothing of value can be done but by God’s will. The humbling even of the ordinary means of preaching is a reminder that “we have nothing, and can do nothing, without Christ” and an occasion to magnify God by remaining “humbly contented” with debility. Preaching manuals of the period offer little insight into the zeniths and nadirs of Puritan preaching as figured in Mather’s anecdotes concerning Hooker. The authors of the two most influential preaching manuals in New England, William Perkins and Richard Bernard, draw largely on sixteenth-century continental and English guides. Very little innovation to plain style based upon a faith in the literal sense of scripture is to be discerned in Perkins’s almost ubiquitously repeated advice: 1. To read the Text distinctly out of the Canonical Scripture. 2. To give the sense and understanding of it being read, by the Scripture it self.

14   Introduction 3. To collect a few and profitable points of doctrine out of the naturall sense. 4. To apply (if he have the gift) the doctrines rightly collected to the life and manners of men, in a simple and plaine speech.29 This type of “doctrine-use” structure of sermons, while typical of nonconformist preaching, was widely used by the early seventeenth century.30 Perkins’s rather ubiquitously cited directives are, in essence, a concise summary of trends in preaching, the roots of which go back to Calvin, if not Origen,31 and whose practical rhetorical evolution begins with Erasmus’s turn away from thematic preaching toward a more humanist model of classical oratory and Melancthon’s subsequent repudiation of varieties of classical oratory in favor of doctrinal and use-oriented preaching.32 No manual or theory of preaching, however, could instruct the would-be minister how to be an inspired instrument for the Holy Ghost but only how to explicate according to human ability. The best a minister might hope for, “if he have the gift,” is to offer application in persuasive but “simple and plaine” speech. Scholars have called the resulting sermons “formulaic” and “tedious.”33 One of the most immediately apparent features of this plain-style preaching was the rhetorical structure of Ramist branching—in which each point of explication might be subdivided into a multitude of subsequent numbered branching points for further explication.34 Ramist structure seems also to account for the remarkable fluency that auditors exhibited in recording, whether at the meetinghouse or at home after the sermon. Even more fundamentally, the method of Ramist logic is at the heart of sermon explication itself. Explanations of Ramist reaction to scholastic logic have suggested ways in which such rote configurations of prophesying might constitute innovative rhetorical change, yet such intellectual history approaches have failed to explain the exhilarating highs and lows of pulpit eloquence, especially for the auditor. Subsequent interventions into sermon literature scholarship—most notably, by Teresa Toulouse and Lisa Gordis—have tried to rescue sermon literature from its own apparent eye-glazing dictates by suggesting that the insufficiency of the guidelines requires fluidity and experimentation. Gordis, in particular, reframes the rhetorical problem as an exegetical issue, revealing not only how individual ministers interpreted preemptory directives such as Perkins’s but also how auditors took and adapted what ministers, with their virtuosity, rendered apparently straightforward.35 Puritan ministers often spoke ex tempore, a style of delivery that might sug-

Introduction   15 gest the enthusiasm and spontaneity associated with later trends in evangelical preaching from the Great Awakening through current-day revivalism, but such a comparison is misleading. Puritan ex tempore skill in the pulpit was developed through university training in which the memorization of lectures and sermons was standard pedagogical method. Under the influence of Ramist dialectic, method, memory, and composition theory dovetail not only in the theory of doctrine-use plain style but in the lived experience of the sermon.36 The incredible uniformity of notes—as produced by ministers either before or after delivery—is remarkably similar to that of notes taken by ministers listening to their colleagues’ preaching. The formulaic structure of the sermon served as a kind of vernacular of Puritan preaching. The structural conventions of university training emphasizing memorization and re-creation of sermons and lectures appear to have informed the notetaking practices of many nonuniversity-trained auditors, as many lay notetakers appear to have learned techniques indirectly. Even rather divergent notetaking styles among some auditors demonstrate how fully naturalized the elements of university training in plain-style auditing became in New England, as notetakers appear to have picked up recording practices in a community where notes circulated freely and eclectically.37 Idiosyncratic variations on university notetaking practices constitute an eclectic vernacular of sermon language and structure. This dissemination of notetaking did not occur merely top-down. Rather, notetaking styles reinscribed but also affected clerical practices and styles. Most concretely, the phenomenon of print sermons based on notes (clerical and lay, authorized and unauthorized) vividly illustrates the interdependence of ministers and auditors in the creation of sermon literature, as hearers adapted to preachers and preachers to hearers. The ability to follow the formal structure and core doctrine of a sermon via systematic notetaking was crucial to the lived experience of preaching but also to the preservation and dissemination of sermons in print. For better and for worse, publishing ministers were dependent upon auditors’ experience and recording. Whether authorized or unauthorized, print sermons drew upon the notes of minister and lay auditor alike, ultimately reflecting a complexly discursive sermon culture. The practices of sermon composition, delivery, and notetaking illuminate much that the preaching manuals fail to elaborate. Further understanding of a theory of the plain-style sermon can be found in discussions of scriptural interpretation itself. Gordis makes useful distinctions between Perkins’s emphasis on “the centrality of exegesis to sermon theory” and Bernard’s focus on

16   Introduction “the minister as interpreter and teacher.”38 Perkins’s relative emphasis on the relationship between scriptural exegesis and sermon composition (the interdependence of literal sense and plain style) suggests an explanation of why Puritan preaching manuals essentially seem to offer negative dictates (for example, not to go beyond the text, not to chase down fourfold exegesis, not to indulge in digressions of mere wit and foreign phraseology).39 Returning to Perkins’s handy list, we see that the first two directives (“To read the text” and “To give the sense and understanding of it”) are premised on the primacy of the literal sense of scripture and a faith that, as Bernard puts it, “No Scripture is in itselfe obscure, but that wee want eie-sight to behold what is therein conteined.”40 The practiced skill of the preacher, then, resides in the next two tasks of gathering doctrine (“out of the naturall sense”) and applying it to lived experience (“if he have the gift”). The series of negative dictates expressed as prescriptive formula imply something more akin to proscription. From a theological perspective, the directives of plain-style explication accommodate the strenuous Protestant insistence on the five solas. A commitment to sola fide might be sought by the three closely related principles of solus christus, sola gratia, and soli deo gloria (only through Christ, by grace alone, and only for the glory of God, respectively), but sola scriptura suggests a potentially competing logic of salvation. As James Simpson has observed, sola fide and sola scriptura exist in Protestant thought in uneasy opposition.41 Which is it that will save you? Is it faith alone, a phenomenon that, after all, is an extratextual, likely passive, and possibly predetermined event? Or is your salvation textual, based on your reading of the Bible, with all the vagaries of its contingent wordiness? Conventional wisdom and scholarly tradition have long privileged a view of the Reformation in which the turn toward vernacular scripture and away from hierarchical church structures empowered Protestants in matters of salvation and selfhood. The need to distinguish a literal sense in the Bible highlights the concept of scripture as an accommodation for fallen human intellect. We need the scripture because we are fallen; yet, precisely because we are fallen, we need help in understanding scripture. The five solas, then, function as reminders of human debility even as they offer salvation from that fallen state. These premises of debility are at the core of the negative dictates of Puritan writing—the plain style, the literal sense, the formulaic aspects of sermon composition. One might reasonably expect these premises and dictates to restrain literary production—not only in terms of quantity of spoken, written, and printed texts but in terms of what efficacy is expected from those human words. This expectation

Introduction   17 is shattered by the excesses of Puritan literary output: the sermon continua on a single passage that lasts weeks, months, or even years; the potentially infinite branching capacity of Ramist logic structures; the physical heft of a printed sermon cycle; the obsessive quality of notetaking and self-writing. The apparent preference for restraint in plain style might begin with the Puritan insistence upon the literal sense. Reiterating the Protestant rejection of the “4. senses of the scriptures, the literall, allegoricall, tropological, & anagogical”—a trend that begins at least with William Tyndale in the first half of the sixteenth century—William Perkins insists in his Arte of Prophecying: “There is one onelie sense, and the same is the literall.” Those senses that have come to be called “Anagoge and Tropologie are waies, whereby the sense may be applied.”42 Certainly, this is largely a matter of semantics; Perkins can retain the hermeneutic scope of the three traditional nonliteral senses if he just recasts them as “application.” Nevertheless, the implications of a single literal sense that unifies all moral, spiritual, and eschatological aspects in its historical truth have created profound repercussions from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers to present-day Fundamentalists, as Simpson has recently argued.43 Perkins tells us that the “principall interpreter of the Scripture is the holy Ghost,” essentially arguing for a self-explicating text. The problem is, of course, that those “dark places” in scripture44 are not merely spaces for deeper contemplation but also potential sites of confusion, doubt, controversy, intolerance, and violence. Sola scriptura, as Simpson points out, is surely as terrifying as it is comforting. In his preface to the New Testament in English, William Tyndale urges the reader to partake but also points out that the vernacular Bible functions like a crucible. The elect are saved by reading, and the reprobates are damned by the same act.45 Thus conceived, the vernacular Bible was not a simple self-help book. Many standard dictates associated with Reformation—sola fide, sola scriptura, and literal sense in particular—frustrate in part because they suggest a closed interpretive system. In her extensive treatment of Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History, Babette May Levy refers to “an occasional tendency” on the part of Puritan ministers to argue circularly—to maintain, for example, “that a just God by his very nature has certain attributes, and, having these attributes, is therefore a just God; or that man by his sinful nature fell from grace, and, having fallen, was therefore obviously sinful.” Despite the fact that the “modern non-believer in Puritanism” will find such reasoning unsatisfactory and unconvincing, Levy assures her reader that “individual points of

18   Introduction doctrine and usually individual sermons remain lucid in the sense that there is rarely any doubt about what the minister thought and wished his reader to think.”46 Within the system is interpretive clarity and salvation; outside the system is ambiguity and damnation. In The Arte of Prophecying, William Perkins offers the reader both the substance and evidence of scripture’s gospel truth in a single proof:



The Summe of the Scripture is conteined in such a syllogisme

*The Maior,

(or forme of reading, as this is which followeth.). *The true



Messias shall be both God and man of the seede of David; he

or Proposition.



shall be borne of a Virgin; he shall bring the Gospell forth of



his Fathers bosome; he shall satisfie the Law; he shall offer



up himselfe a sacrifice for the sinnes of the faithfull; he shall



conquer death by dying and rising againe; he shall ascend into

*The Minor,

heaven; and in his due time hee shall returne unto judgement.



or Assumption.

*The conclusion.

But * Iesus of Nazaret the Sonne of Mary is such a one; He * therefore is the true Messias.47

Within the proof by reason is proof by faith. Perkins concedes that although there exist “verie strong proofes, which show that the [scripture] is the word of God,” “there is onlie one, namely the inward testimony of the holy Ghost speaking in the Scripture, and not only telling a man within in [sic] his heart, but also effectually perswading him that these bookes of the Scripture are the word of God.”48 So while the proof of Jesus Christ as the true messiah can be demonstrated with formal logic, a previous acceptance of the conclusion and its terms is necessary to make the syllogism work. Then again, Perkins would never expect this or any intellectual syllogism to cause belief. The mistake is to suppose that the various examples of circular reasoning met with in Puritan texts are meant to be convincing on their own. It is the heart, not the intellect, that needs convincing. To the extent that Puritanism is a closed system, its dictates short-circuit a clear theory or an explanation of language. In his study of the grammatical origins of Reformation theology, Brian Cummings points out that “the phrase ‘literal truth’ is at best a paradox, perhaps an oxymoron.”49 Etymologically, to say something is literal is to reference its manifestation in letters (or, synecdochally, language). To say, then, that truth does manifest itself in the contingencies of language flies in the face of theories from the Greeks to the early Christians

Introduction   19 and on down that make much of the difference between res (the thing itself ) and verba (words). Furthermore, one of the obstacles to understanding the effectual working of the sermon is the seeming paradox of its theory and practice: disproportionate human technology of branching explication and iterative dissemination of the sermon through print, manuscript, and oral means flies in the face of premises of literal sense, plain style, and the self-authenticating revelation of the Word. The complicated status of scripture is not a problem that begins with the Puritans. Perkins was simply continuing the objections raised by Tyndale and other early Reformers against what they saw as the corruption of the scriptural integrity by the human interference of fourfold exegesis. The hermeneutics of the fourfold method may have developed into full scholastic elaboration over centuries, but its roots were planted firmly in the writings of Origen, Augustine, and others who were revered by Protestant Reformers as “primitive” church fathers. Recognizing what Augustine called the “dark places” in scripture, Origen categorized and promoted figurative readings of problematic passages that had already been in use for generations. Determining whether the literal meaning of a particular passage was governed by common sense served as the primary litmus test for determining if figurative interpretation was warranted. For Jesus to point to a piece of bread and call it his body, for example, was absurd if taken literally, as were competing verses that placed Christ both on earth and in heaven. In such cases, a more flexible understanding of the letter of the scripture was required. Throughout the history of the Christian church, simple flexibility in textual reading has been insufficient to stave off violent controversy. The surface absurdity of bread as body, to use the same example, has produced not merely competing interpretations but competing claims for orthodoxy and charges of heresy, as well. According to Mather, Hooker advised young ministers to undertake a long, systematic development of their exegetical prowess, recommending that “at their entrance on their ministry, they would with careful study preach over the whole body of divinity methodically, (even in the Amesian method,) which would acquaint them with all the more intelligible and agreeable texts of Scripture, and prepare them for a further acquaintance with the more difficult, and furnish them with abilities to preach on whole chapters, and all occasional subjects, which by the providence of God they might be directed unto.”50 Hooker’s suggestion that this initial preaching cycle might be “even in the Amesian method” (an exceptionally plain and very “use”-oriented style) indicates a gradation of

20   Introduction levels of sophistication attainable in the Puritan pulpit. The “Amesian method” here seems to stand for the essential principles required in Puritan preaching but is also aimed at revealing “the more intelligible texts of Scripture.”51 The young minister, in Hooker’s scenario, is something like a journeyman, independent of his apprenticeship but not yet ready to be master. Hooker’s advice to the young minister essentially serves as a confession that literalness and absolute clarity presumed under sola scriptura are more complicated than it would first appear. If a less trained minister might be advised not to preach on “dark places,” how much darker might the same places be to an untrained reader of scripture? God—or, more specifically, the spirit of the Holy Ghost—might inspire any reader to perfect comprehension, but the ordinary means to correct reading seem to involve quite a bit of human learning.52 Perkins continues another long tradition by suggesting a specific syllabus of biblical reading by which the human reader might become enabled to understand more clearly the difficult places in scripture. He instructs the would-be minister to “proceede to the reading of the Scriptures in this order”: “Vsing a grammaticall, rhetoricall, and logicall analysis, and the helpe of the rest of the arts, reade firste the Epistle of Paul to the Rom. after that the Gospell of Iohn (as being indeed the keyes of the new Testament) and then the other books of the new Testam[en]t will be more easie when they are read. When all this is done, learne first the dogmaticall bookes of the old Testament, especiallie the Psalmes: then the Proheticall, especially Esay [Isaiah]: Lastly the historicall, but chieflie Genesis.”53 Moving roughly backward through the Protestant canon, the syllabus of essential readings suggests that the fullness of revelation requires the enlightened reader to read back and forth and not simply through scripture. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the Gospel of John work as more than lenses through which the Old Testament books can be read as precursors to New Testament revelations. According to Perkins, the “manner of perswading” is that the elect reader, affected by the presence of the Holy Spirit, discerns, approves, and believes “the voyce of Christ speaking in the scriptures” and is finally “(as it were) sealed with the seale of the Spirit.”54 Perkins qualifies the mysticism of the reading experience with his cautious parenthetical aside that the seal of the spirit intervenes “as it were,” deferring the question of what exactly happens when the human reader encounters scripture. The reader who encounters Psalms, Isaiah, and Genesis after Romans and John is, in some real way, different from the reader who takes the same five books in canonical (and purportedly chronological) order. Reading in such a scenario is experiential as much as

Introduction   21 it is intellectual, simultaneously an act of reception, interpretation, and arrangement. Reading and hearing scripture require deep intertextual engagement. Perkins’s sense of how to open the literal sense of scripture and his sense of reading from Romans back into Genesis suggest a deep commitment to a kind of textual fluidity of revealed Word. Most concretely, this fluidity can be seen in the long sections of The Arte of Prophecying in which Perkins shows how disparate pieces of scripture can be understood in relation to one another. This process of “collation” is in part practical, allowing ministers to reconcile seemingly contradictory passages, to connect different historical (or “literal” moments), and, above all, to demonstrate the divine coherence of the biblical canon. As Gordis has pointed out, collation as a primary technique of sermon composition premised the self-interpretive capacity of scripture while, in practice, the method often pulled passages out of immediate context and made room for the ingress of human invention. Accordingly, “Collation tends to open exegesis outward, provoking disgressive discussions of the collated texts.”55 The traces of preached collation may be seen most readily in sermons (in print, full manuscript, and notes) in the form of concatenations of scriptural citations that punctuate prose blocks and margins. The deep intertextual logic of collation transcends sermon composition, however, revealing itself in all forms of sermon literature. Puritan writers (perhaps especially the lay writers) become adept at collating scriptural texts with biographical incident, contributing to the generic fluidity of sermon literature. We might call this a kind of lived collation. Nor are writers the only ones practicing acts of collation. In the very keeping of notebooks and circulation of manuscripts, auditors control and collate their sermon experience. Collation opens up not only textual but material means by which the controlling logic of the sermon disseminates across community, genre, and experience.

The archive is filled with curious examples of intertextual engagement through scriptural explication that complicate simple notions of authorship, readership, and the plain style, often in the form of notes, annotations, and other manuscript genres. The very idiosyncrasy of these material-textual artifacts can be particularly instructive, as divergent instances help us to plot out a kind of topography of possible variations of common practice. Unusual examples of lay notetaking, for example, help delineate typical auditing habits while simultaneously contesting the notion of normative practice. One example

22   Introduction of a manuscript artifact that challenges the stability of authorship and genre in New England sermon literature can be seen in a curious handmade book by the otherwise unknown John Templestone. In the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society, his handmade book of folded paper bears a handwritten title page that proclaims himself as owner and creator ( John Templestone) and a date (February 14th, 1687) that probably indicates either the inception or the completion of the volume. 56 A hand-drawn border surrounds the text:

John Templestone th

His BOOK . February 14:1687:

In fact, this title page is just one of several in the little book. (See figures 1–3.) The core of Templestone’s handmade volume is a manuscript copy of part of an execution sermon—originally preached by Joshua Moodey in March 1686 for the execution of James Morgan. On the pages before and after a handwritten copy of Moodey’s sermon excerpt is a careful transcription of notes on a sermon delivered by John Cotton Jr. in November 1687 on a text from Hebrews for a Thursday lecture. Due to the quirks of Templestone’s transcription process, the notes on Cotton’s sermon literally envelop the Moodey sermon. The resulting artifact produces something of the effect of a Russian doll, with Moodey’s text enclosed within Cotton’s sermon and bound up by three consecutive title pages—the innermost for the Cotton Jr. sermon notes, the middle for Moodey’s execution sermon excerpt, and the outermost for Templestone’s own title page. The odd physical configuration of the handmade volume is no doubt a series of negotiations of various practical considerations (Templestone’s initial interests in preserving particular texts, the relative scarcity of paper, and the difficulty in making handwritten pages run to a predetermined page length), but these resulting idiosyncrasies confound our sense of the separable roles of author, bookmaker, owner, transcriber, and reader.57

Introduction   23

Figure 1. The outermost of three title pages for John Templestone’s compilation of two sermons, likely begun in 1687. Additional markings include pen testing, a possible later owner’s inscription, and a nineteenth-century library shelving label that normally would have been affixed to the book spine. 18.9 cm x 14.2 cm. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

24   Introduction Figure 2. The second of three title pages for John Templestone’s sermon compilation, meant to introduce Templestone’s transcription of a print excerpt of an execution sermon by Joshua Moodey, and located within the inner pages of the manuscript book. The manuscript title page reproduces key textual elements of the print title page created for the Moodey sermon excerpt that was published together with Increase Mather’s A Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder (Boston, 1687). 18.9 cm x 14.2 cm. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Figure 3. The final of three title pages for John Templestone’s sermon compilation, meant to introduce the main points (“heads”) of a sermon delivered by John Cotton Jr. Although incorporating some elements of a standard print title page, the transcription that follows appears to be based on auditor notes. 18.9 cm x 14.2 cm. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Introduction   25 The Massachusetts Historical Society records originally identified Moodey as the “Author” of the manuscript book, presumably because his was the one contribution that could be traced to a print version and because his text makes up the majority of the leaves. In a later recataloging of the item, Templestone became the “Author,” suggesting a bibliographical reassessment by which the materiality of the manuscript appears more important than the connection of that manuscript copy to a print source.58 Templestone functions as more than just the material creator of the manuscript, however. He also exerts judgment and discretion in his selection process, implicitly imprinting his own interpretive understanding of the two enclosed texts. The creator of manuscript sermon artifacts acts as an editor or a kind of collaborator alongside the named authors who provide the initial oral or print sermon. Templestone’s acts of juxtaposition are also interpretive acts as he physically links the two texts, enfolding them within the single volume. Templestone’s particular choices of what to include and what to exclude require textual, contextual, and material consideration to understand. Increase Mather preached the sermon on Thursday, March 11, 1686—the day of James Morgan’s execution.59 But the condemned man had also specifically requested that Cotton Mather and Joshua Moodey “address his case in sermons to be delivered on the Sunday preceding his execution.”60 John Dunton, “an astute nonconformist bookseller from London” apparently recognized the great “commercial possibilities in the highly publicized hanging” and soon published the entirety of the two Mather sermons along with a lengthy extract from Moodey’s sermon. Inaugurating a popular new genre of Puritan sermon publication, Dunton’s execution sermon collection also launched Cotton Mather’s print career.61 Key to the dynamic energy of the print sermon compilation was the weaving together of various genres of spoken and written texts within the volume. Increase Mather’s sermon, for example, included the insertion of “a written communication from James Morgan” and ended with Morgan’s purported last words at the gallows, “O Lord receive my spirit, I come unto thee O Lord, I come unto thee O Lord, I come, I come, I come.”62 In the second edition, Dunton added more reported “last words” from the condemned man: “It seems that Cotton Mather had engaged Morgan in a last conversation as they walked together from Boston’s South Church to the gallows. Mather later produced a transcript of his dialogue with Morgan, apparently for personal use or private circulation. [The printer Richard] Pierce then took the liberty of procuring a copy of the transcript, ostensibly without Mather’s knowledge, for inclusion in

26   Introduction the second edition of the collected volume.”63 In a neat reversal of the lay auditor preserving the minister’s words for future circulation, here the lay speaker is recorded, edited, and assimilated into the printed sermon three different times. The entire printed collection of execution sermons is, in fact, a patchwork of reported speeches and subjective transcriptions. The single event of Morgan’s execution triggers a proliferation of texts—oral (during the week of the event), print (in Dunton’s best-selling sermon compilation), and manuscript (thanks to the efforts of Templestone as well as many unnamed recorders along the way). Templestone’s decision to copy out only Moodey’s excerpt (and not the sermons by the two Mathers) requires some conjecture on our part. According to Moodey, the portion of the sermon that he prepares for the first print edition is that section fulfilling two requests from the condemned man himself: “viz. That I would take some notice of him in my Sermon, and that I would give [w]arning to those of his Fellow-sinners that had been guilty of the like Evils, lest they also became like Monuments of Divine Justice.”64 Moodey’s extract is characterized by the drama of direct address and is punctuated with vivid descriptions of the murderer’s crime and his fitting punishment in the hereafter. It is entirely possible that vicarious thrill attracts Templestone to Moodey’s sermon excerpt, yet portions of the two Mather sermons are just as lurid, if not more so, than Moodey’s. As is typical in execution sermons, Moodey explicates the event as a “monument of divine justice,” evoking specifics of James Morgan’s case but also showing how the particulars are ultimately an emblem of man’s fallen state generally. Moodey inveighs directly against all those in his audience who swear and curse, who are drunkards or break the Sabbath, and those who might harbor their own undiscovered, murderous secrets. Beyond those nameable crimes, however, is the even more recalcitrant case of the ordinary sinner who is unaffected by godly preaching, whose lack of fear of divine judgment implies apostasy despite the evidence of any outward morality or attendance upon ordinary means of preaching. True to its genre, Moodey’s execution sermon strikes the balance between the specific case of the condemned and the inevitable guilt of the ostensibly innocent witness at the gallows. The section of Moodey’s sermon directly addressing James Morgan therefore implicates John Templestone, too, just as it implicates any sinner who hears the sermon or reads the words preserved by print, manuscript, or common report. By essentially enveloping the Moodey sermon excerpt within the notes of a sermon by Cotton Jr., Templestone further drives home the universal applicability of Morgan’s case. Cotton’s sermon is not occasioned by a sensational

Introduction   27 event. Rather, it is a simple discourse comparing and contrasting man’s spiritual journey with a brief allusion to a footrace in Heb. 12:1 (“And let us Run with Patience ye Race / THat is set before us US.”).65 Cotton’s sermon was delivered on a Thursday, a day typically reserved for lecture sermons (the systematic coverage of theology and doctrine rather than the pastoral emphasis on personal salvation typical of Sunday preaching).66 The Cotton sermon does not appear to be composed for a special occasion (such as an execution, an election, or a fast day) but is simply one sermon out of his ordinary course of scriptural explication. The later selection and transcription of the notes on the sermon, on the other hand, imbues Cotton’s ordinary, everyday preaching with the special status of a text that has particularly touched at least one auditor: John Templestone. Accordingly, Cotton’s preaching is preserved by a series of private acts of recording, organizing, and duplication. By literally enveloping Moodey’s direct address to the murderer James Morgan within the universality of Cotton’s sermon, Templestone inscribes both texts with his own subjective experience. In doing so, he also brings fulfillment to Morgan’s original desire that the ordinary sinner should heed the “monuments of divine justice” as preached by Moodey. Templestone inscribes his personal response into the meaning of the two sermon texts by creating his own book and authoring the textual relationship between the preaching therein. Templestone leaves further clues to his rationale for putting the two sermons together by his design of their respective title pages. Around Cotton Jr.’s and Moodey’s respective title pages, Templestone inks in a thick black border, similar to the border that frames his own name on the front cover. The border has been drawn so thickly that the chemical makeup of the ink together with the physical pressure of pen against paper has caused the line to eat away the paper. At the open edge of the page, the paper has all but disappeared under Templestone’s emphasis of the border. No mere ornamental effect, the thick black line appears to be a deliberate inscription of what would be known as a “mourning border,” a design element found almost exclusively on printed funeral sermons of the period. Although the published collection of sermons on Morgan’s execution deals with death, the more precise theme is the applicability of the condemned’s fatal sinfulness to any given sinner’s spiritual estate. Accordingly, no mourning border appears on the title page of the print version. Templestone attaches the significance of the funeral to the Moodey excerpt, just as he does to the Cotton Jr. sermon notes, and even to his own name on the front cover, as if inscribing textual experience with an echoing frame of memento mori.

28   Introduction As modern readers in the archive, we can only try to reconstruct conjecturally the implication of proliferating mourning borders in Templestone’s odd manuscript volume, but the simple design element is the most explicit key to the subjective textual connection between the two enclosed sermons. To the extent that the genre of the funeral sermon implicates the individual hearer or reader with its universal applicability, Templestone quite literally inscribes the disparate works of Cotton Jr. and of Moodey with the same reminder of the universality of death. Perhaps rooted in his own subjective reading of published and preached sermons, Templestone retools the textual meaning of Moodey’s execution sermon and Cotton’s ordinary Thursday lecture. This realignment of textual meaning occurs in the material act of creating a book artifact and accordingly adds to the cumulative material textuality of James Morgan’s crime and subsequent execution, of the popular sermon collection occasioned by the execution, and of the otherwise ephemeral preaching of John Cotton Jr. in November 1687. It is no wonder that John Templestone’s book has too many title pages; the proliferation of covers mirrors the centrifugal potential of communal exegesis in Puritan New England as individual hearers, readers, and writers craft textual meaning according to their lived experience. Templestone’s creation of this complicated little manuscript book is not merely an act of compilation but an authorial act of creation and genre manipulation. In considering Templestone’s curious artifact, we are reminded that all books are physical acts of creating meaning, whether in print or manuscript or hybrid form. These physical acts of creating meaning leave traces that are simultaneously stable (in their materiality) and unstable (in their portability, their openness to readerly interpretation and reinscription, their vulnerability to further acts of dissemination). Templestone compiles texts written by others, and in doing so he collates his own lived exegetical perspective with those texts and with the various phenomenal events that occasion them, whether that be the execution of James Morgan or the general need of Cotton’s congregation for spiritual instruction on any given Thursday.

The seeming exegetical excess of sermon literature leaves material traces in notes on sermons and in the incredible complexity of print sermon bibliography because of the vagaries of early modern publication generally and because of the local practices of notetaking and manuscript circulation specifically. The material means of disseminating sermon literature were available throughout

Introduction   29 the gathered communities of New England as the laity heard, recorded, read, and shared the explication of their ministers. Acts of hearing, notetaking, and applying the sermon implicate the auditor in the work of the pulpit. Conversely, ministers responded to the responsive dissemination of their texts, creating not simply a circular loop from minister through laity and back again, but a discursive interpretive community. The laity’s central role in the material preservation of sermon literature made them agents in the formation of texts and textual meaning. The first part of this book offers a challenge to conventional notions of clerical authorship and the traditional bibliographical faith in a singular authenticity of stable printed texts, suggesting the ways in which sermons circulate in print, manuscript, and hybrid forms. In this respect, my work dovetails with wider trends in book history, especially with regard to the overlap of print, manuscript, and oral culture in early modern England.67 Close analysis of manuscript sermon notebooks demonstrates the range of techniques by which acts of listening were recorded, preserved, and disseminated by lay auditors, illuminating the way New England Puritan laity shaped the meaning of sermon experience through hearing and recording the pulpit endeavors of the ministers.68 Later chapters turn to core questions of what, precisely, Puritans thought human language could accomplish in the work of redemption. The materiality and contingencies of vernacular translation, proliferating explications of scripture, and the practices of early modern sermon culture provide a background for the theoretical exploration of the relationship between divine and human language. Throughout, the alternately competing and complementary authority of print, manuscript, and oral expression continues to be in conversation, showing ultimately the coherence within textual variation in Puritan literature. The sermon-ridden literature of Puritan New England develops out of these uniquely discursive material practices in response to linguistic implications of theological belief and lived experience. I begin in Chapter 1 by raising fundamental challenges to the notion of single authorship and sermon literature. Anxiety over unauthorized publication (on the part of the ministers) and textual authenticity (primarily on the part of modern scholars) has largely dominated modern approaches to the print sermon. By first tracing out the erratic peregrinations of sermons into print in light of notetaking, manuscript circulation, and the hybrid materiality of books in the early modern period, I show how determination of textual authenticity is perhaps futile and, ultimately, diversionary. In part, this reconceptualizing of

30   Introduction the production of sermon literature as a discursive process confirms existing book history scholarship.69 My ultimate concern, however, is to reorient the questions we ask of sermons away from content (what was said and written by individual ministers) and toward the experience of sermon as it circulated through New England communities and beyond. The sermon did not end in the ephemeral speech act of delivery any more than it became fixed via the printing press. The permeable modes of material transmission (oral, print, manuscript) give us concrete methods for understanding the sermon as a text of discursive composition and eclectic circulation. Chapter 2 demonstrates approaches to reading and analyzing sermon notes, a genre of writing largely inaccessible both for practical reasons (they exist in a handful of archives, cataloged with unpredictable descriptors) and through a lack of familiarity (even once handwriting is deciphered, the often skeletal records of preaching seem perhaps even less compelling than the more fully fleshed-out print sermons). My aim, therefore, is not only to make available some illuminating examples of notetaking but to provide a means of comprehending this idiosyncratic genre. The concrete evidence of typical notetaking practices and the more ambiguous traces of subjective responses in the notes both illuminate the aural experience of preaching. Discrete acts of listening recorded in notebooks are more suggestive than definitive, as auditors rarely commented on their immediate reactions to preaching in notes. Nevertheless, distinctive patterns of auditing notetaking styles emerge across a range of recorders.70 Accordingly, I suggest three basic tendencies found in notetaking: structural auditing, in which relational meanings among the different parts of the sermon are emphasized; content auditing, in which discrete units of meaning are of paramount importance; and aural auditing, in which the sound and fullness of the minister’s language are privileged. Lay sermon notebooks are material as well as textual, so I consider the ways in which the physical artifact affects the textual experience of writing and remembering. Although auditor recording styles varied greatly, each notetaker clearly envisioned the material notebook as a unique, personal creation. Each sermon notebook exists as an autonomous creation by an individual auditor with his or her own idiosyncratic aesthetic, organizational, and textual logic. Each notetaker, that is, clearly authors his or her own aural experience within the larger conventions of sermon culture. With a perceived disparity between the spoken and the written word, on the one hand, and the evident idiosyncrasies of aural experience, on the other,

Introduction   31 the printed word required special accommodation if it was to retain the vital efficacy and multivalent registers of New England sermon culture. Chapter 3 outlines common strategies employed to bridge oral, aural, and written permutations of sermon culture. Set within the basic framework of formulaic plainstyle sermon rhetoric, strategic imperfections in structure and style conveyed oral spontaneity and aural subjectivity. Accordingly, the reading experience of the print sermon could remain distinctly subjective despite the formulaic aspect of the genre. Moreover, a reconsideration of print sermons—especially unwieldy sermon cycles—in light of sermon aurality suggests ways in which the structural formulae of plain structure can be understood as an expressive form. Ramist branching structures constantly build outward, apparently disseminating the explication of individual verses. The technique of collation similarly allows exegetes (the minister, the auditor, the reader) to open the Word associatively. Although the theological and rhetorical premises of plain-style explication of the literal sense suggest a closed system of meaning held in place by the structural technology of the sermon, the experience of the sermon is largely centrifugal, as interpretation and application move out from central text and doctrine. Especially visible in structural auditors, the capacity of form to regulate and shape centrifugal textual exploration marks the aural and written sermon experience. In manuscript and in print, New England Puritans sometimes seemed to amplify rather than resolve the problematic relationship between the perfection of the divine Word and the contingent fallibility of human words. In Chapter 4, I suggest ways in which the self-conscious treatment of theological-linguistic conundrums allowed human literary endeavor to transcend its own impairment. The premises of postlapsarian intellect mirror the debility of the postlapsarian soul, so Puritan readers and writers turn to the very limitations of their linguistic endeavors to achieve a kind of enabled debility, finding in the gap between divine and human language accommodation for gracious textual engagement. I begin by tracing out the Reformation tradition of vernacular translation and the dictates of sola scriptura that dovetail with Calvinist notions of intellectual depravity. Characteristic features of Puritan preaching—such as an insistence on literal meanings, excessive explication of minute units of scripture texts, structural disproportion—are simultaneously an admission of human limitation and evidence of enabled capacity.71 As the individual experienced a sermon (whether by speaking, hearing, writing, or reading), he or she could participate in a range of practices such as scriptural collation, figurative reasoning, and even

32   Introduction the excessive verbal analysis pejoratively termed “text crumbling” in order to bring contingent, lived meaning in line with unified, doctrinal revelation. This deep intertextual habit of expression and interpretation constitutes perhaps the most distinctive marker of sermon literature. Conversion narratives forge a discursive relationship between individual lived experience and the doctrinal teachings of the sermon. An examination of conversion accounts in direct relation to preaching suggests that this peculiar style of Puritan life writing might more usefully be considered as a subgenre of sermon literature rather than an anticipation of latter-day autobiography. Chapter 5 shows that the Puritan laity not only used scripture in the narration of spiritual experience as “prooftext” but also adapted the methods of sermon composition. Through innovative narrative strategies, the laity sought to create persuasive conversion narratives that would not sacrifice the story of the soul to the story of the self. At a basic level, conversion narrative reveals another angle on the lived experience of sermon culture, as individuals narrate the story of their spiritual progress alongside a trajectory of recalled sermon aurality. At a deeper level, conversion narrative suggests ways in which the habits of exegetical thought developed through attendance upon the ordinary means of sermons across media and across genre. More than reflecting the efficacy of the pulpit, Puritan conversion narrative adapts the methodology of the sermon in order to narrate the unnarratable. The example of conversion narrative invites us to return once more to the notion of a “sermon-ridden” literature. The universe of sermon literature necessarily expands greatly when we consider the proliferation of preaching via print, orality, and manuscript, while the notion of stable authorship declines in inverse proportion to the widened field of dissemination, especially through lay notetaking. The logic of literal sense and the methodology of plain-style explication are visible throughout Puritan writing. Literary endeavors are continually informed by the contradictory premise (or is it promise?) of enabled debility, and compositional techniques from collation to disproportion to selfconscious rhetorical artifice appear in every genre produced in seventeenth-century New England. The Puritan commitment to the plain-style explication of the literal sense of scripture transcends the generic boundaries of the sermon, and a certain malleable notion of genre dovetails provocatively with overlapping categories of material-textual creation. The symbiotic relationship between a commitment to the presumed legibility of scripture and the recurrence of interpretive doubt therefore reveals itself in a full range of sermon literatures.

Introduction   33 Evidence of this phenomenon can be found throughout the accepted canon of seventeenth-century New England writing as well as in the material archive of noncanonical and anonymous texts. Everywhere influenced by the logic of the sermon, Puritan literature seeks to achieve a balance between confidence in the legible truth of Logos and the proper degree of uncertainty of that final truth. Broadly considered, the Puritan sermon is not simply the dominant genre of this time and place but provides the controlling logic of all Puritan literature. The theory, form, practice, and application of the sermon is not restricted to the meetinghouse but rather permeates all forms and material genres of writing, making every member of the gathered community a participant in a shared literary endeavor.

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Chapter 1

h Unauthorizing the Sermon I

n 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

36   Chapter 1 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

Unauthorizing the Sermon   37 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.

38   Chapter 1 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

Unauthorizing the Sermon   39 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

40   Chapter 1 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 wellintentioned 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

Unauthorizing the Sermon   41 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 Goodwin 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

1632

1637

The Soules Preparation for Christ... A Treatise on Contrition Acts 2:37

The Soules Humiliation Lk 15:14-18

The Soules Ingrafting unto Christ Mal 3:1

The Soules Effectual Calling to Christ Jn 6:45

1637

[1640]

The Soules Implantation. A Treatise (sequel to Soules) Preparation

The Soules Implantation into the Natural Olive (“corrected, and much enlarged”)

“The Broken Heart” Is 57:15

“The Broken Heart” Is 57:15

“Preparing the Heart for to Receive Christ” Lk 1:17

“Preparing of the Heart for to Receive Christ” Gal 5:22

“The Soules Ingrafting into Christ” Mal 3:1

“The Soules Ingrafting into Christ” Mal 3:1

“Spiritual Love and Joy” Gal 5:22

“Spiritual Love and Joy” Gal 5:22

linked in ordo salutis (stages of redemption)

In general

1656

BK 2

Purchase

Mt 1:21

BK 1 Pet 1:18-19 Application

1638

Parts

Preparation

In general

Free

BK 3

Lk 1:17 Particulars

Quality

Implantation

BK 4

2 Cor 6:2 Fit

The Unbeleevers Preparing for Christ following “Preparing of pp 6-26 the Heart”

“The Soules Benefit from Union with Christ” (separate title page) 1 Cor 1:30

to BK 4 pp 188 -204 to BK 5 pp 81 -125 to BK 7

“The Soules Justification” 2 Cor 5:22

pp 1-110 to BK 8

Parts

Asleep

Contrition & Humiliation

BK 6

Rev 3:17 Unwilling

BK 5

Mt 20:5, 6, 7 God’s Dispensation Our Disposition

The Soules Possession of Christ Rom 13:4

“The Soules Union with Christ” 1 Cor 6:17

“Spiritual Joy” (doubt regarding Hooker’s authorship) Hab 3:17, 18

textually linked

The Application of Redemption... The first eight Books

1638 The Soules Exaltation. A Treatise...

BK 7

Rom 8:7

Holy Violence Jn 6:44

BK 8

BK 9 Is 57:15

Part I

Rev 22:17 I Cor 2:4 Ezek 11:19 Lk 19:42 Mt 20:3-6

Part 2

Jn 6:44

Contrition

BK 10

Acts 2:37

1657 The Application of Redemption... The Ninth and Tenth Books

[The Application of Redemption, Books 11-16] (advertised but never printed)

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.

42   Chapter 1

1629 The Poor Doubting Christian Drawne Unto Christ... Jn 6:45

Unauthorizing the Sermon   43 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. 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:

44   Chapter 1 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,” “blas-

Unauthorizing the Sermon   45 phemed,” “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

46   Chapter 1 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

Unauthorizing the Sermon   47 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.

48   Chapter 1 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 Revd Mr. John Roger Of Ipswich August ye 16th 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.

Unauthorizing the Sermon   49 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

50   Chapter 1 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,

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.

Unauthorizing the Sermon   51 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. 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 crossouts, 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.

52   Chapter 1 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 ser-

Unauthorizing the Sermon   53 mons 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 ye 11volums of M.SS. of mr Parkhurst Bookseller in London: In ye year 1691. I gave 10 £ for all those ^11 volums.51

54   Chapter 1 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

Unauthorizing the Sermon   55 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.

56   Chapter 1 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

Unauthorizing the Sermon   57 faith and hope. The Lamentations verse in Davenport’s sermon becomes a multivalent 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,

58   Chapter 1 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.

Chapter 2

h Reading the Notetakers W

hen Robert Keayne migrated to Boston in 1635 with his wife and son, he brought with him “two or 3000 lb in good estate of my owne.”1 Among those belongings, apparently, were notebooks in which he had recorded sermons in London. One of these early notebooks survives in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, with the following inscription on the front paste down, made, at the very least, eight years after Keayne began taking his notes: Robert Keayne of Boston New Engl: his Booke Ann 1627. Price 4s There is many a pretious old Engl Sermon in it2

The full implications of the inscription—that he took notes in the first place, that he brought them with him as indispensable movable goods on his transatlantic voyage, and that he later inscribes the physical book with a note of nostalgia—suggest that notetaking continues to hold evolving meaning over time for the book’s creator. Keayne’s English notebook documents particular performances of godly preaching (who, what, where, when), maps Keayne’s own spiritual progress (to whom he listens, what he hears, where it takes him), and testifies to the progress of the whole transatlantic community (who we are, where we have been). Not only are New England migrant ministers John Cotton, John Wilson, Hugh Peters, and John Davenport (three-fifths of Cotton Mather’s honored “Johannes in Eremo”)3 to be counted in these pages

60   Chapter 2 of English preaching, but New Englanders like Keayne still value what remains “pretious” in the performance of and attendance upon godly preaching wherever it occurs. Perhaps, after all, the inscription is something as simple as a notice to his descendants, a clue to the spiritual and personal meaning of the volume and its notes. Modern readers aware that Keayne came before the Massachusetts Bay court several times because of his too great success in accumulating wealth during the early years of the colony might note with amusement that even in his notebook, the merchant places a concrete value (4s) on the “pretious” work of the spirit.4 Less dismissively, however, we might come to consider Keayne’s deeply ingrained habits, formed over a lifetime of both fiscal and spiritual record keeping, as his expression of selfhood in which the worldly-wise merchant might not be at odds with the would-be saint.5 I offer Keayne’s case here not as a validation of an outmoded Weberian trope but rather as a usefully idiosyncratic case. Keayne, like other scrupulous notetakers of the period, manages his lived sermon experience—from aural reception, to textual transcription, to preservation and recollection—in a manner true to his formal training and subjective tendencies. Record keeping and textual production are natural to Keayne. As a merchant, he produces many volumes detailing daily and periodic transactions. As a public citizen, he produces a 51,000-word “Apology” for his life in the form of a last will and testament. As a pious man, he keeps extensive notes, recording not only the basic points and branchings of a sermon but—to the best of his ability—every turn of phrase that the minister offers forth to the congregation. Keayne writes and rewrites his spiritual experience in notes week by week, accumulating volumes year after year. The sermon notebook chronicles not only specific moments in time—the delivery of scriptural exegesis on specific dates and in specific locations as well as Keayne’s immediate aural experience of that oral event—but also evolving meaning over time as Keayne “pretious” texts, revisiting and reimaging the meaning of words that draw an ineluctable line from scripture to biography. Surely, they are now his words as much as they are the words of the minister. Taken as its own peculiar subgenre of sermon literature, auditor notes provide much more than biographical, theological, and historical content. On the one hand, an investigation of the subjective aurality of notetaking sheds light on the bibliographical conundrums of Puritan sermon literature. On the other hand, the insights afforded by an analysis of sermon aurality in auditor notes pose new questions about familiar textual traditions. In a context where sermon

Reading the Notetakers   61 texts necessarily develop along circuitous routes and through communal efforts, the printed literature must read dialogically. Materially, print sermons engage manuscript and oral culture in dialogue, even when all the pieces of that dialogue are no longer extant. Textually, sermon literature constantly references its own aural premises. From proverbial deference to the popular appeal of preaching, to specific structural features, Puritan sermon literature emphatically reiterates the experiential. Plain style itself transcends rote formula when it provides the framework for experiential variance alongside authoritative, “literal” explications of scripture: the proliferation of angles of vision on a single verse or phrase, tangles of sermon branching, putative questions and objections raised and addressed, multiple possible applications of doctrine, the centrifugal force of excessive scriptural citation. The range of notetaking practices—style, detail, completeness—suggests great diversity of methods and intentions, while the consistencies attest to coherent communal engagement in the oral and written aspects of sermon culture. Reading auditor notes, however, can only suggest specific aspects of the total phenomenal experience of sermon culture and the oral power of pulpit eloquence. The extant record is too scattered and idiosyncratic to provide a single model of notetaking practices. Auditor notes are much more rare than clerical notes. In large part, this is because the papers of elite men are more likely to survive (passed down in families, no doubt, by conscientious descendants) and be preserved in archives (where the value both in terms of antiquarian and scholarly interest has been long institutionalized). Manuscripts of elites such as ministers are also more likely to be fully and accurately cataloged. Locating auditor notes can be challenging because no consistent cataloging terms of basic descriptions exist. Accordingly, lay notes might be listed by the minister rather than the auditor (especially when the name of the auditor is unknown) and described as a commonplace book or other genre of manuscript. Because of the idiosyncrasies of the archive, I have used more common as well as less common examples of notetaking styles to chart a kind of topography of the types of notetaking. Ultimately drawing from pedagogical practices in England, the numbered, branching structure that provides the outline for most doctrine-use sermons in the plain style is the most immediately recognizable feature of auditor notes. Not all auditors use this structure, however, and lay auditors generally seem to adapt common practices according to their own preferences. For the sake of convenience, I have identified three basic styles that occur in lay notetaking:

62   Chapter 2 structural auditing (which emphasizes not only the numbered, branching outline of the sermon but privileges the internal logic of parts to the whole of the sermon); content auditing (which prioritizes whole units of meaning, such as doctrine, use, scripture text, and occasion); and aural auditing (which highlights the listening experience most directly, often by attempting verbatim transcription of the minister’s words). These three categories of auditing and notetaking style are simply convenient paradigms for the fuller examination of individual cases. Most notetakers exhibit more than one of these tendencies, and any of these styles can be used to quite divergent effects. The experiential emphasis of Puritan piety dictates an intensely personal relationship to texts. Auditors were encouraged to “goe home and consider” the sermon, and lay confessions and conversion narratives attest to this practice.6 Auditor notes cannot reveal the uncanny moments preserved in conversion stories, nor can they suddenly make sense of the many seemingly hyperbolic anecdotes of powerful preaching. Rather, auditor notes suggest the interplay between oral performances of pulpit eloquence, affective experiential responses, and a body of printed texts that are ultimately limited by occasion and circumstances. To read sermon notes is to give yourself over to the instructive indeterminacies of this odd archive. Rather than considering manuscripts as sources for deriving textual authenticity, I attempt to analyze each artifact on its own terms. In doing so, I hope to delineate the permeability of categories of print and manuscript. Inevitably, the permeability between print and manuscript implicates the oral, that medium provocatively bereft of its own “artifactuality.” The resistance of texts and artifacts to reveal singular coherence does not constitute indeterminacy but, rather, a productive wedge into the problem of reading and interpretation. In a statement of methodology in his 1957 dissertation, the transcriber of Henry Wolcott’s shorthand sermon notebook puts the case for heeding the failure of archival legibility in compelling terms. Explaining what was—in the end—unexplainable in the recovery of a subjective transcript of a distant past, he muses, “I can only suggest that colleges and universities set up courses that should have been in the curriculum for years—seminars in skepticism and lingering doubt: fallibility and the printed page.”7 The issue is not just the letter of transcription but the nature of translation, an always contingent proposition. The failures of the textual artifact to signify a verbatim fact communicate a series of incidental possibilities. Hesitation, intuition, and experiment leave textual and material traces, and the consequent evidence might take many forms: too much detail, too little

Reading the Notetakers   63 detail, syntactic convolution, formula, idiosyncrasy, disproportion, juxtaposition, tangent, error, silence. Obviously, sermon notes record speech acts, but they reveal more about aural experience than the oral performance in most cases. Sermons may be the speech acts of the ministers, but notes are the listening acts of the laity. Both kinds of acts contribute to the production of a communal sermon culture. Studies in the history of the book can aid in understanding the important material aspect of sermon notes. More than simple conduits of preserving ephemeral speech acts, auditor notes continued to evolve as physical artifacts long after the delivery of the sermon. Even auditors who recorded in the meetinghouse continued to work on the notes long after the sermon delivery had stopped, and these manuscript texts could circulate within families, among lay networks, and even between auditor and minister. The exchange of ideas and currency of experience has become almost proverbial in our understanding of Puritan culture ever since the “turn” to American studies that has long provided a useful corrective to older notions of the “New England Mind.”8 Specific aspects of the so-called New England Way (gathered churches, the requirement of a personal confession for church membership, and the political assumptions and geographical spread of Puritan colonialism) make Puritan sermon culture a phenomenon sui generis in important ways. Moreover, as I have argued in the previous chapter, there is neither a direct line nor a hierarchical development from orality to manuscript to print. Nevertheless, a contextualization of local practices within a broader understanding of transitions from oral to literate culture can be extremely helpful. In a different context, Walter Ong notes: “Manuscript cultures remained largely oral-aural even in retrieval of material preserved in texts. Manuscripts were not easy to read, by later typographic standards, and what readers found in manuscripts they tended to commit at least somewhat to memory. Relocating material in a manuscript was not always easy. Memorization was encouraged and facilitated also by the fact that in highly oral manuscript cultures, the verbalization one encountered even in written texts often continued the oral mnemonic patterning that made for ready recall.”9 Ong’s premises about the movement from oral to literate society have been challenged and adjusted by subsequent book history scholarship. Nevertheless, some of his basic observations about oral and written modes of organization and reference remain quite salient in the context of sermon notetaking.10 Although the “manuscript culture” connected to sermon notebooks differs from the manuscript book culture that Ong describes (notes

64   Chapter 2 rather than polished texts, the amateur recorder rather than the trained scribe, the physical circumstances of transcription, and the likely sites of circulation), similarities in the creation and use of manuscript texts remain. For most families, the Bible would be on hand for consultation, confirmation, and further textual study. Verbal signals (sermon divisions, numbering)—provided by the minister and retained, with varied accuracy, by the individual auditor—would have helped to clarify the rational argumentation. At the same time, drawing from memory and manuscript simultaneously, New Englanders would have engaged their oral-aural responses to the sermons, in discussion and in individual contemplation.11 A curious anecdote recorded in John Hull’s diary of public occurrences indirectly reveals some of the ways in which sermon notes might have been read. Hull, an active sermon notetaker, reports of “A man at Ipswich repeating a sermon, and, because it was darkish, stood at a door or window, as a flash of lightning stunned him; but no hurt. His Bible being under his arm, the whole book of Revelation was carried away, and the other parts of the Bible left untouched.”12 The remarkable occurrence, no doubt providentially interpreted, provides clues about sermon note usage. The unnamed man might have been holding a print sermon, but, statistically, he is much more likely to have a manuscript in hand. The use of the verb “repeating” suggests that the man was replicating a performance—either by memory, or with the assistance of notes, or both—likely for the benefit of family or friends gathered in the house. (University students in England and later at Harvard were routinely required to recite sermons from memory as part of their training. Practices such as taking notes and reciting in nonuniversity settings seem to grow in part from these practices.) The Bible tucked under his arm serves as a textual anchor to the interpretive ventures of the sermon, but he is not actively reading from scripture when the lightning strikes. The Bible is for reference, but so is the putative sermon notebook, or the man’s memory itself. Memorization, notetaking, and recitation are inextricably linked activities of sermon auditing—simultaneously public and private—and relocate the words of a given minister from the pulpit to the community. Anne Hutchinson notoriously gathered a following to discuss and critique the ministers’ sermons, but Hull’s curious anecdote reminds us that those meetings were on a continuum with much more commonplace communal activity. Most tangibly, the material conditions of keeping sermon notes affect their use, circulation, and, ultimately, their meaning. Manuscript sermon notes are

Reading the Notetakers   65 difficult to read because of the way information is conceived, organized, and recalled, but manuscripts are also difficult to read because they are hard to write. While some auditors apparently wrote down notes taken from memory after returning home (a difficult enough proposition), my analysis suggests that many more took notes in the meetinghouse and then continued to work on the notes at home. Even though the use of clear heads and Ramist branching made it theoretically possible for auditors to retain notes and then write them from memory, many auditors apparently could record during the sermon, as well. Still others seem to have recorded during the sermon and added to the notes later on (usually adding headers and marginalia but also adjusting transcriptions). An auditor who simply records heads of sermons, for example, in neat hand with straight, regular line lengths, likely does so at home. An auditor who records, or attempts to record, complete phrasing by the minister likely does so in the meetinghouse. Sloppy handwriting, the use of shorthand, numbered sections that run together in block paragraphs (rather than appearing each on a separate line), frequent cross-outs, skipped numbers, and incomplete sentences provide strong evidence that the notes were taken during sermon delivery. Some notes apparently taken in the meetinghouse seem to change pace as the sermon goes on. Many auditors manage to get down whole, spoken phrases at the beginning of a sermon, but slow down and simply record heads (numbered reasons, uses, and so on) as they get further into the text. Conversely, many auditors seem to get carried away toward the ends of sermons, writing out fairly full applications, for example, while the doctrine explication has been more or less skeletal. Some of these differences of recording are likely related to attention span and interest, but would rapt attention make the auditor more likely to record every word or simply to cogitate, recording just the bare idea to jog the memory later? Would an inattentive auditor spend more time or less time getting down the exact words? Generally speaking, when auditor notes show evidence of pacing changes, the changes tend to occur at the beginning and at the end of sermons. Specifically, the spoken word tends to be more fully rendered in notes in the explication of the text and toward the end of the application. Toward the beginning of sermons, auditors who tend to record speech (rather than just sermon heads) transcribe many nonessential phrases: “in the first part of this chapter we see . . . ,” “we have heard before that . . . ,” and so on. Conversely, in many cases, a flurry of transcription at the end of a sermon seems to reflect the energy, pace, and even euphony of the minister’s delivery: handwriting gets smaller and

66   Chapter 2 faster; more shorthand is mixed in as if to “keep up”; and keywords, but few nonessential phrases, are present. While this is only a very general observation, and there are plenty of exceptions, the basic trend seems also to hold true even when the sermon for a given day is simply part of a multiweek sermon sequence; the “pacing” of the notes suggests slower, more deliberate, delivery at the beginning, which accelerates toward the end. On the one hand, this glimpse of pulpit delivery style is not surprising but a rather predictable element of pronuntiatio (delivery).13 On the other hand, tendency to acceleration dovetails nicely with the emphasis on use and application in experiential religion generally and plain style particularly. The anchor of any Puritan sermon is its text, but the teleology of preaching is tied structurally to the ending—how to apply that text. Physical examination of these manuscripts shows that just keeping the ink flowing could be a challenge, let alone keeping pace with the minister’s words. Many auditors ruled off a left-hand margin ahead of time, creating a space for marginalia that could clarify as well as amplify meaning at a later time. Still, the re-creation of a sermon after the fact, even for an attentive and skilled recorder, could prove a difficult task. Cross-outs, emendations, and subsequent additions—as well as blots, obvious misspelling and missing words, cramped writing toward the bottom of a page, and spaces left presumably to fill in later— indicate that notetaking was a laborious pursuit. The vital importance of the practice becomes refracted through its very difficulty. Stout refers to “New England’s literate but nearly bookless society” to describe famously high literacy rates combined with relatively limited book ownership, pointing out that although few read sermons, everyone heard them.14 Scholars continue to fine-tune our proverbial sense of an almost universal education of children to read the Bible,15 but sermon attendance itself might also come to constitute a particular form of New England literacy, one that is hard to quantify and also to describe. Sermon notes provide rare insight into this mode of literacy and the material means of transmission. The cultural and spiritual value of notes is perhaps only increased by the difficulty of the process of production and consumption of these peculiar manuscripts. Analysis of extant sermon narratives illuminates the connection between material circumstances, emotional meaning, and spiritual value. As a notetaker, the auditor could continue to develop the material transcription of a given sermon. As a book owner, the auditor could forge connections among sermons as they were delivered on subsequent weeks, for special occasions, and by various ministers. The auditor who wrote notes at home from memory re-creates a version of an ephemeral

Reading the Notetakers   67 experience within the private space of the home and the personal space of the book itself. The auditor who recorded notes in the meetinghouse would need to bring, at the very least, a book, a pen, and a supply of ink, if not also a knife to keep the pen’s tip sharp and perhaps other items to aid the work of writing. The semi-enclosed space of the pew box would make the presence of these items less awkward, but under the best circumstances, in situ notetaking would have been a cumbersome procedure.16 The notetaker brings a kind of authorial presence in the shared, public space of the meetinghouse. A book of sermon notes serves both as a handy record of weekly teachings and as a marker of pious diligence. It also constructs a site of negotiation between public performance and private devotion; it is simultaneously the product of the minister and the auditor. Library catalogs often list the “author” of sermon notes as the minister, a practice that makes it difficult to determine at first whether the manuscripts are auditor notes or notes written by the minister for delivery, for preservation, or as preparation for publication. The most reliable clue for determining whether notes are composed by the minister or by an auditor is the inclusion of the preacher’s name at the head of the sermon, along with information such as the date of delivery and the chapter and verse explicated. (Occasion and location of delivery are also common pieces of information at the head of the sermon.) Even when the notebook is primarily dedicated to the preaching of a single minister, the lay auditor usually records the name of the minister at the beginning of the notes for the day of sermon delivery. Besides some historical and biographical details, auditor notebooks usually reveal what we expect them to reveal: a text, a doctrine, some reasons and applications, and many scriptural citations. Indeed, the familiar formula of the plain-style sermon is everywhere apparent. What remains most idiosyncratic is the method of recording and the style of listening. Like other types of early American documents, the extant corpus has been inconsistently cataloged. Each archive determines its own descriptive procedures and priorities, and those principles typically change over time. “Checklists” take much effort to compile, but these guides are crucial in any scholarship of manuscript material.17 Additionally, different disciplinary interests determine how material gets described. Historical and genealogical interests have driven preservation and scholarship of this early period, and manuscripts are examined primarily for content.18 In many cases, it is not even clear how auditor notebooks come to be in archival collections. Clerical notes often survive because they are included with other manuscript material passed down through

68   Chapter 2 elite families that eventually donate or sell materials in bulk to historical socie­ ties. Owner inscriptions sometimes indicate that books kept by more obscure lay notetakers similarly came to be passed down in families. Lay notebooks rarely have any recent provenance or acquisition information beyond an occasional letter from a dealer selling the artifact or from an antiquarian informing a historical society of a “curious” volume. Often there is simply no record of the notetaker’s name, and sometimes attribution further down in the catalog record is based on conjectural readings of names that may only be pen tests of another writer or a later owner. (Pen testing, or pen trial, is the practice of “testing” the sharpness of a tip and the flow of ink. These markings often occur in the inside flaps, in margins, or on blank or partial pages. Often a name—usually the writer’s—is used, but short phrases or partial alphabets are also common. It is tempting, but often misleading, to overread the “texts” of these pen tests.) Even when the catalog record reads “by an unknown hand,” the books reveal distinct personality in legibility of penmanship, organizational choices, recording style, and additional written material. For clarity, I have found it convenient to provide nicknames in my analysis of otherwise anonymous notetakers. For ease of reference and further study, I have included these nicknames in the annotated bibliography of manuscript sources. Those notetakers who did record their names usually did so with flourish and phrasing reminiscent of printed title pages (rather than the scribal colophon that more typically would appear at the end of manuscript transcription). These gestures speak to a sense of ownership and creative authorship. In about 1689, Michael Metcalfe (or someone in his household) sewed together long, folded sheets to make a rudimentary notebook for the recording of sermons. (See figure 6.) The first record is of a thanksgiving day sermon on December 19, 1689. Presumably almost a year later, Metcalfe inscribes above this first entry “Michall Metcalfe own this book septem 1690,” though in ink that seems relatively faint in comparison with the other notations. When Metcalfe works his way through the entire book, recording on every recto side of the paper, he turns the notebook over and continues transcription from the other direction, on the blank pages that were previously verso. Metcalfe’s sense of accomplishment is expressed clearly in the inscription that appears after his name on this second part of the notebook, running now from the back to the front of the same pages: “This is my 2 vollam that I made of this Sort of Works.”19 Metcalfe carefully acknowledges the work of each minister by recording the scriptural

Reading the Notetakers   69 text, the date, and the occasion of each sermon performance. The book itself, however, is a work of his own. It is not clear whether Metcalfe or a member of his household fabricated the homemade notebook, but this uncertainty only accentuates our notion that these textual artifacts ultimately were creations of communities rather than individual authors. Regardless of who took needle to paper, Metcalfe’s description of the artifact as a “vollam that I made” suggests a sense of an authorial agency that is simultaneously material and textual.

Figure 6. Michael Metcalfe’s handmade sermon notebook, begun in 1689. MS Am 1065, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

70   Chapter 2 In many cases, auditors appear to be using premade books that were already bound in simple leather or vellum; the covers are rarely ornamented or stamped.20 Typically these books are relatively small—roughly the size associated with octavo format—and they are usually no more than an inch thick. Many notebooks appear to be purchased as blank books or, possibly, gathered and bound by request, previous to transcription. Handmade books (such as Metcalfe’s) may be of unusual size and shape, but they are all notebooks and are typically small and portable. An exception to this general rule is the notebook of Richard Russell (1611–76), who recorded extensively in his book in 1649.21 (See figure 7.) His white vellum-bound folio, at over three inches thick and containing almost 400 leaves, vividly illustrates how much more handy and portable the common, smaller leather-bound books would have been. While many auditors prepared a vertical rule in advance, each page of Russell’s large book has a vertical rule added about two inches in from both the left and the right margin, as well as a horizontal rule just less than an inch from the top edge of the page. Usually auditors waste little space, squeezing as much writing as possible into each page. (In many cases, notetakers seem to adapt their recording to the physical dimensions of the available page. Keayne, for example, frequently manages to have the sentence unit end at the edge of the page, and many notetakers tend to write close and cramped if the end of the page and the end of a sermon might coincide.) Indeed, Russell’s book at first appears presentational—more like a family Bible than a working notebook—and yet there is evidence (such as the use of shorthand mixed in with regular text) that he is recording sermons in the meetinghouse. Over the course of the year that Russell carefully transcribes weekly sermons (Zechariah Symmes in the mornings, starting in front of the book, and then, flipping the book and starting from the back, Thomas Allen in the afternoons), his style of transcription changes. The precise, angular initial letters at the head of each line—typical of English penmanship training of the day—become looser, along with the shape of the entire line. Eventually, Russell finds it more convenient to overrun his right margin to fit more of the minister’s words into a single line. The left margin, however, he still retains for marginal notes such as scriptural citations and numbering of sermon branches. Russell’s book retains a certain precision of penmanship and completeness of transcription throughout, but the format of the book never quite seems suited to its intense, weekly functionality. Regardless, Russell fills the nearly 400-leaf book in less than a year. It seems unlikely that Russell’s next notebook would look quite the same. Certainly, it would not be prepared and ruled in the same format.

Figure 7. The sermon notebooks of Richard Russell, 1649 (above), and his son, Daniel Russell, 1669–79 (right). The former volume can be turned front to back or back to front to record either morning or afternoon sermons. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

72   Chapter 2 Richard Russell’s putative “next notebook” is not extant, but one of his son’s notebooks is. Actually, the notebook that minister Daniel Russell (1642–79) kept from 1669 to 1679 contains not auditor notes but the texts of his own sermons.22 Nevertheless, aspects of Daniel Russell’s transcription of his own sermons bear specific similarities to common formats and styles of auditor transcription. The younger Russell’s leather-bound book is smaller and more portable than his father’s large vellum-bound folio. This later notebook is bound at the top, making an oblong book, not unlike the steno pad or even thinner reporter’s notebook of the twentieth century. The oblong notebook appears to be a popular format for sermon notes. Traditional left-edge binding would make it more difficult to write fully in the gutter, and space is always at a premium in sermon notebooks. As with the iconic reporter’s notebook of today, the oblong shape and top-edge binding would be easier to hold and would allow for more complete coverage of the blank page. Like many lay auditors, Daniel Russell includes a vertical margin, keeping it as close to the left edge of the page as possible. The popularity of the oblong, top-bound notebook is evident not only from its presence in the extant archive but from the fact that this is the format, for example, that Metcalfe chooses when he makes his own notebook. Metcalfe records only the bare statistics of the sermon (the minister, the date, sometimes an occasion or doctrine, usually a text), probably at home, and accordingly does not need the functional portability of a notebook suited to reading and writing in the meetinghouse. Nevertheless, he likely fabricates for himself a notebook that looks like many he has seen in the hands of his neighbors. Conversely, Daniel Russell’s choice to use this particular book format may stem from his familiarity with it as an auditor.23 The notebook dates from the period between Russell’s time at Harvard and his early death in 1679. Although called to the Charlestown pulpit, he was not ordained.24 The notes in his book appear to be prepared for the delivery of sermons, as evidenced by phrasing such as “I have now done with ye first doctrine. I shall now proceed to ye 2d.”25 The relatively small size of the book, along with the limited amount of text that could be contained on each page (especially since Russell appears to have written his text out fully), means that Russell would have needed to flip pages rather frequently while delivering his sermons. The fact that Russell uses a format more commonly associated with auditing likely reflects the relative scarcity of materials such as writing paper and notebooks in New England. Any notebook user of the period would be loath to give over a blank book for writing simply because the format was not par-

Reading the Notetakers   73 ticularly conducive for its immediate purpose. It is unclear whether there was a preference for bound notebooks or whether they were simply more likely to survive because they were more durable than loose papers and handmade booklets. Certainly some auditors, like Michael Metcalfe and Nan Foster, fabricated their own books, and some sermon notes, both by auditor and clerical, survive on loose sheets of paper in a range of shapes and sizes, from full folio sheets (sometimes flat, sometimes accordion-folded to provide several impromptu “leaves”) to partial sheets of paper and possibly blank pages from almanacs. While Metcalfe fashioned his notebook in the style of the distinctive oblong, top-bound books he probably saw around him, Nan Foster’s gift transcription was constructed to resemble a codex book. While some used their notebooks strictly for sermon notetaking, others also recorded diary entries, original and transcribed poetry, drafts of letters, school notes, and classical vocabulary. John Pinch (possibly short for John Pyncheon, who would have been about fifteen years old while keeping the book) used blank space at the ends of sermons, turning the book upside-down to record Greek vocabulary.26 The commonplace book of fourteen-year-old Samuel Melyen displays a similar mixture of juvenile and sophisticated content and recording styles. Inside are extracts of poetry by John Bunyan and Michael Wigglesworth, scriptural extracts, and Latin phrases—all content appropriate for a younger student. While these extracts are executed with extremely careful penmanship, there are also less neat entries, likely transcribed firsthand, of the examination of a “frentchman” captured during hostilities with Indians, an account of an execution, and information about pirate activity. The leather cover of Melyen’s book has the faint carving of a figure (possibly originally just scored into the leather) of which appears to be drawing a bow and arrow.27 The precocious mingling of contents in these books offers a glimpse of how scholarly, personal, and pious registers were necessarily permeable categories for recording and preservation. In many cases, interplay of two different “books” created in one volume by flipping and recording in opposite directions highlights the interconnectedness of the respective texts. Richard Russell’s recording of morning and afternoon preaching in opposite directions in his notebook is a simple convenience on one level but also reinforces the complementary benefit of following two different lines of scriptural explication simultaneously. Thomas Shepard offers a more complex example of interconnectivity when he records “The confessions of diverse propounded to be received and were entertained as members” (the

74   Chapter 2 collection of lay conversion narratives known commonly as the Cambridge confessions and taught in colleges in a convenient modern edition) in one direction and then turns the volume over to record his own auditor notes on sermons by John Cotton, Nathaniel Ward, Charles Chauncy, and others.28 The physical relationship between texts in the manuscript volume powerfully illustrates the correspondence of personal and pastoral endeavors for Shepard. Lay auditor John Dane fills his book front to back with a verse and prose version of his spiritual narrative and more than a hundred pages of poetic meditations. From back to front, however, he records the sermons he hears weekly. Where a missed or incomplete page creates blank space, Dane keeps records of money owed him and even the draft of a letter requesting repayment (the phrasing of which betrays some anxiety on Dane’s part in making this request). Dane’s spelling and syntax make it clear that he has had the benefit of only rudimentary education, yet his drive to record and create fills the thick vellum-bound volume from cover to cover.29 Ultimately, his spiritual efforts are bound up with various forms of self-expression—including the poetic—and inevitably are touched by the mundane concerns of his daily existence as well. Manuscript volumes of all kinds were often passed down in families and sometimes ended up in other hands altogether, presumably as gifts and through wills. Dane’s book of original poetry and sermon notes, for example, passed through his family for many generations. In many cases, the new owner of a sermon notebook might continue to use the book for the same purpose, often beginning to record on the first available blank page. In the case of Dane’s book, shorthand writing in a different hand begins recording in a four-page section left blank toward the front of the book. The shorthand recorder—most likely, Dane’s son—fills two and a half pages completely, marks off the beginning of a second sermon with an ornamented rule, and then fills the remaining blank page and a half. Unable to finish the sermon in the available space, the notetaker runs the very last lines of his sermon into a small space at the bottom of the next two-page spread, even though those pages are already filled with a meditative, dialogue poem. In fact, some of these final words of the sermon are fit into the small space between the “Soule’s” last speech in the poem and the large “FINIS” written at the bottom of the page. Such conscientious use of every available inch of writing space in a notebook is quite common, even if the choice to write almost interlinearly is not. A kind of familial palimpsest of pious composition results as the son records sermons on the very pages that hold poems about his father’s spiritual struggles. John Dane offers the poetic record of his spiritual life as a gift for his family.

Reading the Notetakers   75 The book, then, at least as it runs front to back, is clearly a presentation of writing rather than a working notebook. The book of sermon notes that runs back to front, however, is a kind of working book. Its more utilitarian function means that Dane himself records stray business matters. The explicit utility of the book also invites its later owner to carve out his own spaces, even overwriting the function of individual pages. At the most basic level, paper is paper, and in a world of scarcity, there is no reason that the later notetaker descendant would not write himself even into Dane’s poetic self-exploration. At another level, though, the mingling of pious genres is instructive: whether conversion narrative, meditative poetry, or sermon notes, all is soul work, materially manifest in the lay notebook. Dane’s notebook, in particular, demonstrates the interdependence of communal practices of regular sermon attendance and private articulations of spiritual experience. While the text runs in various directions, the spiritual revelations articulated in prose and verse highlight the endgame of regular sermon attendance, and the regular sermon attendance reminds Dane that the spiritual journey—with its mundane discoveries and its incomplete articulation—is never concluded on earth, and certainly not in a single notebook. Indeed, Dane’s textual construction of his spiritual identity requires both prose and verse, an identity only further implicated in his miscellany writings and the presence of his son’s pious recording of sermon notes within the single volume. Multiuser sermon notebooks illustrate how very idiosyncratic these documents are. By its very nature, the manuscript archive is idiosyncratic, especially for genres of writing as fugitive as sermon notes. The hearing of each sermon remains an individual experience. Every auditor in the meetinghouse would be at his or her own stage of spiritual awakening. This factor was in large part the rationale for sermon series that would work out the same basic verses and topics for weeks, months, or even years. Practical divinity and individual cases of conscience also suggested that certain texts (clerical as well as scriptural) would affect various auditors differently. Part of the evidence for the great power of scripture as opened in sermons was that any individual might be effectually “pierced” in the heart by preaching and begin effectual conversion. The reasons that a given auditor might trail off at one part or another of the sermon might have as much to do with a case of conscience as a state of attention. A skillful anonymous auditor in 1681, for example, uses his abbreviated recording style to get down main points along with some fully spoken phrases. For clarity and convenience, I will refer to him as “Doubting Auditor” because he appears to return to his notes later to contemplate and revise what he origi-

76   Chapter 2 nally recorded.30 Like other auditors, Doubting tends to record nonessential phrasing at the beginning of sermons and keywords toward the end. Nevertheless, toward the end of one sermon, Doubting Auditor seems particularly harried in his transcription, and the result is harder to read than the rest of his prose. The last complete sermon point reads: 5 2 Tim 3.7: Those yt only have prepared by fits & starts in a fright of conscience but not constantly [symbol: god] prepare[s?] ye [unknown symbol] of ye humble & yn he bestowes mercy on them I[t?] seem[?] Som I finde [illegible] distraction in preparation as I know not wt to doe. 31

Technically, point “5” offers a kind of consolation. Although you may feel your preparation in “fits & starts,” God will “humble” you and “bestow mercy.” For Doubting Auditor, however, 2 Tim. 3:7 (“Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” [KJV]) deals a heavier blow than the spoken offer of mercy can alleviate. While another auditor at the same sermon might walk away with a sense that fits, starts, and humbling are simply a prelude to the fulfillment of a gracious promise, this Doubting Auditor finds himself in a state of such “distraction in preparation as I know not what to do.” When does he cross out the note of personal doubt—in the heat of the moment, or after he “goes home and considers”? When he feels that he has missed the pastoral point? When his case of conscience is resolved? What the individual hears in the meetinghouse may or may not be a “verbatim” transcription, but it is always a record of what is heard as well as what is spoken. Nor does the relationship between auditor and note end when the ink is dry. The meaning of the record is not static. Here is a rare glimpse of the ongoing dialogue between the individual and the minister, the individual and the sermon, and the individual and the text. Once delivered, the sermon becomes the auditor’s, whether by note or by memory. As meaning continues to unfold, it does so within the experiential authority of the auditor. While the printed sermon and spiritual narrative can reveal much about clerical thought and lay experience, respectively, only the auditor notebook can afford a more direct understanding of the discursive space in between. Another anonymous lay auditor, transcribing a sermon by John Norton in

Reading the Notetakers   77 1661 in Boston, apparently on Canticles 4:12, begins: we have in this vers [symbol: the] spouses dis posisan my sister my spous namly hav con dishan a garden inclosed is my sister my spouse namely why [symbol: the] spous is comp pared unto a garden – fountain shut up32

While Norton is just beginning his opening of the text with rhetorical questions and frequent repetition of key phrases, this “Disposition Auditor” struggles but fails to keep up with the minister’s exact phrasing, recording instead his subjective aural experience (his aural “disposition”). Rather than waiting for the main point of the opening or, even more practically, waiting for the statement of doctrine, he rushes forth with imperfect transcription. (See figure 8.) Disposition Auditor cannot sustain the effort for the course of the sermon, however, and

Figure 8. Page from an anonymous notetaker (“Disposition Auditor”) recording a sermon by John Norton based on aural features of the delivery. Personal shorthand symbols are used in place of certain words. Transcriptions by Disposition Auditor appear in the same notebook as those by Elegant Auditor (fig. 9). 14.8 cm x 10 cm. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

78   Chapter 2 the notes to the sermon conclude in less than one page of the small notebook (approximately 5¾ by 3½ inches). Subsequent sermon notes take up a bit more space, but all are short and imperfect (imperfect, that is, if the goal is to record verbatim). Although seeming to strive for verbatim accuracy of the oral delivery each week, Disposition Auditor comes away with mere snatches of phrasing, particularly the repetition of scriptural phrases. What he has created is a record of his own aural response to Norton’s preaching. In another notebook, a notetaker whom we might call “Correcting Auditor” records the logical divisions and argumentation of sermons by Norton in Ipswich in the mid–1640s. The following extended excerpt from notes on a sermon on covenant and works versus grace illustrates the dramatic difference in recording styles that might be found between two auditors of the same minister. In this excerpt, some words are crossed out and other portions corrected (probably at some later time) in darker ink, represented in boldface below: 8 Heb: Mr Norton not according — we have oft heard our intent hath beene to show the excellencies of the Covenant of grace by comparison with the Covenant among other workes god makes himselfe knowne by covenant and he doth not leave at first makes but me[rest of word faded] the substance of it is the [?] [?] of it is divers as if god would bring the same good in severall [?] and dispensation of it to Adam another to Abraham another to moses, another at the coming of [symbol for Christ?] and another dispensation of it the Cove nant shall be in glory [page break] [word torn] under the post ^despensation^ covenant in glory — 1 the Covenant now is the same in substance

Reading the Notetakers   79 with that made to the people of Israel when they came out of the Lamb of according to Beza the covenant with the fathers was a Legall dispensation of the Covenant of grace 1924 Exod 24:8 but the dispensation of it is divers 1 then it was prepounded[?] in appearance Legallte and the answer of the people was accordinglie 19 Exod: 8: 26 Levit 27 Deut but it was the covenant of grace was in it as [??] 29 Exod [number? yt ?the v?] was on it: — 2 the worship of it was Legall 3 in regard of the many ceremonies that yt did accompany the Legall Dispensation of the covenant of grace: a very body ofcere monies t 4 y did propound grace to be had in[?] Christ to come ours[?] propounds the reason grace of + as come that is the reason he yt is Least in the kingdome of heaven is greater than John. the bap tist33

Like Disposition Auditor, Correcting Auditor pays particular attention to the opening, but he focuses less on the repetition of the scriptural phrasing and rhetorical questioning. Rather, Correcting Auditor uses numbered reasons and doctrines, focusing on Norton’s argumentation. The scriptural text itself seems of secondary importance as Correcting Auditor leaves the reference fragmentary. Usually, a minister would preach on a specific verse, not an entire chapter. The isolated phrase “not according” may indicate that Norton’s chosen text might be part of Heb. 8:4 (“For if [Christ] were on earth, he should not be a priest, seeing that there are priests that offer gifts according to the law” [KJV]). In any case, the sermon takes up the idea developed throughout the chapter (that Christ’s dispensation supersedes the Mosaic, or, as described in the preferred local argot of New England Puritanism, “grace” versus “works” or

80   Chapter 2 “legality”). Correcting Auditor’s notes include many chapter and verse citations but fewer articulated scriptural phrasings than Disposition Auditor’s notes do. He also apparently returns to the sermon notes at a later point and corrects not only citations but the prose of his notes as well, crossing out and emending in a darker ink. As the sermon winds up, Correcting Auditor’s transcription becomes more and more chaotic, with frequent cross-outs, incomplete sentences, and enough variation in the placement of lines that it is difficult to distinguish one line of text from another. While Disposition Auditor has been rather consistent in recording the incomplete but tangible aural sense of the sermon of transcription, Correcting Auditor begins with more attention to elements of plain-style construction. Although he loses control of this recording style toward the end of the sermon, his objective throughout has been to record the structure of the sermon and each citation. While Disposition Auditor seems most responsive to the pure aural experience of Norton’s preaching, Correcting Auditor seems more conditioned to recognize and record specific cues of sermon structure and argumentation. Neither can master the style of recording to which he aspires, but the very incompleteness and irregularities of the notetaking reveal their respective aural experiences. Some variance in style must attend different topics and occasions of preaching, not to mention discrepancies of time (Disposition Auditor is recording approximately fifteen years later, not long before Norton’s death), place (Ipswich and Boston), and scripture (by any assessment, Canticles is simply a richer linguistic source text than Hebrews). Nevertheless, these two auditors have heard, retained, and preserved fundamentally different elements in Norton’s preaching. Even their methods for recording scripture differ, with Disposition Auditor recording aural experience (the phrasing itself ) and Correcting Auditor recording analytic function (citation proving argumentative points). While the tendency to record at least the bare “heads” of the sermon (scripture text, doctrine, reasons, and uses) supports a view of plain-style structure as merely utilitarian, many notetakers attempt to write out as much of the delivered prose as possible. As can be seen in examples of these two anonymous Norton auditors, however, the attempt gives no guarantee of verbatim accuracy.34 Auditors each listen differently from one another, and these differences in turn affect recording style. Conversely, a given notetaker’s recording style would come to influence how that auditor listens as well.

Reading the Notetakers   81 We might distinguish three basic tendencies among notetakers—structural auditing, content auditing, and aural auditing—although most notetakers exhibit combinations of these three styles of recording. First, and most broadly conceived, the structural auditor is one whose focus remains fixed on the transcription of sermon “heads.” Clerical training in plain style and long student experience in reciting sermons from memory mean that ministers paid heed to the branching structures of sermons. In turn, trained as well as untrained auditors often reflect the minister’s presentation of structure in their own notes, and the divisions of doctrine, reasons, and uses serve as the most immediately legible characteristic of the Puritan sermon to modern-day readers. A typical auditor notebook might at first be indistinguishable from a clerical notebook, as both are likely to have a left margin filled with structural markers, such as the following, taken from the first entry in a sermon notebook by an anonymous auditor of Thomas Shepard in 1637: Doct Rom 1:20 Reasons 1st 2 3 4 5 6 Last 1st [multiple marginal scriptural citations] 2 [etc/] 2 ground [scriptural citation] i 2 — 2Argumt 3 Argumt 4 Argumt

82   Chapter 2 5 Argumt 6 Argmt Last Argmt Instance 1 use 2 use [page torn, end of sermon missing]35

The left-hand margin of the page, often reserved for structural markings, creates space for the notetaker to manage content and recording. Ink variation indicates that notetakers might record partially in the meetinghouse and partially at home. Sometimes the auditor seems to record the minister’s phrasing in situ and then to fill in structural markings or fix scriptural citations at home (as does Correcting Auditor, above). In other cases, an auditor might note only the structural marker and then fill in the actual doctrine, explanation, or use at home. This practice is particularly noticeable when, for example, the space after a structural marker is left empty (perhaps the notetaker forgets or neglects to return to the sermon) or when the space allotted for the point is not filled (perhaps the notetaker no longer retains much detail regarding the point). In the same notebook in which Disposition Auditor records his notes on Norton’s expositions of Canticles, notes in a different handwriting style illustrate how streamlined structural auditing might appear. Here the auditor records a sermon preached by Josiah Flynt on Ps. 46:2–3 (“Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, thought the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah” [KJV]). Internal evidence leaves undecided the question of whether these entries are made by Disposition Auditor with a very different notetaking strategy or by a different auditor altogether. (Sermon notes in this sermon notebook on many of the same ministers show a range of handwriting styles, from the scribbled and incoherent to carefully formed letters that look more like penmanship exercises than notes and various stages of gradation in between. Whether the sermons in this section of the book are the product of a single person or many, however, the various auditing tendencies exhibited remain quite distinct from one another.) The notes in this different handwriting may very well double as penmanship exercises. Given the care of layout and flourish of individual characters, we might call this writer Elegant Auditor, notwithstanding the number of corrections evident in the manuscript:

Reading the Notetakers   83 In the former vers You have the propo sition of the whole Psalm They.say though an earth Quak should Com & Shak the earth Under us we wil not fear D holy Security from God or not to fear when yr is caus is a gracious priviledge ses David in the 23 Psalm allthough I walk in ye Valley of the shadow of Deth I wil fear none ille 1 Re from the stability of this covenant of grace 2 Re from the plentifull measure of the church 3Re from yt Glorrous[small blot] Acount of the death of the ye saints and the sartainty yrof 8:of:cant:8: 5ly from ye perfect conquest yt Christ hath to defend sathan [small blot] who ther Lieth under yr feet:Rom:i6 6ly from promise that God hath made with his peple [cross out in correcting ink] to be a light to his people in the day of darknes i Use It may serve to Teach that in tims of their Calm[tilda over “m”; letter (s?)blotted out] To think of A storm 3:of:Job:23: 30 of Jereme So ye Lord would have purged ^Job^ o[wn?] harts from feble fears 2 Use to Awaken al the children of god to study ye promis of marcy iii Psalm:7:ye Lord wil preserve so that no evel shal befall thee [line of small flourishes to end of line]36

While the opening phrase (“In the former vers You have . . .”) is consistent with in situ notetaking, in which Elegant Auditor is likely attempt taking down words verbatim, most of the sermon is recorded with the careful structural balance and parallelism (five consecutive reasons beginning with “from,” two uses phrased as infinite verbs) that argues for writing at home from memory. Indeed, structural auditing grows directly from principles of memoria emphasized for both preacher and auditor. Accordingly, structural auditing tends to remind the modern reader of the formulaic branching associated with plain-style preaching. More subtly, however, structural auditing constructs the meaning of a

84   Chapter 2 sermon out of its internal, relational logic. While text, doctrine, and uses appear to the modern reader as rote formula, the Puritan auditor receptive to plain style would be more sensitive to how the relationships among pieces illuminate a greater whole. Sermon heads alone provide sufficient cues to provoke meditation because the auditor can later reconsider the relationship between two disparate parts of the sermon. Structure is simply a tool with which the auditor can continue to “open” scripture on his or her own. Some structural auditors record heads exclusively, and such auditors are very likely to be recording their notes at home. Nevertheless, plenty of structural auditors appear to transcribe in the meetinghouse, as well. For example, it is common for an auditor to record an entire numbered set (say, of “Reasons”) as a continuous block paragraph of prose, often without punctuation. The numbers are either recorded in the line of the prose, presumably as the minister is speaking, or in the left margin, probably at home. This retrospective parsing out of the sermon structure provides an additional, private venue for the auditor to revisit the sermon, investigating its relational qualities and, ultimately, the inevitability of the whole pastoral message. A meetinghouse auditor combining aural and structural recording styles is likely, for example, to preserve nonessential connective phrasing rather than simply the “main point” of a sermon head. Almost all auditor notes show at least some numbering and heads, but not all are shaped by structural considerations. Not surprisingly, structural auditors are the most skilled at maintaining the coherence of sermon sequences delivered over the course of many weeks. The practice of continua sermon—in which explication extended over many weeks—was the rule for regular preaching. Complete sermons on a single verse delivered on only one day were almost always occasional preaching (for fast or thanksgiving days, elections, and so on). Ministers would sometimes work their way through an entire chapter or a section of a chapter, but might just as likely develop an explication of a single verse over weeks or even months. An anecdote in Thomas Weld’s commonplace book (probably apocryphal but nonetheless instructive) suggests that not everyone found the practice of preaching long sequences over the course of many weeks easy to follow: Concerning a heedless minister. I have heard of a certain minister, who after other duties being performed would [have?] preached also, but had forgott the place yt he preached at the last lords day, therfore he rises up, and thus frameth his tale viz I think I preach a dayes to the heathenishest

Reading the Notetakers   85 people that are again in the world, I don’t think that thers one of you that can tell where the text was left Sabbath day whereat up stood an old man, and asked him why he thought so? Because you do little mind, much less practise what I say to you, and you that are so brisk to ask where was it? Can you tell? and so then he told him where it was and then he could preach tho before he had forgot it.37

In actuality, auditors appear to have paid great attention to the continuance of sermons over the course of many weeks, often adapting recording practices to the rhythms of the minister’s explication. An entire section of a notebook or a single direction in a notebook could be allocated to the preaching by a minister on a single verse or chapter. Even more often, auditors worked back and forth between lines of preaching. In a typical case, the preaching of two different ministers might alternate in the weekly entries in a single notebook, with interruptions as necessary, due to visiting ministers and occasional sermons. In some cases, auditors exhibited particular care in maintaining the integrity of their notes on a continued preaching series. Keayne, for example, inscribes a notebook he kept from 1643 through 1646: Mr. Cotten. his. exposition. upon. the Actes of the Apostells beginninge.. at the 20. Chapter X.. 34. the rest of the Booke: beinge gone. over. by him. and written in other Books:. at this X. he. begnne. in his. sermons. upon the Lords dayes in the afternoones. mo. i2. [small blot] 4th 164338

Keayne, a notetaker with a consistent commitment to structural auditing, reveals a sense of purpose in this book that is much more narrowly focused than his earlier sermon notebook, with its “many an old Eng. Sermon in it.” Where one book of notes might reflect the weekly sermon experiences of the auditor, another book might participate in the larger communal project of unfolding explication on an entire section of scripture. Keayne now keeps track of Cotton’s progress through Acts, apparently dedicating previous books to this venture as well. Keayne’s project of compiling Cotton’s oral commentary is interrupted by a few sermons by John Wilson and Thomas Cobbet, but for the most part, he manages to reserve this book for one single sermon series. His conscientious labeling of the volume and recording of the particulars of times and place complement his structural auditing style throughout. For many au-

86   Chapter 2 ditors, structure provides an expressive form, capable of preserving ephemeral moments of spiritual insights as well as producing retrospective meditation. Keayne’s bookmaking connects the record of communal preaching with his personal engagement with Cotton’s preaching while simultaneously forging a connection between the ephemeral present and a recursive future with his material textual endeavor. Content auditors appear similar to structural auditors, but ultimately, they are more interested in discrete units of meaning rather than relational logic. Elegant Auditor, who records Flynt’s sermon on Psalm 46 with an eye and ear primarily toward structure, records what appears to be another sermon on the same scripture text (or is it a reworking of the previous sermon?) in a single page. (See figure 9.) Here the same Elegant Auditor focuses just on content rather than structure: D [flourish] When the Earth is Removed, and Mountains Caried into the ^midest^ of ye Sea [flourish] When the Waters therof Roar And are trobled So that the Mountains shake with ye swelling Thereof: Then is A Time of Grate fear if spsal spasial Grace Prevent not instru Faith Amongst the children of men In Tempetious Times Tempestious Times 2ly the fa faithfull are Like the Wheat [blot] Apon the floer: that is [?]blown With winde. Tempestious Time [pen testing flourishes]39

Elegant Auditor may be copying out the Psalm 46 sermon merely as a handwriting exercise, so the movement from structural to content recording may simply be an incidental shift. Elegant Auditor, who shifts between structural and content auditing, demonstrates an impressive ability to phrase and rephrase Flynt’s preaching. Perhaps most intriguing, the odd repetition of the phrase “Tempestuous Time” twice in the (reworked?) version of the sermon suggests

Reading the Notetakers   87

Figure 9. Page from an anonymous notetaker (“Elegant Auditor”) recording a sermon by Josiah Flynt. Elegant Auditor records Flynt’s preaching on Psalm 46 twice, once emphasizing sermon structure (not pictured) and later preserving bare content (as pictured). Transcriptions by Elegant Auditor appear in the same notebook as those by Disposition Auditor (fig. 8). 14.8 cm x 10 cm. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

88   Chapter 2 that the structural notetaker of Flynt’s preaching might possibly be Disposition Auditor trying out different recording styles and practicing dramatically different penmanship.) Earlier, Elegant Auditor outlines the logical argumentation of Flynt’s sermon. Later, he epitomizes the sermon as scripture text, a brief statement of doctrine, a use of instruction, and a use in the form of a simile. This work of both memoria and reconstruction is the essence, if not the letter, of Flynt’s oral delivery and Elegant Auditor’s initial hearing. A content auditor typically might record only the minister, the date, and the doctrine or scripture text. Familiar with the plain style, the content auditor might focus on the sense that all is contained within the single expression of scripture or doctrine. Content becomes a singular, powerful touchstone in which memory and scripture become mutually informative as a site of spiritual contemplation. Collations of scripture, perhaps even more than doctrine and uses, are what the auditor brought home to consider throughout the week, whether in a notebook or in memory alone. In a lay confession, for example, a piece of doctrine may come across worked seamlessly into the biographical narrative, but scriptural citation often stands on its own in the flow of the narrative, suggesting through collation its significance in the spiritual story rather than contextualizing itself. Although scripture is understood to work effectually by the power of the Holy Spirit, it nevertheless also exists as vernacular words manifest in print, on the written page and in ordinary human speech. Although ministers often point to textual variants, specifically those produced by translation from original languages into vernacular tongues, the fundamental stability of scriptural meaning does not come into question. Portable touchstones such as doctrine and scriptural citation are not the only kinds of content to which an auditor might respond. Michael Metcalfe is a content auditor, and on the first page of his handmade book, he records the bare essentials of occasional preaching that he has heard over the course of about two and a half years (along with a bit of pen testing): of the thinksgiveing dayes by mr roger the 104 psalm & 8 december 19 1689 by mr clap the 50 psalm at 23 on an thinksgiveing day febuary 26 1691 by mr clap the 1 of theseloneans the 5 & 18 november the 5 1691 the 26 of leveticus the 28 of deureronomye

Reading the Notetakers   89 the 2 corinthanane 13 at 11 Michael Mr Mans Ordaynation Sermon Text out of the 1 of Chorinthians the 4 at the 2 Aperel the 13 1692 ABCDEffGHIK By Gershom Hubbard the 50 psalm at 23 Preached on a Thanksgiveing Day July 14 169240

Metcalfe also records some occasional sermons in the main pages of his book, but often he records regular preaching and sermons continua. The first inside page of Part I of the book, for example, begins: 1690 1690 by mr youn iohn cotton 13 of romans at 14 1690 by mr you iohn cotton 13 of romans at 14 1690 in september the 14 this was made 1690 1690 1690 by mr you iohn cotton the 13 of romans at 14 by mr iohn cotton the 13 of romans at 14 doc it is a deuty hyly incumbant upon al & every one to put on or becloed wth the lord jesus Christ september the 21 1690 1690

At first, Metcalfe’s pen testing is indistinguishable from John Cotton Jr.’s sermon continua. Only the embedded details of “september the 14” and “september the 21” let us know that Metcalfe records a preaching event that lasts at least over the course of two weeks. By contrast, less than two years later, Metcalfe appears to be more determined to record specific content without extraneous words and marks: by mr Pike the 2 Chorinthans 5 at 1 tha the saints have knowledg faith & foresite & some grave asuerance of thare adoption & [enterest?] to the kingdom of god

[entrance?]

90   Chapter 2 by mr Pike the 2 chorin at 5 & 1 March the 20 day 1692 [abed?] by mr Pike the 2 corinans at 5 & 1 that saints as well as others must sufer desoloution & [scribble] bodyly deeth [scribble or illegible word]

Since the earliest recorded delivery is “Mr Roger” from 1689, it is likely that Metcalfe begins his book specifically for the observation of days of thanksgiving and fasting. Even as he settles into the regular recording of weekly sermons, though, he apparently reserves space on the outer page of his notebook for special occasions. The notebook becomes a manifestation, then, of Metcalfe’s connection to these special events and to the community. For Metcalfe, the sermon is an event, and the notebook is evidence and remembrance of continual attendance upon “ordinary means” as well as ephemeral occasions. The irregularity of spelling, the careful but uneven formation of letters, and the unsystematic syntax of recorded information all suggest a man guided more by a personal relationship with notetaking rather than any formal instruction in the practice. Metcalfe’s statement of pride when he announces “my 2 vollam that I made of this Sort of Works” also attests to his participation in the important occasions of his community. He has become a record keeper of self and community. The recording style of Harvard student John Chickering provides both contrast and continuity with Metcalfe. In fact, Chickering’s notebook of 1651 exhibits elements of structure, content, and aural recording, but content seems to be most important. The first page of an extremely neat and meticulous index table at the end of his book reads as in Table 1. Table 1

Index of Preaching Kept by John Chickering in the Back of His Sermon Notebook

Minister Chap Text

verse page Month

Day yere



Where [preached]

Mr Mitchel 6 John

35

1

July

28 1651 Cambridge

Mr Russel

2 Gallai

20

6

July

28 1651 Cambridge

Mr Stow

1

1.2

9 August

3

Mr Mitchel 1 John

9

12 August

3 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel

10

15 August

10

10

19 August

10 1651 Cambridge

1 Peter

10 Jerim:

Mr Mitchel 10 Jerim:

1651 Cambridge 1651 Cambridge

Reading the Notetakers   91 Mr Allin

12 Rom

9

23 August

17 1651 Dedham

Mr Dunster

14 1 Corin

40

27 August

24

1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 1 John

10.11 31 August

24 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 1 John

11

38 August

31 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 1 John

11

40 August

31 1651 Cambridge

Mr Dunster 12 Mathw

31.32 46 September 7 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 10 Jerimi

10

Mr Dunster 12 Mathew

31.32 56 Septem

14 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 10 Jerimi

10

61 Septemb

14 1651 Cambridge

Mr Allin.

5 Cantic:

9

67 Septemb

21 1651 Dedham

Mr Allin:-

6 Galla

15

68 Septemb

21 1651 Metfie[ld]

49 September 7 1651 Cambridge

Mr Dunster 12 Mathw

31.32 70 Septem

28 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 33 Exodus

23

72 Septem

28 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 1 John

12.

74 Octob

5 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 1 John

12:

77 Octob

5 1651 Cambridge

80

12

Mr Dunster

11 1 Corinth: 28

Octob

1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 33 Exod:

23.

81 Octob

12 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 5 Ephess:

14.

85 Octob

15 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 6 John.

37.

91 Octob

19 1651 Cambridge

Mr Blindman 5 Rom:

2.

95 Octob

19 1651 Cambridge

Mr Blindman 5 Rom:

2.

98 Octob

26 1651 Cambridge

Mr Blindman 5 Rom:

2.

100 Octob

26 1651 Cambridge

Mr Mitchel 1 John

12

103 Novemb

2 1651 Cambridge

Source: John Chickering, Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1651–52, MS Am 804, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Note: The index appears on what would be pp. 145–46, according to the hand-numbered system, although the corners are torn.

Chickering’s table provides a practical index to the book, but the detail and precision of the work seem out of proportion to the benefit of being able to quickly locate, for example, exactly what verse of Matthew 12 it was that Dunster preached on September 28. (After all, the book is organized chronologically, just like the table.) Rather, the table seems to be an exercise in disciplining the disparate pieces of information. Unlike Metcalfe, Chickering is a highly skilled notetaker who can maintain intricate structural branching while recording some of the aural sense of the minister’s speech. His student train-

92   Chapter 2 ing is everywhere apparent. Like other skilled notetakers, Chickering slips into shorthand when necessary to keep pace with the minister’s words. He masters each sermon with his notes and then masters the notebook itself with the table. Chickering takes the sermons he has compiled at length and uses the table to break them into their constituent parts: minister, text, date, place. The inclusion of the page number is obviously a convenience, but since the sermons are recorded in chronological order, the information is not strictly necessary. (Nor, for that matter, is the column that asserts, over and over again, the clerical title “Mr.,” creating a sort of inadvertent anaphora in the index.) The table allows Chickering to reinscribe the sermon event (for example, October 5, 1651, in Cambridge) as sermon record (for example, pages 74 through 80 of Chickering’s book). Every notetaker performs a similar act of reinscription. Chickering’s table makes the act visible and explicit. Aural recorders are perhaps the most varied and idiosyncratic of auditors, but the very idiosyncrasy of this style of sermon auditing makes it a particularly instructive style. Many are drawn to copy down the words of the minister as exactly as possible, whether or not they are able to accomplish verbatim transcription. Chickering is a particularly skilled notetaker who is able simultaneously to record aurally and structurally with an ultimate ear toward content. Many notetakers, however, find aural recording particularly difficult. Doubting Auditor, who records personal anxieties at the end of one sermon only to cross them out again, generally manages to get structure down as well as some sense of the minister’s exact words. While beginning a sermon on Matt. 13:46 (the merchant and the “pearl of great price”), however, this relatively skilled auditor loses the exact sense of the initial opening of the verse before regaining his bearings at the doctrine: This portion of Script is pt [symbol: of ] ye Doct [symbol: of ] ye Lord Jes x. & this is ye Sum~e [symbol: of ] the gosple. & ye Scope [symbol: of ] it is to search men by ye wisdom yt mercht have for yr carnall advantage to— D That its ye highest wisdom ye [illegible] & best intrest [symbol: of ] all & every man to Sell all yt he has & buy this pearll of great price. 3 pro:13.15 9 pro 10.11.12: 3 phill 7.8:41

Even Metcalfe, who records only the most essential information (minister, date and occasion, verse, and/or doctrine), likely at home, seems to have trouble,

Reading the Notetakers   93 drifting off in the middle of a doctrine, leaving the record incomplete and instead inscribing his name as a pen trial. For many skilled auditors, shorthand and cipher aid aural-verbatim transcription. Some notebooks are written entirely in shorthand, with the frequent exceptions of structural markers, citation number, and minister’s name. Others sprinkle shorthand and self-fashioned symbols for common words into their notes, apparently to increase transcription speed.42 Whether the exact words of the minister are retained may not matter to every aural auditor. Certainly, the goal is always to record the original sense of the minister’s message. More mundane implications of idiosyncratic auditing might be seen in many notebooks. As in the case of Disposition Auditor, some auditors seem to attempt verbatim transcription but, in fact, are responding only to specific aural elements—components of the aural experience rather than the whole spoken text. Some, like Disposition, respond specifically to cadences and phrasing of scripture rather than doctrinal points. For others, an attempt to render both aural and structural cues can result in many more connecting phrases than fully articulated specifics of doctrine and application. Some auditors even manage to capture the rhythms of oral delivery, shedding light, perhaps, on the phenomenal experience of listening to a sermon, even when a sense of the precise meaning of sentences is lost. An anonymous auditor who records sermons by Cotton Mather, James Allen, Joshua Moodey, Solomon Stoddard, and Samuel Willard appears to be particularly moved by Moodey’s sermons, voraciously recording as much of his aural experience as possible. A thoroughly aural notetaker, “Voracious Auditor” not only manages to get down entire sentences but to convey a sense of the energy of scriptural citation and larger patterns of rhythmical speech as well. The very cadence of Moodey’s delivery on September 19, 1689, seems tangible. After his initial opening of Jer. 5:3 (“O Lord, are not thine eyes upon the truth? thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved; thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction: they have made their faces harder than a rock; they have refused to return” [KJV]), Moodey focuses on the meaning of grieving (or not grieving), using repetition and a regular pattern of downbeat stresses to punctuate the message. Or so Voracious Auditor conveys Moodey’s delivery: They have not grieved, they have not felt ye smart of it. there was no Penye of thy

94   Chapter 2 hand. intimating yt. wn. God strikes wee should be in pain as a woman in travail. Gods Anger is a fearfull thing and wn God strikes we should grieve for these two things - 1º. yt. God is grieved for wn. God strikes its because he is grieved now for a Father to tell a child he is grieved with him for such a child not to be grieved is an unnatural thing wee should be concern.d to have God pleased & be grieved wn he is grieved — 2.º for Sin yt grieves God y.e griefe yt God expects is griefe and sorrow for Sin. if God strikes wee should be grieved and rept for Sin. and wee are never rightly grieved und.r affliction [page break] unless wee are grieved for Sin. and w.n there is this griefe for Sin it wilbe like ye pain of a woman in Travail this is ye. grief proper to a desciple. 16 Jno. 20.1. this is y.e product of y.e griefe of a Child of God under his fathers ffrowns, theres no peacable fruits of righteousness ye products of affliction but such as are agrieved under them wn. God sends any affliction he intends some good fruit of it. Joy is yt. wch. all kindly griefe under Gods afflictions is turned into.43

[16 John 20–21]

The sermon, a kind of jeremiad based on this text of the eponymous prophet, mixes equal measure of topical anxiety, dread of divine judgment, and the promise of joy and reconciliation. Toward the end of the sermon, Moodey offers (or Voracious records) two relatively short uses, followed by a third use of “awakening and Exhortation” that builds momentum even as it breaks into a series of numbered questions, all leading to a rather surprising revelation of the specific occasion of the jeremiad. I quote at length to show the rhythmical

Reading the Notetakers   95 patterns and overall crescendo that Moodey presumably achieves and that the unnamed auditor manages to capture:

Use.1.° hence then make a stand here and cry out o what vile creature is man. yt won’t receive instruction by correction this is y.e Spirit and guise of man not to grow better but to grow worse under y.e chastnings of God —— 2°. hence then a Sining or a Suffering people may hereby judge of ye ending or continuance of their afflictions there are Signs and Prophets yt will toll up how long, are wee growing more hard stupid and unsensible calamity is not at an End—do wee return or do we refuse to return it’s ye. tears of repentance and blood of yt. puts out ye fire of Gods anger. w.n no correction is received destruction wilbe inflicted. —— 3.° of awakning and Exhortatn: let us see [small blot] if this be not our case is there not a great deale of not grieving and hardness of heart to be found among us. there are the Evills to be found among a great many. Q: 1°. is Gods hand seen in all this. —— Q.2.° do wee see ye anger of God in it 26:Js:11. if Gods anger were seen it would put another upon things than is a calm sedate and humble viewing ye. hand of God —— 3°. do wee grieve wher is ye. griefe for ye Destruction and loss of our ffriends & neighbors 4°. are we disgusted at Sin do wee cry out at yt. are we willing to fall

[page break] [Cht?]

96   Chapter 2 out with Sin and take revenge of that. and are we grieved particular ly for our own Sin do wee Say wt have I done, none but have done some thing in ye drawing of this sword. 5°. do wee receive instruction.——6° do we grow soft are our hearts [page break] softned. —— 7°. where is a reforma tion and returning. —— 8°. where is ye. stirring up of a Spirit of prayer. Ext ˙: be grieved at Sin be grieved for grieving God receive Instruction & labour to be reformed.. Let it not be said Rulers teachers heads in ffamilys yt wee have cast off ye. bond but let us be dealers in reformation yt those Sin’s may be reformed for wch. ye wrath of God is come upon us. reformation of yt horrible pride yt is found among us ye. prophaning of Sabbaths. ye. onely way to Kill Indians is at home to do in our own hearts & lives. Kill Sin and yow. Kill ye. Enemy. pray for a Spirit of conviction humi liation and reformation. ˙ / .44

Had this sermon been recorded by a structural auditor, the emotional orality could not have been conveyed so clearly. Three uses, with the last use subdivided further into eight questions, would retain the argument but not suggest the sensory experience and emotional cadences. No doubt the structural auditor would still find the numbered points sufficient to re-create the phenomenal experience of the delivered sermon. No doubt the content auditor would retain the main heads as well as the scriptural references as touchstones for further meditation and examination. For the modern reader, however, unused to responding to structural and scriptural cues, Voracious Auditor’s notes on Moodey’s sermon are at first seductively rhythmical and then disconcertingly specific, offering an uncanny sense not only of the affective, aural experience

Reading the Notetakers   97 of the jeremiad mode but of the exhortation to “Kill Indians” and “Kill Sin” “at home” and in “our hearts and lives.” The end of this ultimately martial sermon may not be a literal call to physical violence (though it certainly premises very real violence against the Indian “Enemy”) but an emotional plea built upon an affective, aural crescendo of grief and self-scrutiny. Aural cues are more “legible” to the modern reader, I suspect. This linguistic-affective legibility is one reason that poetry is easier for many people to read (and to teach) than the more prolific sermon form. Accordingly, or as if to put sermons into a literary context, Ann Kibbey breaks down the phonic structure of a Cotton sermon, and Hambrick-Stowe divides up the concluding paragraphs of Cotton and Shepard sermons to make free verse.45 This scholarly play with the texts of print sermons works well because the complexity and rhythm (or poetics, if one prefers) of pulpit rhetoric are always at work in pulpit literature. There are several points to bear in mind, however. First, not all auditors responded directly to aural cues. It is necessary to recognize the use of repetition and copia and euphony and prose metrics (the “free verse” potential) to appreciate one important aspect of the orality of Puritan sermon culture. No less important are structural and content elements—not just how things are said, but which discrete texts argue what discrete points, and how all these connections are organized. It is crucial, therefore, to listen to the structural and content auditors as well as the aural notetakers. Furthermore, we must remember that the notes above are a creation of Voracious Auditor as well as Joshua Moodey. We “hear” the rhythm and emotional appeal of Moodey’s jeremiad through the consciousness of the anonymous notetaker. Aural notetaking reveals, perhaps even more clearly than structural and content notes, something of pulpit eloquence, and something of the laity’s skills in “hearing” the minister’s words, but most of all the affinity between minister and auditor. Lay auditors display their own distinct recording styles, but they often demonstrate significant differences in responses to various ministers within their own notebooks. Chickering, for example, writes out very full sermon notes for Jonathan Mitchell, his regular minister, recording full phrasing and filling up sometimes six or seven pages in his notebook for a single day’s delivery. When Chickering audits the preaching of Thomas Allen, on the other hand, he usually records the entire sermon in shorthand. Moreover, Allen’s sermons consistently run the fewest number of pages in Chickering’s book, sometimes only one or two. One reason for these differences in notetaking might be the speed with which Allen delivers his sermons. Chickering might need to

98   Chapter 2 record Allen “faster” than he does Mitchell and so turns completely to shorthand. But clearly, the length of overall transcription is also a variant, and the brevity of his entries for Allen suggest the possibility that Chickering simply did not respond to the preaching of this minister as strongly as he did to Mitchell’s. Usually, shorthand seems to be used merely as a convenience—a means to record more information more quickly—but when recording Allen’s preaching, Chickering uses shorthand to record less information. The shorthand itself becomes a veil that prevents the easy comprehension of Allen’s sermon for any reader of Chickering’s notes, including Chickering himself. Because all available evidence in his book points to a skilled and controlled notetaker, Chickering’s anomalous recording of Allen shows the disparity of response that a given auditor might have to one minister or another.

The prefatory material to printed sermons is filled with apologia. Claims that the minister would not have published if not for the overwhelming demand of his congregation are conventional, if not just a bit cliché. Popular and pastoral concerns merge in the constant justification of why ministers publish. Indeed, the act of translating the ephemeral acts of pulpit eloquence into material texts perhaps does require explanation. The laity help provide that explanation—as flock and as individual cases of conscience, as hearts of stone and as souls crying out, as informed critics and as ravished auditors. Moreover, the laity, their responses, their misinterpretations, their applications, and their doubts all help to shape the ministers’ preaching, whether spoken or published. Lay sermon notes do not reconstruct “authentic” oral performance; rather, they constitute a material record of discrete acts of listening that occur within specific communities of interpreters. Within these communities, common assumptions can counter individual perspectives, and vice versa. For example, Doubting Auditor finds uncertainty in an explication that might bring his neighbor assurance. Where their hermeneutical premises and aural preferences overlap, something like consensus may seem to emerge. Where the distinctiveness of experiential application and idiosyncratic hearing occurs, this illusion of consensus falters. Most directly, sermon aurality as evidenced in auditor notebooks provides specific insight into the relationship between conversion narrative and the sermon itself. While sermon notes rarely record explicit personal reactions (Doubting Auditor is a rare case in this regard), the spiritual implications for

Reading the Notetakers   99 the notetaker are everywhere implicit. Conversion stories, with their often ambivalent sense of narrative closure and seemingly problematic reliance on scriptural citation, reveal a fresh coherence when read as texts with generic and genetic relation to sermon aurality. As with the formulae of plain style, prescriptive elements of Puritan narratives create space where the vagaries of aurality might render spiritual experience legible to the individual and the community. Out of experiential variety, threads of interpretive consensus may emerge, though often only to be met with competing interpretive possibilities. Unlike strict theological orthodoxy (or orthodoxies), the kinds of consensus that might emerge out of communal engagement with interpretive possibilities tend to influence pastoral strategy, affective tropes, and individual spiritual application. The ever emerging, ever transforming strains of consensus that arise out of aurality tend to be linguistic and rhetorical in nature. Sermon literature re-creates and refines itself according to its previous reception and implementation. Through the overlap of lay response and clerical intention as well as material preservation and dialogic engagement, sermon literature becomes a kind of shared communal endeavor. Beyond the phenomenal implications of aurality for Puritan piety and pastoral rhetoric, the outward appearance of textual indeterminacy raises fundamental questions about the status of language in sermon culture. Already when a minister preaches, he adds his own human variations on divine scripture. Auditors, in turn, add their own variations in hearing, remembering, recording, and applying. Plain-style preaching may be said to consist simply of the opening of literal meanings of the Word, but in actuality the proliferation of words in the practices of Puritan sermon culture brings contingency, context, and variety. The promise of proper exegetical application in the work of redemption (sola scriptura and sola fide) is the converse side of the potential for human errancy (simultaneously the cause and the confirmation of reprobation). Puritans held that the ordinary means to salvation came via the hearing of the preached Word, but the reification of discrete acts of listening in the material form of sermon notes and the mutable nature of memory added practical uncertainty to the inscrutability of predestination. Nevertheless, these fundamental linguistic quandaries were not unfamiliar to Puritan thought. In particular, a long history of grappling with the implications of vernacular translations of scripture provided models by which Puritan readers and writers could maintain faith in the primacy of the Word. Structural, content, and aural auditors are ultimately unified by their common goal of identifying and preserving the work of the

100   Chapter 2 Word within the phenomena of words. In particular, the successful application of a point of scripture explication became its own prooftext, returning to the experiential once again with the universality premised by plain-style preaching. Ultimately, the phenomenal encounter with the aurality of the Word held more promise than indeterminacy for the participants of Puritan sermon culture.

Chapter 3

h Publishing Aurality S

ermon culture was predominantly oral. Notetaking offered one way for individuals to attempt to preserve that ephemeral experience, but print sermons provided a means for the dissemination of godly preaching beyond the meetinghouse and local community. How, then, could the orality of delivery be suggested in print form? How might the conventions of the printed page provoke the lived experience of aurality? The same branching structures that constitute both practical guide and expressive form for some listeners can become a technology enabling an unwieldy prose elaboration. The formula of sermon structure serves as a base from which the explication and application can move outward with centrifugal energy and create lively sites for contemplation. Disproportion itself contributes to the expressive capacity of print sermons, indicating the places in the text where spirit overruns letter and creates a kind of grammar of spontaneity. Rather than hindering the intuitive exploration of doctrine and use, Ramist branching, textual collation, and other elements of sermon composition open up multiple avenues for plain-style explication in print form to approximate oral, aural, and manuscript experience. Ministers in New England were acutely aware of the complex ways in which oral, manuscript, and print sermon culture permeated one another. The publishing minister was more the exception than the rule, and John Cotton expressed a cliché of English Protestantism when he reminded his readership that “Faith comes not by reading, but by hearing.”1 Nevertheless, when Puritan ministers did publish, they did so with polemic insistence and at unapologetic length. Lengthy sermon cycles, based on sermons continua, originated as part of the basic pastoral strategy of ordinary means (sermons were not efficacious

102   Chapter 3 in redemption per se but were considered the vital ordinary means by which the individual might come to faith). Polemic concerns often informed publication,2 and the imprimatur of the community is an almost pro forma convention in prefaces. Typically, the author-minister might be depicted by a clerical colleague in the print preface as reluctant to publish, but he either acquiesces to the desires of the appreciative congregation or recognizes some pressing need for clarifying certain theological or ecclesiastical points. The minister who has the opportunity to write his own prefatory epistle (usually to the “Christian reader” and sometimes specifically to the “Christian reader in New England”) often finds it necessary to ponder the differences between the spoken and the printed word. In his “Epistle Dedicatory” addressed “To the Church, and Inhabitants, of Ips­ wich, in New-England,” John Norton prefaces his systematic, polemic treatise The Orthodox Evangelist with one such reflection: Sometimes Pauls writing is more weighty then his speech, and some of Christs words after his death, were more effectual then in his Life. Hence I have desired to sow Seed, both by Pen and Tongue; present, and absent; Alive and dead: Not knowing whether shal prosper more, either this, or that, or whether they both should be alike good. Good Books help both the understanding, and memory. They are both Teachers, and Registers, like steeled looking-glasses; that do not only reflect, but continue reflecting the Image to the beholder: The speaker hasteth on, and cannot wait the leasure of the hearer; but the writer is always at hand, attending the capacity of the Reader. What is sayd of the poor, with a little alteration, may be applyed to written Treatises; Books you have always with you, you may receive good from them when you will.3

Throughout his prefatory epistle to this somewhat scholastic treatise, Norton continually gestures toward the difference between the written and the spoken word while pointing out ways in which print might supply what is lacking in speech. In Norton’s figuration, print and its technologies provide a kind of imagined spectral capacity. The book that can “continue reflecting the Image to the beholder” becomes an object of virtual interaction between the reader and the departed or absent minister. The book is not a static, mimetic portrait but something potentially uncanny.

Publishing Aurality   103 Similarly, John Cotton adds his contemplation of the difference between the preached and the printed word in his own preface in the same volume. Cotton muses: “THe Penning and Reading of godly Books, is a singular improvement of the Communion of Saints: as whereby we enjoy sweet and gracious conference with the Saints, though unknown to us, though absent in place, & distant in time (yea many ages before us) and so partake in the in the Communion of their most precious Gifts, as if they were present with us, or as if we had been of long acquainted with them.” Still actively invested in the project of international Calvinism and the course of the Church of England, in particular, publishing New England ministers also appear keenly affected on a personal level by the distance that migration has created. Increasingly, as the first generation of godly preachers began to pass away, a preemptive nostalgia permeated prefatory writing. Cotton’s reflections on the possibility of bridging temporal and spatial distance continues as he posits that though I cannot nor dare not say, that Spiritual Gifts are buried, when they are only dispenced in a Pulpit (for in a Pulpit they are set upon a Candlestick, and give light to all that are in the House of this or that particular Church:) yet where God giveth an eminent measure of light, fit to shine forth to a Nation, or to a world of Churches: That such Gifts might not be confined to a Pulpit; but are as clusters of ripe Grapes passing under the press, are fit to be transported to all Nations; So such Gifts and Labors passing under the Press, may be fitly Communicated to all Churches.4

The figuration of minister as the candlestick draws directly from Matt. 5:15 (“Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house” [KJV]). Increasingly this figure will provide a source of mourning and commemoration as posthumous publications will include in prefaces images of the candle being snuffed out. In 1654, however, a decade before Norton’s death, Cotton emphasizes the differences between the spoken and the printed word. Both speech and print derive from the same original substance, but the quality and experience of each differs. The printed word, we might say, is substantively the same as the spoken but of a distinct vintage. Print may lack orality’s immediacy of spirit and interaction, but it has the advantages of a portable accessibility over space and time. Both media are profitable, but both are ultimately constrained by their human limitations.

104   Chapter 3 The Puritan commitment to plain-style “prophesying” and the sparse formulaic instructions provided in instruction manuals implicitly address anxieties over human explication of divine language. William Perkins’s preaching manual title—The Arte of Prophecying—reflects the balance that must be struck between inspired speech and methodical technique.5 As the oral sermon itself requires methodization, the print sermon requires even further justification. By suggesting complementary but distinct uses for oral and written forms of “prophecy,” clerical authors such as Norton and Cotton provide a necessary rationale for the potentially problematic hubris of publication. While print and oral versions of a sermon might share basic content and an ultimate pastoral goal, each mode also offers advantages particular to its medium. The justification for publication draws from the perceived need for a multivalent approach to the dissemination of godly preaching. The more ways the explicated Word might be spread, the more opportunity for human means to accomplish salvific ends. Printing, to some extent, fixes genre and interpretive meaning. Multivalent legibility, in one sense, affirms the universal coherence of scripture, but as potentially divergent applications of the literal sense proliferate, explanation becomes increasingly necessary in prefatory material. The bulk of New England print sermons in the form of unwieldy “sermon cycles,” for example, often come to press in response to specific polemical concerns. The Parable of the Ten Virgins, based on Thomas Shepard’s explication of Matt. 25:1–13, offers a useful example of how topical and universal attributes of a single sermon might be balanced. The parable in Matthew is opened by Shepard into a sermonic text, unfolding over the course of four years (1636–40), and references to Shepard’s explication figure prominently in many Cambridge confessions and other conversion narratives. Each auditor who weaves those explicated revelations into his or her own spiritual narrative creates another text that uniquely speaks to an individual case of conscience and, in turn, offers meaning back to the literal sense of the original parable through their narration of lived experience. The notebook in which Shepard records the confessions in one direction contains Shepard’s notes on other ministers’ preaching in the other direction. Presumably, the preaching of his colleagues continues to inform Shepard’s own ongoing, embattled case of conscience (as witnessed in both his autobiography and his journal). Shepard’s palimpsest notebook of confessions and sermon notes illustrates the overlap of lived experience and lived exegesis, pointing ultimately to the proliferation of interpretation tethered to the memory of preserved acts of listening.

Publishing Aurality   105 When Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins comes into print in 1659, however, the meaning of the print text emerges in relation to a set of topical and polemic concerns. In the preface to Shepard’s Parable, Jonathan Mitchell observes “that to make sure of life eternal is the one necessary business that we sons of death have to do in the world,”6 reminding the reader of this sermon cycle’s roots in the aftermath of the Antinomian Controversy. The occasion of the publication of Shepard’s four-year explication of Matt. 25:1–13 is the unresolved problem of how to live a life of visible sanctity in New England. Mitchell refers to “the instant desire of many that heard [the sermons], and of some that have heard of them, that they might be imparted to the public.” Not only are Shepard’s words good medicine against latent and emergent heresies, but they serve ordinary means as well. Mitchell also calls attention to the eschatological dimensions of Shepard’s Parable, acknowledging in his preface that “there be some who somewhat differ from this our author in accommodation of this parable, and analysis of some part of the context, referring it to the times about the expected calling of the Jews.” Admitting that millennialist opinion varies greatly, Mitchell exhibits judicious reserve, suggesting that in this matter, “every man is left free to his own further disquisitions.” The precise dating of end times is a matter of continual dispute and highly technical argumentation in the seventeenth century, but ultimately the speculative is held in check by pastoral concerns. Mitchell cautions that Shepard’s work is neither “for the sake of the bare exposition, much less chronical accommodation.” If Shepard has not contributed a new work on the elusive calculations of the millennium, he nevertheless has established the “spiritual, practical, lively, soul-searching truths and applications thereof.” Though advertising polemical and eschatological concerns, Mitchell clearly privileges the transhistorical truth of Shepard’s explication and his ability “to teach others the true middle way of the gospel, between the Legalist, on the one hand, and the Antinomian, or loose gospeller, on the other, with much and sweet clearness.” Mitchell notes that the printed version may lack “some lively passages that were uttered in preaching,” implicitly acknowledging the divergent trajectories possible when moving from medium to medium over the course of time and, perhaps, the potential loss of liveliness when moving from pastoral to polemic application and from the oral to the printed word.7 How, then, might oral and printed sermons resemble each other formally and rhetorically? The problem of representing orality in print form is not unique to sermon literature, but the fundamental incommensurability of the

106   Chapter 3 two modes is specifically exacerbated by Puritan preferences for the pastoral efficacy of the spoken over the written word. As Norton points out, the print form allows for a stable referentiality. A published sermon might include glosses, citations, and other features that would be impossible to include in oral performance. The text remains the same, no matter how many times the reader returns, even while lived experience continues to shape memory of the aural event over time. Especially when controlled by the minister himself, the process of preparing a manuscript for the press allowed for elaboration in prose. Published versions of occasional preaching, such as election sermons, regularly run longer than would have been possible during a single delivery. Even the already prolonged sermons continua of New England ministers that were eventually worked up into lengthy, polemic sermon cycles appear to reflect an expansion from original delivery, a specific advantage of the publication process informed not in small part by anxiety over unauthorized publication. Setting aside the differences in media that we might characterize as technological—the fixity of print, the relative stability of editions, and paratextual framing and interjection—Puritan ministers and modern scholars alike have remained interested in how the rhetoric of pulpit eloquence might translate to the printed page. There are no explicit guidelines dictating how to create a simulacrum of ephemeral speech acts through the written word, but, in practice, rhetorical features such as structural disproportion, figural digression, and the insertion of dialogic voices proliferate throughout sermon publication. Such rhetorical devices are not merely mimicry of orality in print; rather, each medium picks up and echoes compatible technologies and conventions. A minister preparing a manuscript in his study might incorporate actual questions posed by the congregation, for example, or seek to re-create an ex tempore explication of a scriptural metaphor, while the preacher in the pulpit reflects the visual Ramist branching and incorporates referential citations familiar to an audience conversant with conventions used on the printed page. The reciprocal practices of oral, manuscript, and print forms of sermon dissemination foster an implicit “grammar” of pulpit spontaneity that can work among the various media.8 The incorporation of dialogic voices within print versions of sermons is perhaps the most obvious facet of oral simulacra. “Questions” and “objections,” met variously with “answers,” constitute a distinctive feature of the Puritan print sermon. Marked in the margin gloss at the side of each page, these print voices create the sense of the minister as interlocutor in active dialogue with

Publishing Aurality   107 individuals in the congregation. The practice of lay questions during or immediately after a sermon seems to have been permitted in some congregations. For example, in his notebook kept on Boston preaching in 1639 and 1640, Robert Keayne records several points of clarification posed by “Brother Martiall” (Thomas Marshall) to John Cotton at the end of sermons as well as transcriptions of church business in which the entire congregation participated.9 The context of the notebook (the years immediately following the Antinomian Controversy) lends to these entries a particularly loaded resonance (especially since Marshall was one of the Boston congregants who signed and vocally supported the petition in support of John Wheelwright after his fast-day sermon);10 but overall, Keayne conveys in his notebook the sense of a habitually discursive congregation that was no doubt typical of many autonomous gathered churches throughout New England. Perhaps more significant than the actual practice of lay interjections within this meetinghouse was the larger context of pastoral engagement within gathered communities. Protestant catechism and casuistry provided concrete generic conventions that fit quite well within Ramist logical and rhetorical structures.11 Catechism, of course, feeds a developmental line of thinking to the respondent-student. The systematic elaboration of Cases of Conscience (or De Conscientia), by William Ames, on the other hand, regularly incorporates questions into the very structure of its argumentation. In both cases, the premises of oral discourse guide the pedagogical-pastoral system of rhetoric in a manner that is markedly both visual and aural. Passages of this rhetorical call-and-response fit neatly into the visual and logical spread of the Ramist branching of doctrines, reasons, and uses. Practice outside of the meetinghouse also seems to have informed the uses of dialogic interjections in both oral and print sermons. “Cases of conscience” were not merely textbook exercises but the ongoing experience of lived religion. Protestantism emphasized its status as an “experimental” (that is to say, experi­ ential) religion, making the work outside of the meetinghouse vital to clergy and laity alike. Gathered churches in New England that required individuals to testify to their personal spiritual state in order to become full members made their individual “cases of conscience”—and the dialogues surrounding those cases—all the more central to the experimental theology of local practice.12 The oral circulation of conversion narratives—especially the detailing of spiritual crisis and uncertainty—inevitably influenced ministers in the composition of their sermons, just as much as the sermons in turn influenced the contours of spiritual narrative.

108   Chapter 3 Perhaps the classic example of the conscience of the laity directly influencing sermon publication is the case of Thomas Hooker’s ministration of the spiritually troubled Joan Drake in England.13 For several years, beginning in 1618, Hooker had been living at Esher, a small village in Surrey, apparently in large part so that he could provide intense spiritual guidance to Drake, “a religious melancholic with suicidal tendencies”:14 “Mr Hooker being newly come from the University had a new answering methode (though the same things) wherewith shee [Drake] was mervellously delighted, and being very covetous of knowledge, was pleased with new disputes and objections to fasten further upon her selfe those forementioned things; still further and further sifting into the same old Truths whereof shee was well perswaded (and as is said) convinced.”15 According to Drake’s seventeenth-century biographer, the minister John Dod recommended Hooker after much time in extended, marginally productive disputation with her. Hooker covered much of the same theological and pastoral ground as Dod, but his particular discursive style yielded better results initially. Frank Shuffelton attributes Hooker’s success with Drake to this “answering methode,” which appears to be essentially Ramist in its systematic approach and akin to the pastoral, casuistic writing of William Perkins and William Ames.16 Drake apparently responded well to the “new disputes and objections,” finding in the engaged pastoral dialect response to the less tangible intimations of the soul as well as the more intellectualized convolutions of Calvinist soteriology. Hooker subsequently ventriloquized Drake’s voluble, troubled conscience in old England and New England preaching. As Shuffelton notes, Hooker’s popular English sermon cycle, The Poor Doubting Christian (thought to reflect most directly Drake’s prolonged and agonized “case of conscience”) “was advanced by an interrogative dialogue between the doubter and the pastoral adviser,” which subsequently proved to be “one of the distinguishing marks of Hooker’s later sermons” and “one of his most effective rhetorical devices for urging sinners into the way of salvation.”17 If Drake proved to be an extreme or a peculiar case in many ways (an elite woman, intellectually engaged in the theological implications of her already volatile psyche), she also served Hooker as a kind of ideal interlocutor, dramatically voicing and enacting extremes inherent in typical cases of Calvinist anxiety. In New England, as in England, the voices of many different Joan Drakes and other real but anonymous individuals would come to be incorporated into the argumentation directly and indirectly. The dialogic passages evident in print sermons ultimately reflect not only catecheti-

Publishing Aurality   109 cal methodology conveyed through oral delivery but the many ongoing formal and informal casuistical conversations held throughout the small gathered New England communities. Dialogic voices become incorporated into sermons for a range of purposes. While notetakers often record a “question” or “objection” in the course of the sermon delivery (sometimes within the flow of a block of text and sometimes noted in the margin, similar to print convention), many also seem silently to omit. With their inclination to preserve speech as such and to transcribe rather than to systematize, aural notetakers are most likely to include questions and objections. Content auditors, not surprisingly, are unlikely to include dialogic insertions in their sermon record, and structural auditors might only record when working toward a comprehensive accounting of the argument branchings. For the somewhat terse notetaker Henry Wolcott, for example, a preference for structural and content auditing leads him to record simply “here were many objections answered” in multiple places in his shorthand notebook.18 Ministers used dialogic interjections for a variety of uses. Most formula­ ically, questions and objections provided bridging structures and logical links for Ramist argumentation. Despite his background in using pastoral conversation to infuse a dialogic element into his strict explication, Hooker (and others) would often use the convention to erect straw-man arguments in key moments of the sermon. In Book III of The Application of Redemption—a New England reworking of earlier English preaching found largely in “The Preparation of the Heart”—Hooker shifts from a more coaxing tone to a more dismissive mode in his ventriloquizing of questions and objections, concluding his querulous straw-man concerns with “Hence those feeble Objections fall to the ground, and are wiped away with a wet finger” and “Hence that Cavill is crushed.”19 Admittedly, The Application of Redemption reflects the definitive statement of arguments that he has preached through at least three times in their entirety and on two continents, so the vital origins of some questions might reasonably come to more rote responses in print. In The Parable of the Ten Virgins, by contrast, Thomas Shepard seems earnestly to engage the ventriloquized speaker, drawing out the emotional psychology of the query before responding with pastoral intervention. Consider, for example, his dialogic exploration of the doctrine to “Take heed you do not build your assurance from a mingled covenant of works and grace.” Shepard conjures an interlocutor whose concerns might well be based upon those of actual congregants (and, conversely, inform future articulations of concern by readers and

110   Chapter 3 auditors). In the following section, he achieves a smooth transformation of a rather technical answer into a lively dialogue, allowing his own pastoral voice to give over to the voice of faith personified, answering the objections of the reader: Object. But many a Christian that retires [to the covenant of Grace] hath no peace; and so have I done, yet find none. Ans. It is then upon a double ground which you are to avoid; either, 1. Because you have faith, but you imprison your faith, you put out the eyes and shackle the feet of faith; for faith will conquer and triumph over all sins and fears of the world, if at liberty, (1 John v. 4;) like a master in a ship, if he can not save the ship one way, let him have liberty, he will by another. If it be objected, you have departed from Christ, what have you to do with him? I’ll return, saith faith, to my first husband. Object. But he is angry with you. Ans. If he be angry for my departure from him, I will not provoke him more by staying here; who knows but he may repent? Object. But you can not go to him with all your heart. Ans. True; yet I’ll look to him to draw me. Object. But you feel nothing. Ans. Yet I will wait. Object. But you will wait in vain. Ans. Still I will look he would keep me from that. Now, stop at any of these, trouble comes; suffer it to shift, it will find rest. As it is with the anchor, let it down but little, the ship drives; but let it down at full length, it will ride in storms; then it is wrestling of faith that gets the blessing, where opposition makes the soul take faster hold, as it was with Jacob. The woman of Canaan got it thus.20

The reader of the print sermon cycle might well “hear” as well as read the assuaging argumentation. The most lengthy, polemic sermon cycles nevertheless have many such set pieces—passages of transported prose that punctuate and build the indefatigable energy of lengthy explications. In this imagined conversation, Shepard maintains a seemingly natural, lively pastoral intervention, which he achieves by holding the anxiety of a familiar case of conscience in the foreground. As an experienced pastor, Shepard knows well the specific anxieties of the saint who has moved to New England, testified to his or her spiritual experience, and now waits in the prolonged state of anticlimax. To create the watchful vigilance of the wise virgins of the Matthew parable, Shepard redi-

Publishing Aurality   111 rects the anxieties already familiar to his New England flock into lively dialogue with comfort, urgency, and intimacy. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, or the Canaanite woman abjectly pleading with Christ to save her daughter, the imagined reader of this or any sermon cycle is presumed to be in active, prolonged spiritual struggle. Implied in the prolonged form of the sermon cycle is the necessity of perseverance in ordinary means. God can redeem any sinner at any time through any means, but lived experience tells the hopeful saint that Paul’s instantaneous conversion on the road to Damascus is an exceptional, exemplary ideal, not a regular occurrence. Regular attendance upon the Word—usually the explicated, orally delivered Word—remains the primary activity one might “do” in hopes of faith, justification, and sanctification. Passages of dialogic engagement provide a kind of “text correlative” for the auditor listening, thinking, and recognizing himself or herself in the case of conscience. The written record of oral means, whether in manuscript notes or printed tomes, must achieve some measure not only of intellectual-spiritual edification but the more intangible heart logic that accompanies ephemeral speech acts. The inclusion of dialogic passages—as catechism, as straw man, as ventriloquized case of conscience—is only the most apparent feature whereby the minister seeks to retain the liveliness of pastoral dialogue in sermon form. As dialogue may be employed to enact a simulacrum of conscience within a text, so, too, are the markers of improvisation and spontaneous speech acts employed to confirm the authenticity of scriptural explication. Ramist branching and other apparently formulaic rhetorical technologies of the sermon provide a surprisingly versatile structure for creating a sense of the ephemeral speech act. Although the print sermon is understood to be a distinctly different articulation, it nevertheless correlates with oral delivery, and markers of that orality may be preserved—or invested—via the press. Perry Miller once used a musical analogy to describe the difference between “symphonic” Anglican preaching and “rather flat” Puritan preaching, but in many ways the typical plain-style sermon suggests the structural conventions of certain jazz styles more usefully.21 The scriptural text provides a kind of base melody that defines (and ultimately delimits) the variation to follow. Introductory explication of the verse is generally simple, informative, and measured. Lay auditors taking notes in situ often appear to strive for verbatim transcription of complete phrases in these early passages (even nonessential phrasing such as introductory clauses and transitional asides), probably because the minister

112   Chapter 3 is speaking more slowly and simply. The sense that the minister slowly “warms up” is further suggested by print versions of sermons that usually have less elaborate branching and shorter explorations of initial points of explication in the beginning. As the print sermon unfolds, branching often becomes increasingly elaborate and individual points of exploration might become longer. This general movement from theme to variation resembles jazz, particularly in the unevenness of progress and overall disproportion of individual pieces to the whole. Each new branching of the sermon functions much like an individual solo might. Always ultimately governed by the main verse, each branch of explication allows for the breaking down and recombination of discrete aspects of the scriptural text. As with jazz improvisation, some textual explorations might be shorter and others longer. The structure in both cases is ultimately formulaic (we know how to anticipate the branching progression of reasons and uses, for example, much as we can predict the inevitable solos of the instrumentalists), but within that structure dwells almost limitless potential for elaboration and exploration.22 Lay notes, especially those that appear to be taken in situ, often reveal changes in recording over the course of the sermon that similarly suggest variation of pacing and tone. Toward the conclusion of sermons, notetakers with aural tendencies either record much more or much less of the minister’s language. For some notetakers, phrasing becomes more complete; for many others, the phrasing becomes fragmentary. Nevertheless, both close adherence to the minister’s words and lapses in recording suggest that the auditor is taken up by the crescendos and shifting rhythms of pulpit “riffs.” Depending on the auditor’s recording skill and style, in other words, a heightened aural engagement might result in more—or less—exact attentiveness to the process of recording. Print versions of sermons tend to have long, relatively uninterrupted elaborations of specific points, especially uses, toward the end of the work. The retention of disproportion that characterizes the ex tempore delivery of preaching suggests the strategic inclusion of structural imperfections in the print version of sermons. A rhetorical preference for disproportion (overly elaborate branching that is increasingly hard to follow, great variation in length of components of that branching, constant shifting of the pacing of the prose) characterizes many print sermons. While principles of disproportion do not appear in preaching manuals, they are consistent with the negative dictates of plain style (simple, unornamented opening of the literal sense of scripture); the minister does not dictate the length and proportions of his explication so much as he cedes to the

Publishing Aurality   113 insistence of the revealed truth. Moreover, disproportion is a manifestation of ex tempore delivery—a sign that the trained minister submits himself to the inevitabilities of scriptural exploration, guided but not regularized by the formulaic directives of plain style. In oral, print, and manuscript variations of the sermon, the controlling technology of Ramist branching and plain style works to balance the improvisational energy of the experience. An expansive, centrifugal force derives from the Puritan commitment to the literal sense of scripture as the minister methodically reveals doctrinal implications, reasons out the fine points of the doctrinal argument, and then applies the whole into a range of uses. The structure of plain style simultaneously enables the expansiveness of revealing the applied meaning of the literal sense and regulates its opening through method and structure. Accordingly, structural disproportion serves as one of the most distinctive markers of the centrifugal energy of plain-style sermon explication. The spontaneity of transitional markers evident both in notes and in print versions (“but no more of this,” “but I proceed”) also suggests a kind of organic inevitability of disproportion in plain-style exegesis. The Ramist branching that guides sermon structure suggests symmetry, but, in practice, various branches and divisions regularly receive disproportionate elaboration. Acceleration, particularly in the application section of the sermon, is another form of disproportion that contributes to a sense of the natural, centrifugal force of plain-style explication. Writing of Hooker’s sermons in particular, but with reference to plain-style sermons in general, Sargent Bush Jr. notes: “The sermon’s structure was thus especially fitted to the Puritans’ understanding of the way man’s inner nature responded to the stimuli which could lead to faith: work on the understanding first, then proceed to have the heart accept what the mind has perceived. Remembering the Puritans’ recognition of the heart as the key to the inner man, it is not surprising that the preachers of Ames’s and Hooker’s generation were inclined to feel the final part of the sermon was the most important.”23 The apparent acceleration effect in sermons is, in a sense, inherent to practical theology. For some ministers, a clear linguistic acceleration occurs as well, with the most concrete language, striking images, emphatic questions, and aural effects occurring, generally, toward the end of a sermon. Although plain-style formula and Ramist branching premise an orderly, symmetrical unfolding, the apparent spontaneity of disproportion and irregular acceleration within that branching implies that in the plain-style opening of the literal sense, certain doctrines, reasons, and uses will inevitably rise and make manifest their own self-evident

114   Chapter 3 truth. The minister cannot help elaborating certain aspects of the text, nor can the auditor help noting them. The full implication of literal meaning will inevitably reveal itself. With proper, plain-style explication, the full truth of the literal sense will out. Structural disproportion reflects the discursive nature of the sermon, particularly the oral-aural experience in the meetinghouse. These characteristic elements—as performed in the pulpit, heard by the auditory, and recorded by notetakers—translate with surprising ease into print forms of the sermon. Whether deliberately cultivated or not, apparent imperfections help the print sermon retain the spontaneous energies of the spoken sermon. The unwieldy scope and ornate branching that often disorient the modern reader of the print sermon reflect some of the idiosyncrasies inherent in oral performance and aural perception. As suggested above, rhetorical imperfections in sermon literature also confirm the likely authenticity and truth of the minister’s explication. Neither the literal sense nor the plain style is really as simple or straightforward as the terminology suggests.24 Literal sense must be spun out into a range of lived experience, first in putative applications directed by the minister and then through the biographical application in individual cases of conscience. The literal sense proliferates in variations on applied meanings precisely because plainstyle hermeneutics are bound up in the primacy of sola scriptura. Furthermore, the formulaic structures of plain style provide an authenticating technology whereby the spontaneity of largely improvisational disproportion indicates the authenticity of prophetic explication. Between the words of the minister and their reception by the auditory, a consensus of applicable truth emerges. This is not to say that there is a proscriptive guideline to mimic meetinghouse spontaneity. Rather, a tacit grammar of strategic imperfection evolves through lived practices of preaching, auditing, recording, and writing plain-style explication.

The ultimate rhetorical challenge for the dissemination of sermon literature is suggested in 2 Cor. 3:6, “for the letter killeth , but the spirit giveth life” (KJV). Although the record of the oral-aural event may not be replicated in the print version by the letter, the spirit of the event might well reflect the ephemeral experience of the meetinghouse. The necessity of rendering “spirit” in “letter,” particularly in the letter of print sermons, raises a reasonable question about the extent to which written versions accurately represent their oral counterparts. The question is further complicated by what we mean by accuracy and how

Publishing Aurality   115 we judge it. Sermon notes provide a vital piece of the puzzle but are not mere records of oral performance. Related to both oral and print culture, manuscript sermon notes must be treated as a distinct genre of sermon literature with its own conventions, rhetoric, and variations. It is helpful first to distinguish between different kinds of accuracy. At the very least, we might distinguish accuracy of content (doctrine, argument, uses, citation) from accuracy of sound and aurality (cadences, speed, rhythm, stylistic effects). With caution, we might even begin to contemplate experiential accuracy (emotional response, pastoral efficacy, apprehension and misapprehension, reputation, report, memory). While experiential accuracy is most evident in an examination of spiritual narrative, we might also see hints of more subjective criteria in the notes themselves. To begin with, the different tendencies exhibited in sermon notetaking suggest that not all auditors thought verbatim transcription was necessary to preserve the vital essence of a delivered sermon. Certainly, some notetakers strove for something like verbatim, in situ preservation of the preached word, but an attraction to the sounds of the words themselves appears to have held primary importance for a notetaker such as Voracious Auditor. Accordingly, Voracious Auditor’s very full notes and Disposition Auditor’s very incomplete notes would both seem to participate in a similar theory of sermon language in which phrasing plays a crucial role. To these auditors, perhaps, the letter does not always “kill” but, rather, might be activated by the presence of the spirit and so “give life.” Admittedly, one might still distinguish between the two auditors insofar as Disposition is more inclined to record repetitions of the main scriptural verse (responding to Logos as such) and Voracious demonstrates more faith in the minister’s pulpit eloquence (which is no doubt inspired by the Holy Spirit but manifest in verba). Disposition Auditor’s seemingly ineffectual notetaking might also share some of the same tendencies demonstrated by the content auditor Michael Metcalfe, whose habit of recording the scripture verse of a sermon suggests a similar faith sola scriptura. By contrast, then, content auditors who limit themselves to recording statements of doctrine and structural auditors who record bare heads and branchings epitomize the instructions offered by Perkins to “collect a few and profitable points of doctrine” and to apply them “in a simple and plaine speech.”25 For a content auditor, the “spirit” of the “letter” might best be rendered by a conscientious attendance to matter rather than manner, while a structural auditor would privilege argumentation over all else. While publishing ministers directly tested the potential of language to tran-

116   Chapter 3 scend media by moving constantly between print and aural forms, lay notetakers approached these ubiquitous concerns obliquely, through a myriad of semiconscious decisions about punctuation, revision, and transcription—deciding in the moment of recording how language would function within the limited scope of a single notebook and a single sermon delivery. Robert Keayne, a scrupulous sermon auditor throughout his adult life, kept a notebook in 1627–28 in and around London that helpfully reveals how a conscientious auditor might translate sermon language between media. Three of the sermons he recorded during this period appear in the popular 1629 print sermon collection The Saints Cordials—two originally delivered by Richard Sibbes and one, apparently, by John Brinsley. The sermons in the collection are all anonymous, but Sibbes apparently authored many of them; later in the century, the collection came to be attributed to Sibbes on the main title page.26 The Saints Cordials collection is of particular interest to Americanist scholars because it contains Hooker’s early English sermon cycle The Poor Doubting Christian. Cotton was familiar with The Saints Cordials, which he cites in “A Boston Conference” as part of the ongoing clarification of his theological position during the Antinomian Controversy. Cotton calls The Saints Cordials “a Booke of choice English Sermons,” uncannily echoing Keayne’s characterization of his own notebook containing Sibbes’s “Art of Contentment” as having “many a pretious old Eng. Sermon in it.” Cotton pulls from the larger collection of this mostly soul-assuaging pastoral encouragement several fine points that he needs to bolster the orthodoxy of his theological position on the nature of justification and sanctification.27 Keayne’s notebook perfectly illustrates the way in which the laity were involved with clerical networks. Implicated in London’s dissenting circles through his family, business, and religious connections, Keayne attended preaching from moderate Puritans like Sibbes and Brinsley—who remained within the established church for most of their careers—and more strenuously dissenting preachers Hugh Peters and John Wilson (Keayne’s brother-in-law)—who maintained at least nominal non-separatist positions even upon migration to New England. Keayne, who left for New England at the height of the great migration of the mid-1630s, was undoubtedly spurred to follow the godly preaching of these ministers and in Boston joined the church of Wilson and Cotton. Significantly, the preaching of four prominent ministers ( John Davenport, Cotton, Peters, and Wilson) was available to Keayne both in old and New England in various forms—oral, manuscript, and print. A comparison of the printed text and the sermon notes would seem to be

Publishing Aurality   117

Figure 10. Page from Robert Keayne’s English sermon notebook, 1626–29. The sermon by Richard Sibbes preached in 1627 that Keayne records is published not long after this delivery as “The Art of Contentment,” in the collection The Saints Cordials. 14.7 cm x 9.5 cm. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

an excellent way to gauge how accurate Keayne’s recording of these London and Boston clerical circles was. Keayne’s notes on Sibbes’s August 9, 1627, explication of Phil. 4:11 can be compared with the first sermon in The Saints Cordials, “The Art of Contentment,” a print version drawn from the same sermon by Sibbes. Assuming that the print version of Sibbes’s sermon is at least somewhat representative of the oral performance, Keayne’s notes do not appear to be very accurate. Read on their own, Keayne’s notes seem to be fairly complete structurally and to approach something like verbatim accuracy. (See figure 10 for a visual sense of Keayne’s transcription.) Read alongside the print version of “The Art of Contentment” as it appears in The Saints Cordials, however, Keayne’s transcription of Sibbes’s corresponding sermon seems to stray far from his mark. The first and most obvious disparity is the raw volume of words. A

118   Chapter 3 transcription of Keayne’s notes tallies up less than 20 percent of the word count of “Contentment.” Even adjusting for a necessary contraction of text on the part of the notetaker and a typical expansion of the text on the part of the publishing minister, the difference in sheer volume remains disproportionate. Much more surprising than word count, however, is Keayne’s omission of entire heads and sequences of branching from the sermon’s structure. Again, even adjusting for some hypothetical elaboration of numbered “points” as Sibbes prepared his sermon for the press, the disparity between the texts is simply disproportionate. Keayne’s record of old English sermons is “pretious” to him not because it is accurate to a one-time delivery but because it is accurate to his lived experience of the verbal event. The print version of Sibbes’s sermon records a different textual event from that of Keayne’s notes. While Keayne records an act of listening, the print sermon produces a site for acts of reading, contemplation, and reference. While expectations that the print version will be a fruitful text for future readers to encounter are no doubt based in large part upon a powerful oral-aural event (the Blackfriars delivery that Keayne and others experienced), “The Art of Contentment” does not attempt to record that occasion so much as it attempts to create new opportunities for private reading. Keayne’s manuscript text is occasional and commemorative; Sibbes’s print text is latent and potential. When read on their own, Keayne’s notes on Sibbes’s preaching render a distinct pastoral and aural coherence that seems to reflect both the minister speaking and the man hearing. Keayne begins his notes by recording the particulars of the occasion (“By Doctor Sibs: at Black friars: August 9th 1627 / Phelipians: 4th chapter verse 11th”) and then by writing out the text of the scripture: not that I speake in respect of want for I have lear ned in whatsoever estate I am. thearwth to be content I know. how. to be abased: & how to abownd every where in all things.28

Not all auditors find it necessary to write out the entirety of the verse as part of their aural experience. In fact, many notetakers only give chapter and verse citation. Keayne generally does record the scripture text, yet the exactness with which he copies down the text is not critical enough to his aural record that he would check, correct, or complete the scripture at home after consulting his memory or a print Bible. The sermon scripture exists for Keayne’s purpose within the explication itself, first in the occasion of delivery and hearing (“at

Publishing Aurality   119 Black friars: August 9th 1627”) and then, more portably, in his imperfect notes. Keayne is a much more accomplished notetaker than, for example, Disposition Auditor appears to be, yet specific words and phrases from the Philippians text (“abase,” “abound,” “estate,” “learning,” “content,” “I can do all things”) will proliferate throughout his account of Sibbes’s explication. These echoes are no mere stylistic punctuation or prescribed prooftexting. Rather, the presence of scripture phrases contributes to the essential makeup of the sermon for Keayne and for many auditors like him. After giving the scripture text, ministers typically performed initial explication of the text, focusing on the most literal, historical contextualizing of the verse before moving on to doctrine and more nuanced applied interpretation. Notetakers, however, sometimes do and sometimes do not record this initial opening. While content auditors are most likely to move directly to a statement of the doctrine, aural auditors are most likely to get down as much of this opening explication as possible. In this sermon, Keayne demonstrates the aural tendency typical of his recording style, and his transcription can be read side by side with the later print version of the sermon, likely produced by Sibbes himself: THe words are the blessed

The blessed apostell. soe him selfe expressinge

Apostles concerning himselfe,

the power of grace in a growen christian-

expressing the glorious power

doth labor to be content in every estate: to

of the Spirit of God in a strong

want & to abownd. It is a mise for gods

and growne Christian: and are

children: sometimes to speake of them selves

to wipe away the imputation

as hear(?) the apostell doth. to wipe away offense

of worldlinesse in the Apostle,

& preiudice. (Keayne, Sermon Notes)30

seruing herein also for a patterne to all Gods Children, that they may learne by his example, that as they must be carefull to auoid all blemishes and imputations: so especially that of worldlinesse, as being most contrary to the profession of a Christian, whose hope is in Heauen, who hath a high calling. (“The Art of Contentment”)29

[amiss]

120   Chapter 3 Several words appear in both, suggesting that Sibbes particularly emphasizes (and Keayne retains), for example, the “wiping” away of “the imputation of worldliness” on the part of Paul.31 Although keeping relatively close to structure and reiterating basic argument and even bits of phrasing, the print version contains more than four times the raw word count in this single section of opening explication. Furthermore, the disseminated echoes of Phil. 4:13 that shape the pastoral tone and spiritual message of Keayne’s sermon are brought out explicitly in the print version, first in the inclusion of the full verse at the head of the sermon (“I can doe all things through Christ that strengtheneth me,” part of the scriptural text that Keayne leaves off ) and again in Sibbes’s emphatic textual redirection. In essence, if not in letter or proportion, the two sermons pursue the same course of what Perkins would distinguish as “the literal sense applied.” In the manuscript notes, Keayne further demonstrates his combined auralstructural auditing style by moving swiftly toward branched explication that culminates in the first statement of doctrine: 1 generally: he sets downe the blessed grace of contentment: 2 He instaureth in some perticulars to want & abouwnd. 3 He lapp up all in generall agayne: I cane doe all things: yet wt a blessed recalling of him selfe agayne: I cane doe it by ch I have learned: content is a misterie, it is a misticall learninge: not to be taught in schooles. but by Ch: [page break] it is learned by grace: & not by nature. which I note for(?) this and. because ordinary Chri stians thinkes it nothinge to be religious: tho ugh every estate in Christianetie: is a mis terie: it is to be learned: but I proceed doct: God leaves. his children the range varieties of estate & conditions: to want & abownd32

[Christ]

The passage has the sense of incompleteness that is often inevitable in the

Publishing Aurality   121 auditing and notetaking process. The print version of this opening, again, is much more fully rendered. The first three points correspond rather closely: [1] “But to come to the words. First, in generall he sets downe the power of Gods Spirit in him, in regard of that blessed grace of Contentment,” [2] “I have learned in what estate soever I am, therewith to be content. And then hee doth parcell out this Generall into Particular Conditions in this same state, I know how to be abased, & how to abound: every where, & in all things I am instructed, &c.,” and [3] “then hee wraps up all in generall againe. I can doe all things, &c.” Following a lengthy explanation (complete with three more numbered reasons) of why this verse is not “vaine-glorious” and that “Your ordinary Christian thinkes that Religion is nothing, that it is easily learned: whereas there is no Point in Religion, but it is a mystery,” Sibbes comes to his doctrine at last: “Gods Children know what it is to want, and to abound, by experience. God leades them through varieties of Conditions; Their estate is not alwayes one and the same.”33 Keayne’s notes retain the core of Sibbes’s points of explication. Comparing the two accounts, the modern reader could ponder whether “lapp up” versus “wraps up” suggests the failure of accuracy on Keayne’s part (perhaps a crowded, noisy auditory made Sibbes’s words unclear at points?) or a change of wording on Sibbes’s part (is “lap up” more colloquial than “wrap up”?) or a matter of indifference to either of the men. Perhaps more important, the modern reader might contemplate Keayne’s decision not to include Sibbes’s further division of his third point into three more branched reasons (assuming, that is, that Sibbes included those points in the August 9, 1627, delivery at all). Probable expansion in the print version results from the amount of explication and from the intricacy of branching. Alteration also occurs potentially in some of the substance of explication, with certain notable figures and examples differing between the two versions. In the print version, Sibbes offers a vivid, extended exploration of the story of Goliath, but no matter how much or how little the minister said during his delivery at Blackfriars, the section merits only a passing reference in Keayne’s notes. (This is only to say that the emphasis is less in the notes, not to say that Keayne was necessarily unaffected by Sibbes’s elaboration or that the print version matches or does not match the quality of the oral performance at Blackfriars.) In a use in another section about halfway through the sermon, Keayne’s notes and the print version have divergent details but a similar emphasis:

122   Chapter 3 [2 Use] If a Christian be an able man: I

use 2: Try thy selfe by what is spoken: tht

beseech you let it serue to try our selues

tryest thou art a christian: well where dost thou to testefie this: what coust thou doe. dost then cary thy selfe like a Crhi stian: coust thour wth stand fire, resist tempation: overcome coruption: if not thou art an an Hipocrite. whear is the power. of religion: in many Christians. some in high degree. ar pprowd. & will not knowe thear bretheren in Lowe de gree, in povertie thay ar deiected: what ashame is it for Christians. not to wth stand & be able to overcome these things. what a shame it is. for christi ans. to be as prowd. as worldly as pationate. as distempered, as world lings: whear is the power of Religion now (Keayne, Sermon Notes)35

by this scantling, that I have spoken of. Is Christianity a point of strength, and abilitie? Let vs try the truth of our estate then: thou wouldest be a Christian: What canst thou doe then? What sinne canst thou resist? What canst thou beare? What holy duty canst thou doe? How canst thou enjoy the good Blessings, that God sends thee without defiling of thy selfe with those Blessings? That thou are not proud of the Riches, nor of the Honour though hast? Grace manageth all Conditions. Thus if thou be a Christian, answer thy Name, if not, thou are an Hypocrite yet. For a Christian in some measure is able to doe all things, through Christ that strengtheneth him. I beseech you let vs not deceiue our selues; the best of vs all may mourne for our want in this kinde; our Consciences tell vs, that wee might haue done a great deale more then we haue; That God would have inabled vs, if wee had not beene false hearted, and betrayed our selues, and beene negligent in the vse of the meanes, that we might haue done a great deale more then we doe. What a shame is it for Christians; that indeed haue some truth of Grace in them, that they cannot be a little abased in the world, but they are all amort. Why? where is the power of grace? they cannot be lift vp in their condition a little, but they will scant know their Brother of low degree. Where is Religion now? (“The Art of Contentment”)34

Publishing Aurality   123 After the anchor instruction to “try thy self ” based on what has already been said, the barrage of rhetorical questions conveys an improvisational quality both in the aural record and in the print version. The print version extends the discussion of the identity of a “Christian,” perhaps, but an uncanny and swift realignment occurs as each recorder poses the governing question, “where is the power of religion now?” Again, it is not the letter of the text but the spirit of the movement that signifies the essence of what we must understand to be the text of the sermon. The explication is partially legible in phrasing but ultimately manifest in structure, particularly in applications of the literal sense of the Philippians passage. The correspondence of aural and print record follows by fits and starts, with branches lining up exactly in some places, only to fall “out of sync” and then back again further along, sometimes employing exact phrasing. The overall movement of the print version appears to expand upon the basic structure for the oral delivery at Blackfriars. In only one place does the print sermon appear to proceed in a different order from that in Keayne’s notes, and then only one isolated passage seems to have been rearranged in the preparation of the print version. In places, there are clear lapses in Keayne’s attempt at full transcription of Sibbes’s preaching. In more than one place in his notes, misnumbering and omissions occur (one branching is numbered 1, 1, 3, for example, while in another place the numbering is missing altogether). At a remove of more than three and a half centuries, even the modern reader can look and correct several “errors” in Keayne’s notes of Sibbes’s 1627 preaching, which makes it seem all the more significant that Keayne himself does not choose to do so. Keayne’s sense of recording the sermon involves marking the basic branching structure, but the value of his record does not depend upon even that criterion for accuracy. Rather, the textual rhythms that push from one point to the next provide a more reliable sense of structure and movement. In several places, wording such as the above “but I proceed” preserves Sibbes’s (and subsequently Keayne’s) shifts from one major point to another. Throughout both versions of the sermon, Sibbes’s verbal markers occur in the same places, even when the wording of the marker differs (for example, “But of that I have spoken before” in the print version, where Keayne records a simple “but I proceed”). Like the non-corrected errors in numbering, these verbal markers spoken by the minister are signs of in situ recording. For the strict structural auditor (one who notes sermon heads exclusively) as well as the bare content auditor (one who preserves units of meaning in whatever form), such

124   Chapter 3 verbal markers are not substantive. In Keayne’s aural-structural hybrid auditing, nonessential phrases such as “but I proceed” seem to come out incidentally: Keayne’s aural tendencies might lead him to copy down Sibbes’s words before his structural tendencies tell him that the phrase is largely unnecessary. The persistent, nonessential transitional phrases in the recorded notes function both as structural signposts and useful signals for rhythmic shifts in the aural flow of the words. Many aural auditors preserve this (strictly) unnecessary wording, and even print versions of sermons frequently reproduce these markers of orality. Aside from clear errors and omissions in numbering, Keayne’s notes also include many incomplete sentences. Furthermore, the sheer bulk of verbiage that Keayne gets down on paper clearly does not fully reflect the length of time during which a full sermon might be delivered. The notes of Keayne and other relatively skilled notetakers demonstrate a significant degree of strong aural tendencies, but while they often seem to attempt verbatim recording, they rarely achieve anything that might approach full transcription. Such a skill in transcription appears to be within the reach, perhaps, of Voracious Auditor, but is more likely restricted to highly trained auditor-notetakers who utilize shorthand or similar techniques. Experientially, the inconsistent record of aurality in Keayne’s notes creates a sense of completeness even when the notes are clearly incomplete. Or perhaps the idiosyncrasies of recording render the aural experience of Sibbes’s sermon legible precisely because the notes are incomplete. Incomplete and flawed as Keayne’s recording of Sibbes apparently is, the notes nevertheless provide a tangible insight into the experience, if not the letter, of the sermon delivered at Blackfriars on August 9, 1627. Even when clearly incomplete, sermon notes such as Keayne’s often convey a distinctive sense of rhythm and structure that corresponds with meaning. Keayne often “points” in his notes, a phenomenon (perhaps even a strategic technique) whereby the notetaker seems to pause in the course of the line, possibly keeping the pen on the paper, creating a small dot. The usefulness of such a practice seems obvious; the notetaker can look away from the page without losing his or her place. To the reader of the notes, however, this pointing resembles (and is probably ultimately related to the historical development of ) punctuation. “Pointing,” the precursor of punctuation, developed largely in monasteries as a system to aid the correct reading aloud of liturgy and other texts. Some of the idiosyncratic ways that sermon notetakers pointed rather than strictly punctuating their in situ transcriptions provocatively resemble

Publishing Aurality   125 medieval conventions of noting various lengths of pauses in written texts meant to be read aloud.36 Keayne’s pointing style is typical of many aural notetakers in that the rhythms of the recording seem to take precedence over the logic of syntax and punctuation. Systematic punctuation is rather rare in many notebooks, with commas, periods, and dashes used sometimes indiscriminately and with sentences and other syntactical units run together. Indeed, some auditors use no punctuation whatsoever. Pointing often substitutes for syntactical markings of regular punctuation as a kind of aural-receptive marking system. Keayne points rather than punctuates Sibbes’s explication of the first doctrinal point, for example: That gods. children: have lear ned. & doe know how to cary them. selves in every condition, grace is aboue all con ditions. yt will manage every estate: he is not caste downe: ouer much: in want not pufed up. wth riches: he is humble: in every estate: he trusts not in uncertayne riches. he hath a right esteme of every estate: soe he cane want wth out dejecti on of spirit. & murmeringe, a christian is rich all alike:37

Clearly, the single points (which appear much like periods but which often appear a bit higher than the base of the written line) are not meant to suggest a syntactical full stop. In Keayne’s notes, as in those of many other auditors, an apparent comma is somewhat more likely to signal the end of a full sentence unit. Why point between “gods” and “children”? Why point between “them” and “selves”? On one level, the practice of pointing might simply offer insight into the rhythms of recording. Perhaps Keayne pauses to listen to what Sibbes has to say about the learning process of “gods. children” before proceeding to record the subject. Perhaps he pauses in the middle of the word “themselves” to consider recording (or not recording) whatever comes next. On another level, however, the incidental effect of pointing in the material record creates an enticing simulacrum of aural experience. Not to put too mimetic a point on it, the modern reader of the auditor notebook might hear in the fits and starts of syntactical semi-coherence the

126   Chapter 3 intangibility of the preached word. The idiosyncrasy of the notetaker’s record communicates with surprising clarity the elusive quality of effectual prophesying. Throughout the sermon, echoes of the Philippians text anchor us to meaning, even when the limits of human skill—Sibbes’s preaching, Keayne’s transcription, our own readerly expectations, even character legibility of handwriting—fall somewhere between the certain and the suggestive. In fact, Keayne’s habit of sometimes producing a double point (what looks like a colon in the above transcription) suggests that pointing is more than a simple practical technique. Apparently stringing together a series of examples given by Sibbes of “every estate,” Keayne’s use of double pointing (“he / is not caste downe: ouer much: in want not / pufed up. wth riches: he is humble: in every / estate:”) creates interlogical connections across syntactical units, suggesting, ultimately, the leveling of the vicissitudes of human conditions that Paul, Sibbes, and Keayne seek to discover. Our worldly experience tells us that times of wealth and times of want are categorically different, but here we are reminded through a mixture of scripture, explication, and aural record that difference in material “estate” is merely an ephemeral distinction. Pointing helps to render the surprising staccato clarity of Keayne’s aural record, and once attuned to the rhythms, a reader might find coherence in unpointed passages as well. The following passage, for example, makes limited grammatical sense but conveys meaning nonetheless: But doth a Christian learne this at first re: he learnes it by degrees. There is many things to be knowen befor he coumes to this he must know yt god is his father: that all things. workes togeather. for his good that he is in Ch: in the Covenant of grace38

[reason:]

Here the lack of pointing and punctuation adds to the coherence of the whole by keeping related units of thought in unmediated proximity to each other. The disjointed passage highlights the complicated process of recognition and revelation in aural experience—both the straightforward logical connections (“But doth a Christian learne this at first” is summarily answered with a “reason,” to wit, “he learnes it by degrees”) and the more intuitive patterning (connecting, variously, “his father” and “all things,” “workes togeather,” “for his good,” “in Ch[rist],” “in the Covenant of grace”).

Publishing Aurality   127 Keayne’s notes and the print version diverge increasingly toward the end of the sermon, which makes moments of correspondence all the more striking, especially when they employ almost identical wording. After a very long stretch in which the improvisation at the end of the sermon seems to push apart the respective trajectories of the aural and print records, the two texts come back into verbatim accord with the instruction to “take heed yt by base dispayre” one lose Christ and with the reiteration “I say dispare not befor hand: the(?) / spirit of god will not leave the thee in prison / nor in persecution:” (Keayne, Sermon Notes) paralleled with “Take heed of base despaire” and “Despaire not beforehand” (“The Art of Contentment”).39 Despite the concurrence of phrasing toward the very end of the two sermon versions, the aural and the print record diverge one last time. Whereas Keayne’s notes end with two branching points of final clarification, Sibbes’s print sermon ends with a rather free-form verbal benediction to the reader. This difference suggests that the print version does not depend exclusively upon elaborate Ramist branching (a structure presumably more easily referenced by the reader). Nor, for that matter, does successful oral delivery depend primarily upon the ex tempore energy of the spoken word (a presumably affective feature suited for aural reception). Structure all along has been a major factor in the efficacious working of the explication of the literal sense. Furthermore, the verbal fireworks at the end of this particular print version of an oral sermon may or may not be original to the delivery. As is apparent in the contrasting Sibbes and Keayne versions of the explication of Phil. 4:11–13, the oral delivery at Blackfriars may have ended in a final branched application, while the print version may have employed oral markers of extemporaneous clerical exhortations (the apparent free-form closing benediction) to reflect aural experience and ex tempore energy.

An examination of Keayne’s notes in comparison with Sibbes’s print sermon suggests concrete ways in which the orality of pulpit performance might or might not be preserved in written form. To the extent that an implied “grammar of spontaneity” is at work in sermon culture, we can come to read verbose, unwieldy print sermons and sermon cycles with an eye for the centrifugal energy in explication. Books I through X of The Application of Redemption—the voluminous, posthumous, and yet incomplete sermon cycle by Thomas Hooker— offer an extreme case of an unrelenting print sermon opus that nevertheless displays an unexpected orality through disproportion and acceleration. Allow-

128   Chapter 3 ing Ramist branchings continually to advertise and delay the next step in the sequence of salvation, Hooker creates a work of preparatory disproportion, mimicking the perceived elongation of pre-faith experience itself. (See figure 4 in Chapter 1.) Books I through VIII do not quite get to the distinction of “Our Disposition,” which Hooker insists on treating before exploring redemption itself. Book IX—in a sense, a summary of all the Books that come before—is so much shorter than Book X that it seems to be included as if only to further heighten the effect of disproportion. Even though Redemption is an incomplete sermon cycle, Book X essentially functions as the conclusion, even the telos, of all previous Books. Once inside the exhaustive divisions and openings of Acts 2:37, disproportionate length gives way to, if not purely rhythmical acceleration (Book X is simply too long to sustain such an effect), a steadily gathering and overwhelming momentum. In Book X of The Application of Redemption, Hooker takes 600 pages to open Acts 2:37: “And when they heard this, they were pricked in their Hearts, and said unto them, Men and Brethren, what shall we do?” Hooker draws eighteen doctrines out of this single verse: eight doctrines speak to the whole verse; two open the clause “When they heard this”; two more the question “what shall we do?”; and six doctrines are required to open the main clause, that “they were pricked in their Hearts.” Critics have noted that the sermon cycle lacks much of the vivid orality found in some of Hooker’s early, unauthorized English publication of single sermons and shorter series. Yet the bombardment of doctrines—especially on “pricking,” “breaking,” and “piercing”—precisely enacts the bombardment to which the individual soul must make itself vulnerable. The specific density and exhaustive length of the work makes for a different kind of immediacy. Explaining the power of meditation, Hooker suggests: “As men that are stoned and pressed to death, while the stones are few that are cast, and the weight not great, may be they are troubled and wounded in some measure but their bones are not broken nor yet their lives hazarded, but while they stil continue flinging and adding to the number and weight, their bones break and their lives fayl under the overbearing pressure that is put upon them.”40 The overall impact of Book X, unrelenting and didactic in its exhaustive precision, functions like the weight of the stones. Some of the affective power of the sermon cycle is precisely the sheer, overwhelming bulk, proof after proof of the necessity of having one’s heart broken. The Application of Redemption evolves not through an early conceived plan of composition but experimentally. Hooker’s career, the changing circumstances of his congregation, and each pass-

Publishing Aurality   129 ing delivery of each piece of the whole contribute to refine the opus of 1656. The experiential growth of the sermon cycle is not merely in its doctrinal reach but in its negotiation and integration of topical concerns, its modification of figural argumentation, and the adaptation of its larger structure. Hooker renders the grammar of spontaneity quite legible in his disproportionate magnum opus, while Keayne’s notes, especially in comparison with the later print version of Sibbes’s sermon, make the listening experience of the sermon somewhat audible to the modern reader. The improvisational energy of these explications comes across because of Hooker’s stylistic tendencies and Keayne’s aural preferences in notetaking. By contrast, not all ministers emphasize application as emphatically as does Hooker,41 and non-aural notetakers do not generally communicate an audible, improvisational quality. Some sermons and notes indeed appear “rather flat” in terms of aural markers, but many suggest more subtly the same kind of disproportionate structures and centrifugal energies that Keane and others do through their attempts at verbatim transcription. Rather than encountering the mimetic effect of aural notetaking, the reader of content and structural notes finds logical disproportion and centrifugal explication. In structural and content auditing, the improvisational energy of the sermon reveals itself not through jazz-like development of textual themes but through the logic of elaboration and variation of initial propositions. Matthew Grant, an auditor with predominantly aural tendencies who records preaching by Thomas Hooker in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1638, preserves his sense of the minister’s connecting logic in his explication of 1 Sam. 7:12. Throughout the analytic divisions of the text, Hooker asserts his authorial presence and, more important, his authorial discretion with various verbal markers. These markers, which Grant retains in his transcription of the sermon, are first and foremost for clarity. As the branching divisions of Hooker’s explication become increasingly complex, Hooker (and Grant) must continually draw attention to “where” in the argument he is. In addition to markers for navigating the argument branching (“We will begin with the former of these [points],” “We now come unto the second point,” “now, therefore doe three things”), Grant records many phrases meant to encourage the auditor’s sustained attention. At times, Hooker seems to anticipate impatience in his listener as well as his own limited time for elaboration (“But I will troble you but with these two Instances of Isaak and the Church of the Jues in the time of Ezter,” “I could give you the reason of the point but I hasten”). Within the sermon, these surprisingly conversational verbal markers for navigation also often suggest emphasis.

130   Chapter 3 After one relatively brief, straightforward use, Hooker concludes, “No more of that.”42 The subsequent use is more extensively elaborated, however, with two fully elaborated reasons for the point. Hooker concludes his first reason of the use with the comment that “It is a most presious place” and urges the auditor to “Think much of it,” presumably encouraging further private meditation on the point. As he begins to explain the second reason, Hooker warns, “I might be long here, and it worth the while, to show how the course of Gods provvidense doth run this way.”43 The markers of disproportion grow more frequent and more emphatic as the sermon progresses. Hooker and other ministers of the plain style consistently use disproportion as a rhetorical strategy. Although the Ramist branching that guides sermon structure suggests symmetry, in practice various branches and divisions regularly receive disproportionate elaboration. Besides guiding the rational argument, disproportion also suggests the revelation of an inevitable and organic meaning in the scriptural text being opened. While Grant transcribes Hooker’s sermons with an inclination toward both structural and aural qualities, another Windsor, Connecticut, notetaker, Henry Wolcott, is primarily a structural auditor with some content tendencies but little apparent interest in aurality. From April 1638 through April 1641, Wolcott took shorthand notes of sermons delivered by nine ministers, including Hooker, John Warham, and Ephraim Huit. In the introduction to his transcription of Wolcott’s notebook, Douglas H. Shepard reflects on the lack of aural tendencies. Shepard characterizes Wolcott’s notes as “frequently perfunctory and often seemingly unintelligible” but ultimately dismisses his initial speculation that “the stenographic transcriber, Wolcott, was incapable of following a detailed sermon, unable to comprehend the logical subtleties of the preachers, and unqualified for recording any but the most obvious ideas”: Is it likely that a dull listener could have captured the distinctive quality of the “evangelical preoccupation” of Hooker, whom he heard some thirty-odd times in three years, and yet failed to follow a preacher whom he heard several hundred times in that same period and who prepared his sermons with such care as to willingly sacrifice “heat and force of delivery” to gain “strength and solidity of the matter”? The answer seems clearly to be “no.” And if Wolcott can be trusted to have inscribed accurately and intelligently, then it follows that the sermons he transcribed can legitimately be included in any consideration of New England Congregationalism

Publishing Aurality   131 and of the individual ministers recorded. Valuable as these sermon outlines may prove to be, it must not be forgotten that they are only outlines. Any recognition of the skillful selecting that managed to retain much of the manner and matter of the original should also include recognition of the fact that undoubtedly much of the force and pungency of the original was not retained.44

A sense of “the force and pungency of the original,” presumably, would depend upon aural recording tendencies, and the places where aural sensibility and whole phrases come through in Wolcott’s recording are extremely rare. A consideration of the textual transcription alone makes difficult the determination of whether Wolcott is recording in situ or from memory at home. Shorthand transcription generally suggests in situ, but the clear preference for structural and content over aural recording strongly suggests that Wolcott may be reconstructing notes at home from memory. Absent, too, are scriptural references within the notes. Whether recording in the meetinghouse or at home, he is uninterested in scriptural texts besides the main verse being explicated. Wolcott’s sense of what is vital in the sermon derives almost exclusively from the series of numbered points that are developed from the main verse. When recording each preached installment of a sermon continua, Wolcott assigns a “book” number and a “sermon” number. In general, these numbers appear to correlate, respectively, to the larger sermon series and to the individual sermon installments in the series, but many odd variations to this system throughout the notebook complicate a simple understanding of Wolcott’s organizing principle. Toward the beginning of the volume, the “book” number appears possibly to correlate to the minister preaching, but soon the book number seems to distinguish among various sermons continua series. Keayne dedicates most of a single physical volume to John Cotton’s explication of Luke, beginning in 1640; Richard Russell dedicates his 1649 notebook to the sermons of Thomas Allen in one direction and Zechariah Symmes in the other direction (by flipping the volume, presumably for morning and afternoon services); but Wolcott records in chronological order in a single direction, mingling separate sermons continua by four ministers. (The reverse direction of Wolcott’s notebook begins with a verbatim transcription of a 1625 publication Gods Holy Mind, by Edward Elton, the preacher of Wolcott’s youth.)45 Wolcott employs a complex numbering system to track an individual sermon series over the course of his volume,

132   Chapter 3 even when sermons preached by other ministers interrupt the flow for several entries. In a long sermon continua by Warham on Eccles. 1:5, the “book” number shifts within a sermon series, possibly correlating with distinct doctrines derived from the main scriptural text. Nevertheless, the numbering of “books” and “sermons” by Warham proceeds in numerical order, even when interrupted by the recording of sermons by Huit or Hooker. In various places, Wolcott’s system is not immediately clear to the reader. In the second half of the volume, Wolcott occasionally records, for example, “15 book 6½ by Mr Warham at Windsor August 21 1640” followed by a separate entry for that same day, “16 book 1½ sermon by Mr Warham at Windsor August 21 1640.”46 Corrections made to the number sequences occur occasionally, suggesting that these apparent irregularities in Wolcott’s numbering system are not mistakes but a deliberate strategy. Like some structural auditors discussed in the previous chapter, Wolcott devises his own idiosyncratic system for managing his listening experience. Wolcott’s particular system may be his own, but his instinct to devise a system to manage his listening experience is common to many notetakers. Intriguingly, Wolcott’s numbering system seems to extend beyond those series that he is auditing in their entirety. Wolcott records “2 book 3 sermon by Mr Davenport at Hartford May 16 1638 / text 1 John 5 4 and this is the victory that overcometh the world / even of faith,” for example, even though he apparently hears (or, in any case, only records) one discrete sermon in a longer series away from his regular Windsor preaching.47 The entry for “2 book 3 sermon” by Davenport in Hartford, for example, is the only installment of the series that Wolcott records (and, presumably, hears), yet he tracks the pieces against the whole, just as he does in Windsor with his regular sermon attendance. The relationship of the parts to the whole is clearly of paramount importance to Wolcott’s understanding of the experience of the sermon. Although Wolcott has almost none of the aurality that Keayne and others demonstrate (perhaps accounting for that elusive “force and pungency”), his idiosyncratic structural arrangement and content auditing nevertheless reveal the improvisational, centrifugal energy of the preached sermon. Because Wolcott is a structural and content auditor, the length and verbal “pungency” of disproportion is invisible in the sermon notes, but disproportion of the listening experience is everywhere implied in what is consistent and inconsistent in his notebook record. A sermon delivered by Warham on one day may be recorded with multiple numbered sections and branches, none described by Wolcott with more than a simple statement of bare content. The next sermon might be

Publishing Aurality   133 only the doctrine repeated again, or perhaps only one new use. The disproportion of Warham’s pulpit emphases is folded into the nearly impassive record of Wolcott’s notebook, and the subjectivity of Wolcott’s own listening experience renders Warham’s delivery even more disproportionate. On one day, he is either more or less attentive, while on another day the connections between the parts and the whole are either more or less compelling. Wolcott seems to respond very differently to Thursday lectures and to regular pastoral preaching sequences, for example. In most cases, he forgoes recording branched explication of the doctrinal argumentation of the lecture, preferring in many cases to encapsulate the argument simply by giving the governing verse of scripture or by characterizing the argument in a single phrase—for example, “arguments proving that sprinkling rather than / dipping is to be used in baptism against Mr Chauncy of Plymouth.”48 Wolcott’s preference for what we might categorize as pure content auditing in the case of lecture sermons suggests that his auditing response differs according to the genre of the sermon itself. Throughout the notebook, Wolcott consistently records his oddly numbered system of discrete “books” and “sermons” along with the name, date, and place of delivery. At the beginning of almost every entry, Wolcott also records the main scripture explicated (the governing verse of the “book” series), writes out that verse in its entirety, and also transcribes the governing doctrine of that “book” or “sermon.” Wolcott’s front-loaded, explicit reiteration of these details effectively anchors the sermon explication of any given day within the larger movement of the sermon series. Wolcott can then record as much or as little branched explication as is relevant on a given day without losing track of the overall movement of the sermon series. Wolcott uses the technology of plainstyle structure to regulate the centrifugal energy inherent in plain-style hermeneutics, as the sermon continua of each minister evolves over time. Wolcott’s habits of structural auditing make legible the centrifugal energy of both the pulpit performance from week to week and the printed versions that often come from sermons continua. Wolcott records Hooker’s explication of Acts 2:37 (corresponding to Book X of The Application of Redemption) off and on throughout the notebooks, presumably when business of one kind or other brings him to Hartford from Windsor. His structural auditing corresponds rather precisely with posthumous publication in the specific wording of many heads and branches, if not in the fullness of Hooker’s well-known pulpit eloquence. It is remarkably easy to locate the points that Wolcott records in the corresponding prose passages of The Application of Redemption.

134   Chapter 3 Wolcott’s opportunities to hear Hooker’s sermon continua on Acts 2:37 do not come frequently enough to correlate the notes against the related published sermon cycle in its entirety, nor is Wolcott trying for anything like a full, verbatim record. Rather, Wolcott’s notes on Hooker provide an important clue to what discontinuous attendance upon the word might look like via the hand of a structural and content auditor. Revisiting the sermon notes must have required unique, nonlinear reading practices, perhaps not unlike the ways that a reader of a disproportionately elaborated sermon cycle would have approached the print text.49 Wolcott’s discontinuous attendance upon multiple threads of sermons continua simultaneously required ingenuity in recording and reading. While Wolcott’s particular approach is perhaps unique, the necessity for such recording innovation was typical. While the overall strategy of Wolcott’s recording is to bring broad, argumentative coherence to the minister’s weekly explication, his recording on individual days suggests a discursive engagement with discrete units of meaning. In specific places, Wolcott’s sense of a structural imperative gives way to complementary content auditing instincts, a discursive aural-manuscript mode that ultimately informs (and is informed by) nonlinear print reading practices. Out of all the notes taken by Wolcott, only those on Hooker’s explication of Acts 2:37 correspond to any sermon literature in print, providing one example of lived sermon experience, in contrast to a specific textual articulation of that oral-aural phenomenon. Accuracy, as I have maintained throughout, is not the point. Indeed, there are points where Wolcott’s recorded heads are amazingly close in phrasing and in structure. What appears in the print version of Book X of Redemption that does not appear in Wolcott’s shorthand version of Hooker’s explication of Acts 2:37 is the full prosaic development, collation of scriptural citations, and vivid figurative language. What is vital for Wolcott is not the well-wrought prose from the man who could “put a king in his pocket”50 but rather, pure argument: a scriptural text and the doctrine derived thereof (both of which Wolcott writes out in their entirety at the beginning of each new entry), the branching reasons and explanations, and the precisely articulated uses. For the most part, Wolcott can achieve what is “pretious” to his aural experience of Hooker’s sermon with bare heads only. On a few occasions, however, Wolcott seems carried away, usually by the explicit, precise articulation of a doctrinal point of application. For Wolcott, such elaboration usually manifests in the form of increased recording of branches rather than inclu-

Publishing Aurality   135 sion of more prose content. When Wolcott includes many branched heads in his transcriptions for a given day, he likely reflects the amount of detail and elaboration offered by the minister himself. Sometimes, however, the detail involved in his structural recording suggests that Wolcott is particularly engaged in the preaching by a certain minister on a certain day. Unlike Voracious Auditor, who consistently records much more detail for some ministers and much less for others, Wolcott seems to demonstrate variations in his aural experience on a day-by-day basis, regardless of who is preaching. His elaborated transcriptions suggest places and times when his aural experience proved particularly potent. For Wolcott, these nonsensational, non-aural sites constitute the “force and pungency” of recorded experience. In other places, truncated references, references to notes in other notebooks and to other preaching occasions, and lists written in tight, parallel prose suggest another kind of attentiveness. Wolcott’s record of a fast-day sermon, transcribed in its entirety, provides an excellent example: 12 book 2 sermon by Mr Warham at Windsor on a day of humiliation for England July 29 1640 9 Ezekial 4 and the lord said unto him go through the midst of the city through the midst of Jerusalem and set a mark on the foreheads of the men that sigheth and that cry for all the abominations that are done in the midst thereof doctrine that the sins of the other men as well as of ourselves ought to minister matter of mourning unto all and doth unto those that are marked of God 1 reason because God himself requires it of our hands 2 reason because sin is an abomination in their eyes 3 reason because all misery is an object of pity 4 reason judgement is bound up in sin 1 use to reprove the neglect of this duty use exhortation to us to mourn for the sins of others 1 God calls for it answer our own welfare lies in Englands welfare answer consider we have helped forward their actions answer a pitiful spirit is a godlike spirit answer if prayers will not [h]elp them the more cause we have to mourn

136   Chapter 3 answer suppose it were our cause would not they pray for you answer consider how acceptable it will be unto thee answer it may save us in a time of danger51

Wolcott’s structural- and content-oriented style of auditing may not be as immediately legible to the modern reader—especially if compared with the inconsistent verbatim tendencies of Keayne or the tangible aural cadences of Voracious Auditor—but over the course of his notebook, the rhythms and variations in his recording reveal a complex, discursive engagement with the preaching of his regular and occasional ministers. The staccato anaphora at the beginning of lines (reason . . . reason . . . reason . . . ; answer . . . answer . . . answer . . . ) at first resemble the incidental poetics of John Chickering’s index of preaching (Mr . . . Mr . . . Mr . . . ). The repetitions of recorded structure stand in for the unrecorded cadences of the minister’s voice. More deeply, Wolcott’s insistent parallel construction of his aural experience suggests not only what he hears but how he organizes the minister’s explication. Relational logic of the parts to the sum appears to be a key component to Wolcott’s lived piety. Wolcott’s record of his aural experience of Hooker further reveals an alternative view of the rhetorical power of the prominent minister’s pulpit endeavors. Modern readers have particularly emphasized the vivid force of Hooker’s “homely imagery” as a part of his pulpit eloquence, his preparationism, and his “activist aesthetic,”52 and his preaching as represented in printed sermons certainly bears out this reputation. For Wolcott, however, the power of Hooker’s preaching resided in (or, in any case, was made manifest in) his inexorably branching explication and precise doctrinal argumentation. Wolcott’s twentieth-century transcriber remarks that “Hooker’s published works . . . explore with an appalling thoroughness the process by which a depraved sinner may hope to achieve redemption and ultimate salvation,”53 but this characterization pertains just as accurately to Hooker’s spoken works as recorded by Wolcott. While giving himself over to the disproportions of a given day’s sermon delivery, Wolcott seems able to telescope in and out, connecting the minute content detail and broadest structural context. More than to homely imagery, Wolcott responds to Hooker’s “appalling thoroughness” in his record of the aural event. Wolcott is not completely tone-deaf to the vivid, homely language of Hooker’s preaching: in several places in his record of the Acts 2:37 explication and elsewhere, Wolcott notes the liveliness Hooker’s language, if only in passing. In describing the third of “4 particulars” as to why sinners resolve to “bear” their

Publishing Aurality   137 sinful state rather than seek remedy, Wolcott records with uncharacteristic incompleteness and seeming distraction, nevertheless communicating a tangible sense of fear and self-doubt proper for the attentive Puritan saint: 3ly he sayeth if God do call me to an account yet I shall be able to answer him and will repent hereafter when old or dying answer as to the rich glutton thou mayest have no time nor heart nor acceptance54

In a later doctrine, some months later, Wolcott seems to cultivate his own artful balance of homely imagery when he elaborates three points of advice that ministers might use “with sinners when they are in perplexity of spirit”: . . . . 1 be not slight in the search of the wound 2ly be not too hasty to heal the wound 3ly be not too suddenly confident of the cure55

Although reference to “the rich glutton” recorded by Wolcott is not present in the print version of the corresponding sermon, the subsequent three points of advice appear with almost identical wording in both sources. Where Wolcott records what appears essentially to be a conceit of sin-as-wound in list form, the print version offers a shifting series of figurative explications: the first point turns on a similitude of wood chopping (“He that cleaves knotty logs must have the sharpest wedges and hardest blowes”), the second draws on a series of purging and cleaning similitudes (“Old and deep sores as they have been long in gathering corrupt humors, so they must have a time to wast and wear them away, which wil not be done in a moments; old stayns must lye long in soak, and have many fresh lavers before in reaction they can be cleansed”), and the third describes the proper patience required of the convert through a series of biblical examples.56 The precise coincidence of the structural, doctrinal framework of the Acts 2:37 explication in Wolcott’s shorthand notes and Hooker’s posthumous print sermon suggests the potential for stability within the “appalling thoroughness” and centrifugal branchings that both Wolcott and Hooker seem to privilege, albeit each according to his own tendencies. Though apparently following the improvisational energy of plain-style explication, the method of branching simultaneously provides a technology to control centrifugal meaning. By contrast, such markers of content auditing such as a vivid similitude might

138   Chapter 3 be retained from one articulation to another (as evidenced by Keayne’s recording of Sibbes’s preaching) or be created, changed, improvised, emphasized, or omitted for specific uses and by different speakers, hearers, and writers (as evidenced by comparing versions of the sermons on Acts 2:37). Both oral and print sermons utilize predictable structural development and explicit verbal markers to help the auditor and reader, respectively, navigate the relational logic of explication and its doctrinal application. The notetaker stands in a unique position to oral and print modes, replicating, omitting, or enhancing those navigational technologies in ways that alternately reflect and demand convention, accidentally and strategically disrupt those conventions, and coordinate and blur the authorial agency of minister and auditor. Print conventions of structural markers in the margin simultaneously draw from and determine notetaking preferences, with the effect that the reader of a print sermon might conjure the aural experience of the meetinghouse as well as the commemorative referentiality of the sermon notebook. Manuscript articulations of sermon literature tend to reflect the auditory tendencies of the individual recorder who is both creator and primary reader. Oral and print articulations, by contrast, tend to keep all modes of aurality in balance. A content, structural, or aural auditor might find in the print reading experience whatever mode of spiritual argumentation he or she finds most compelling. Particularly because print sermons may be read nonlinearly, this medium more easily serves a range of aural tendencies. Although a reader could proceed straight through the printed text, following the systematic movement from doctrine to use, the typographical presentation of text encourages indirect progression. The reader is invited to jump from one marked section to another, to skim a list or an area of acceleration, to dawdle (or skip over) elaborated disproportion, and, always, to linger in specific sites that “speak” to the subjectivity of the reading experience. Specific content in such sites might demand intellectual engagement with a doctrinal point, invite excursus outside the sermon text itself with a concatenation of collated scriptural prooftexts, or provide a similitude for extended contemplation and personal application. In all modes of sermon literature—print, oral, and manuscript—the centrifugal energy of plain-style explication is held in balance by the predictability of the structural formula, on the one hand, and by the improvisational, subjective experience of the reader, speaker, and auditor, on the other. Perhaps the nonlinearity of the written sermon allows spirit to remain in the letter of explication. Much of the organization and physical presentation of sermon text encourages a distinctly different kind of reading experience. The

Publishing Aurality   139 reader who experiences the text nonlinearly, or even the one who reads straight through, may or may not notice the principles of disproportion and acceleration at work in the text. In part, the sheer volume of text tends to level off the overall effect of these techniques. The notetaker, like the publishing minister, can indulge in the full and precise rehearsal of even minor points of consideration. Similarly, the reader is enabled to dwell upon passages that speak to his or her own individual case of conscience. The reader constructs meaning in the sermon, whether in manuscript or print, imbuing the letter of explication with the spirit of experiential revelation. If the permeability of modes of sermon publication—oral, print, and manuscript—helps bridge the potential gap between letter and spirit in practice, a reliable, contemporaneous theoretical explanation of the phenomenon remains somewhat elusive. The implied grammar of spontaneity suggested in this chapter illuminates the practice of plain-style explication but does not clearly elucidate the theory of literal sense, the object of that explication. In the following chapter, the problem of literal sense is addressed through contradictions inherent in Reform assumptions about scripture generally and vernacular scripture in particular. Fortunately, the Reformed sermon culture that ostensibly privileges inspired, spontaneous speech as authentic simultaneously reveres transparency of exegetical method. In Puritan attempts to make all explication conform to the plain explication of a literal sense of scripture, we might find the foundations of a methodologically consistent explanation of the precise relationship between divine and human language and, in essence, a Puritan literary theory.

Chapter 4

h Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling W

hile studying at Harvard College, Thomas Weld III kept a small commonplace book in which he recorded pious, secular, academic, and administrative miscellany. At the beginning of the volume, Weld transcribes multiple pages of jokes and humorous anecdotes. Much of the humor turns on verbal play and punning, as in one joke about a minister who “had a great mind to cite the originall” Greek text in his explication of an epistle wherein Paul “speakes perticularly to one man συ γαρ .” The Greek phrase might translate ´ ρ intensifying the roughly as “indeed you” (with the coordinating particle γα second-person pronoun συ) and can be transliterated as “su gar.” Weld’s punch line requires but minimal familiarity with Greek; he describes how the explicating minister “burst out with a great exclamation. how sweetly doth ye Apostle speake, tis sugar [in the] originall.”1 The sweetness humorously attributed to the Pauline text might remind the reader of the nightly reading habits of John Cotton, who reputedly claimed, “I love to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before I go to sleep.”2 Indeed, the sensual corporeality of human-sacred texts (whether of Paul or of Calvin) apparently is a trope common enough to help drive the humor. The obvious butt of Weld’s joke on scriptural translation may be the pretension of the minister, but—perhaps more precisely—the punch line also suggests the ease with which pious attention to the letter of the Word might lead to misprision. At the heart of the joke lies the problem of where exactly a commitment to the literal sense of scripture might lead. Other stories in Weld’s compendium turn on similar cases of clerical enthusiasm for explicating the letter of the Word. In another joke, for example, a man preaching on the verse “whatsoever is not of faith is Sin” (Rom. 14:23)

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   141 is challenged by his “learned Auditory” for running “praeter textum” (outside of his text, presumably in violation of the directives of plain style) and replies that his justification for wandering explication is “contained in the first word of his text, viz. whatsoever.”3 Weld’s jokes presume a certain nimbleness of scriptural literacy among the laity, as evidenced, for example, in the story of a hungry Harvard waiter who, too impatient to wait for leftover scraps after the students finish their meal, eats the meat out of their pie, replacing the filling with grass and inscribing the crust with the motto “all flesh is grass” (Isa. 40:6; 1 Pet. 1:24).4 The Latin “alia” (“another”) precedes each subsequent entry in Weld’s compendium of humorous stories, as if the surprisingly jovial third-generation Puritan punctuates each laugh with the proverbial “I’ve got a million of them.” Weld’s notebook is as unusual as it is exemplary, revealing a third-generation Puritan who is simultaneously pious and irreverent. Apparently, Weld records the jokes and anecdotes about the first few generations of New England Pur­ itanism because the humorous stories suit his temperament, but clearly he does not invent these stories himself. Rather, he seems to record jokes that are already in circulation. While it is tempting to compare Weld with his firstgeneration grandfather (contributor to The Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, & Libertines as well as the Bay Psalm Book), such a contrast would only superficially suggest, yet again, declension in the Bible commonwealth. Taken on its own, Weld’s collection of jokes suggests a shared understanding in seventeenth-century New England sermon culture that close attention to scriptural language is necessary but also problematic. The point is not that Puritans developed a sense of humor by the third generation5 but, rather, that the problematic relationship between human and divine language was a common concern that created a shared sensibility for particular kinds of verbal play in the theory and practice of sermon language. Weld records humorous anecdotes that turn, in part, upon the deceptive simplicity of plain-style explication of the literal sense and, more fundamentally, upon the complicated implications of the five solas of Reformation theology. Indeed, the proverbial spiritual empowerment of Protestant principles such as sola fide and sola scriptura proves to be a double-edged sword, particularly with the Calvinist emphasis on innate depravity. Faith and scripture are gifts, not the tools, of redemption. The ordinary means to salvation require an enabled understanding, so the spiritual journey is implicated in intellectual venture as well. A proper comprehension of scripture can be productive of faith, but faith is necessary for a proper comprehension of scripture. Gracious intervention

142   Chapter 4 is necessary to overcome spiritual as well as intellectual debility. Human endeavor may be enabled through a work of the Spirit, but even once justified, the spiritual and intellectual self remains compromised by the fallen language and understanding of this world. Presumed Visible Saints—laity and clergy alike— are subject to the vagaries of postlapsarian coherence. Nevertheless, individuals were responsible for pursuing spiritual understanding through ordinary means such as scripture reading, sermon attendance, and other verbal-textual activities. As this chapter demonstrates, theories and practices of sermon literature allowed for a kind of enabled debility of human linguistic endeavor, through which impairment might be embraced as a method for achieving spiritual understanding. The vagaries of scripture translation, for example, rather than proving the impossibility of human articulation of divine truths, might demonstrate the glorious copia of the Word applied through the centrifugality of explication. Divine unity of scripture becomes manifest in the accumulation of partial comprehensions of Logos. Preaching manuals provided only skeletal advice for ministers on sermon composition, and the theoretical rationale for how sermons should be composed (let alone heard) is often implicit rather than explicit, drawing as much upon habits of traditional rhetorical teaching as on a single, clear Protestant linguistic theory. “Humane” learning was proverbially rejected by the more strenuous Puritans, but while the apparatus of human intellectual ingenuity may be faulty, it is also indispensable to theological as well as pastoral endeavors. The formulaic instructions for plain style, particularly as outlined by William Perkins, were closely related to the university system. “Prophesying” was much less an inspired speech act than it was a kind of explication and recitation exercise for ministers in training. Nevertheless, the minister could use close explication as an expressive tool, exploring within the determinate boundaries of the socalled literal sense an extraordinary copia of applied meaning.6 Print versions of sermons often have abundant citation from scholarly and even classical sources, though there is significantly less occurrence of such non-scriptural reference in auditor sermon notes. Either auditors tended not to record extra-scriptural citation, or in oral performance the learning of the minister was simply silently folded into the exegetical choices that he made in the pulpit. The oral sermon may or may not have “smelled of the lamp” to the congregation, but its scriptural insights were always informed by the scholar’s light. As Weld’s stories of overzealous ministers remind us, the creative exploration made possible through plain-style explication of the scripture may be

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   143 prone to excess, even when motivations are sober and earnest. The amount of specific linguistic pressure exerted upon scriptural language could be intense, with Puritan ministers regularly mining the implications of single words in their explications in order to drive the fullest understanding of the literal sense home to their congregations. John Davenport, for example, was careful to analyze the word “therefore” if it appeared in a verse that he was opening, alerting his reader or auditor to the grammatical-theological implications of that “illative particle.” In opening Lam. 3:24 (“Therefore will I hope in him”), Davenport identifies the reason “whereupon their hope was grounded” in that single word, explaining that “This illative particle, therefore, notes the result of a discourse in the minds of believers, whereby they compare one thing with another; and gather one thing from another; and thence conclude to act suitably to the truest and best reason.” Davenport’s reasoning continues, and his fine point—that “Faith is an understanding grace”—bridges the gap between unredeemed human reason and the gracious immediacy of “Hope.” For Davenport, the grammatical logic of the single word “therefore” contains a clue to the resolution of notoriously problematic concepts for New England Puritanism—preparation and evidence: “The affections, though they have not reason grafted in them, yet they are thus farre reasonable, that, in all that are godly-wise, they are raised up, and laid down, guided, and actuated, by sanctified reason, which is the highest and best reason.”7 Davenport also analyzes the grammatical implications of the “illative particle” in his opening of Zech. 1:3 (“Therefore say unto them, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, Turn ye unto me, saith the Lord of Hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the Lord of Hosts”) in God’s Call to His People to Turn unto Him. Even earlier, in a 1653 sermon The Knowledge of Christ (discussed in the opening of Chapter 1), Davenport grounds an entire doctrine on the divinity of Christ on the “illative particle” of Acts 2:36 (“Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ”).8 For Davenport, the logic encapsulated in “therefore” proved a profound point for contemplating the spirit within the letter of scripture. For many preachers of the period, a full contemplation of the single word is necessary to tease out the essence of its divine logic in the verse, sometimes even requiring minute analysis of grammatical implications. Thomas Hooker may refer to the “copulative particle” (the conjunction “and”) in Luke 3:8 (“And the flesh shall see the Salvation of the Lord”) merely in passing, but Ephraim Huit sees in the simple grammatical term the larger logic of atonement and its types. From Zech. 9:11 (“as for thee also by the blood of thy covenant / I have sent

144   Chapter 4 forth thy prisoners out of the pit wherein is no water”), Huit draws the doctrine that “former experiences are arguments of future mercies,” arguing, in part, that “the nature of the covenant is copulative.”9 Huit’s notion of the “copulative” logic in scripture dispensation seems to draw from his understanding of human syntax.10 The complex intertextuality of different verses, events, and dispensations represented in scripture has, for ministers such as Huit, a larger syntactical logic than the smaller grammar of human language might reveal. Frequently an entire doctrine within a sermon continua might turn on a single word of the scriptural verse. With the centrifugal force of elaborate Ramist branching and the tendency to explore a verse, if necessary, one word at a time, ministers might be seen to engage in mere “text crumbling.” In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, text crumbling (sometimes known as “mincing”) was a pejorative term used to characterize explication that paid undue attention to breaking text into smaller and smaller parts with excessive and ever more minute analysis. George Herbert rejected excessive “crumbling” in A Priest to the Temple, contrasting the proper method of “some choyce Observations drawn out of the whole text, as it lyes entire, and unbroken in the Scripture it self ” with “the other way of crumbling a text into small parts, as, the Person speaking, or spoken to, the subject, and object, and the like, hath neither in it sweetnesse, nor gravity, nor variety, since the words apart are not Scripture, but a dictionary, and may be considered alike in all the Scripture.”11 To crumble the text, in Herbert’s estimation, was to do it violence by reducing the unified coherence of Word to dislocated signifiers.12 Text crumbling was objectionable primarily because a too precise attendance upon the minutiae of the text detracted from the common sense of the words as well as from the divine truth of Logos. A charge of text crumbling often implied plain-style preaching because of its emphasis on close textual explication of the literal sense of scripture and reliance on elaborate Ramist branching, but the excesses of overly witty, metaphysical preaching might be just as vulnerable to such categorization. Ironically, plain-style text crumbling would have inadvertently replicated the same kind of idolatrous misprision (such as fourfold exegesis of the scholastic tradition and ornamental Anglican wit) that it strove to reject. Text crumbling is a literary and rhetorical preference rather than a denominational marker, however, and a charge of text crumbling would necessarily be in the eyes (or ears) of the beholder. For a committed practitioner (as for his auditory or reading audiences) the deep resonance of even a single word of scripture could not always be bound to a single, simple meaning. Text crumbling might not even be restricted to words alone, as the English

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   145 preacher Thomas Adams (variously described as either a Puritan or High Anglican)13 demonstrates in the 1615 sermon Mystical Bedlam, or THE VVORLD OF Mad-Men, initiating his opening of Eccles. 9:3 (“The heart of the Sonnes of men is full of euill, and madnesse is in their heart while they liue: and after that, they goe to the dead”) with an analysis of the punctuation: THe Subject of the discourse is Man; and the speech of him hath three Poynts, defined and confined in the Text. 1. His Comma, 2. his Colon, 3. his Period. . . . First, Man is borne from the wombe, as an arrow shotte from the Bow. 2. His flight through this ayre, is wilde, and full of madnesse; of indirect courses. 3. The Center, where he lights, is the Grave. First, his Comma beginnes so harshly, that it promiseth no good consequence in the Colon. 2. The Colon is so madde and inordinate, that there is small hope of the Period. 3. When both the premises are so faulty, the Conclusion can neuer be handsome. Wickednes in the first proposition, Madnes in the second: the Ergo is fearful, the conclusion of all is Death.14

The example from Mystical Bedlam is wonderfully absurd, but here the absurdity proves the rule, or, more precisely, the curiosity reveals common practice. The punctuation that Adams analyzes, of course, is particular to his English rendition of the Ecclesiastes verse and is nowhere present in the Hebrew (Qohe­leth), the Septuagint, or the Vulgate. Most curiously, the sequence of comma, colon, and period that Adams cites apparently does not occur in any of the print editions of English Bible translations. (The specific phrasing in Adams’s sermon corresponds closely to the Geneva and the KJV, but neither of them has the colon in print versions, making it very unclear where, exactly, Adams finds his model.) Adams’s curious explication raises many fundamental questions about how highly educated ministers who were increasingly savvy regarding inter-linguistic difference could explicate so closely the vernacular peculiarity and errant textual appearance. Cognizant as they were of the contingencies of linguistic particularity, how did they remain true to the simple precepts of plain-style explication of literal sense? After all, they were not merely explicating content to arrive at doctrine and application; they were drawing doctrine and application out of intense linguistic and rhetorical analysis.

146   Chapter 4 The essential problem for early modern Protestant exegetes is that human explication, even of the literal sense of scripture, requires human reasoning. Sola fide and sola scriptura do not ensure that fallen human intellect can conceive the truth of the literal sense without aid, and the enabling presence of the Holy Spirit moving within the letter of scripture might prove as elusive as human interpretation might prove deceptive. In John Norton’s most pessimistic formulation of the problem, “Mans interpretation of the Scripture, is not Gods mind, but mans mistake.”15 The fact that human reason is simultaneously necessary but insufficient does not prevent ministers from using a range of approaches to their explication of scripture—from scholastic methods to anti-scholastic logic. Indeed, dependence upon human constructions of understanding seems to justify the use of a range of sometimes competing systems of knowledge, including Ramist branching, etymological speculation, historical projection, pagan references, and even Aristotelian causality. Huit, for example, presents efficient, material, formal, and final causes (scholastic logic drawn from Aristotle) within Ramist branching (ostensibly an anti-Aristotelian methodology) in his preached sermons.16 Too precise or too academic attendance upon scripture is not a manifestation of overconfidence in human reason but, indirectly, an admission of the disproportion between divine and human understanding. The copia of method and proportion apparent in text crumbling ultimately reveals the insecurity of the exegete who must trust to the abundance of close analysis to counter the fallibility of reason. Once again, Thomas Hooker’s unwieldy sermon cycle The Application of Redemption provides a useful example precisely because of its disproportionate extremes. The tenth book of Hooker’s Application of Redemption deals with contrition and shares a textual-genetic relationship to an earlier sermon, The Soules Preparation for Christ, an unauthorized English publication from 1638, apparently based on auditor notes.17 (See figure 4 in Chapter 1.) Both sermons are an extended, plain-style explication of Acts 2:37, but whereas the earlier sermon runs 242 pages, the latter sermon requires just over 700 pages to fully open the single verse of scripture. The two sermons and the KJV and Geneva versions each exhibit negligible textual differences in the phrasing of Acts 2:37 (notable variants indicated with underlining): Now when they heard it, they were pricked in their hearts, and said unto Peter and the other Apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we doe? (Geneva, 1610)

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   147 Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter, and to the rest of the Apostles, Men and Brethren, what shalt we doe? (KJV, 1611) Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their hearts, and said to Peter and the other Apostles, Men and Brethren, what shall we doe to be saved? (Preparation, 1638) And when they heard this, they were pricked in their Hearts, and said unto them, Men and Brethren, what shall we do? (The Application of Redemption, 1656)

More surprising than the minor variations from one vernacular text to another is the overall consistency, particularly of vivid phrasing “pricked in their hearts” and “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Within Book X of The Application of Redemption, however, Hooker parses Acts 2:37 through its constituent syntactical units, sometimes slightly modifying phrasing of the governing verse as he explicates. From the single verse, Hooker develops eighteen separate doctrines: two doctrines come from the verse in its entirety, two from the phrase “When they heard this,” six from variations on “They were pricked to the heart,” two from “They said to Peter and to the rest of the apostles,” and eight from variations on “men and brethren, what shall we do?” This, surely, might constitute an example of text crumbling. The negligible textual variations of the scripture verse as quoted over the course of Book X of The Application of Redemption suggest that neither the minister nor the printer necessarily made reference to a single print version of scripture. As rigorously “literal” as Puritans are reputed to be, they nevertheless were somewhat promiscuous in their rendering of scripture in the vernacular. After pursuing two doctrines drawn from the whole verse and two more just from the clause “When they heard this,” Hooker opens up four phrasing variations in the development of his doctrines: They were pricked to the heart (Doctrine 5 & 6) They were pierced in their hearts (Doctrine 7) Pierced (Doctrine 8 & 9) They were pricked in their hearts (Doctrine 10)18

148   Chapter 4 “Pierced” simply serves as a synonym of “pricked,” but Hooker’s untroubled vacillation between the terms indicates a kind of confident indifference that contingent manifestations of the letter of the words will conform to the Logos of scripture. Although “pricked” is the dominant choice in print translations (both the KJV and the Geneva), Hooker’s own explication of the term privileges the term “pierce” (the verb appears in about half of Hooker’s stated doctrines). Open the word “pricked,” Hooker implies, and you will find it might also be expressed as “pierced”; a proper understanding of the verse requires flexibility in vernacular translation. Today’s modern readers perhaps put more stock in the stability of text than did early modern English readers, for whom vernacular translation was essentially still an emergent and potentially contentious proposition. Variation of phrasing, even within a single sermon delivery, was not unusual. A bit of variation in ex tempore translation demonstrated that the minister might be speaking in English but that he was nevertheless anchored in deep contemplation of the original scripture text. Accordingly, slight variations in vernacular rendering reinforced a sense of the glorious copia of scripture relevance. The vagaries of vernacular translation, for example, bear witness to the simple, coherent perfection of divine language through contrast. Scriptural citation as it appears in manuscript notes and in print versions of sermons challenges the received wisdom that Puritans preferred the Geneva Bible over the “authorized” King James Version.19 Because few congregants would have been conversant with biblical languages (the elite, male laity would be likely to know some Latin, but few would have any significant command of Greek, let alone Hebrew), members of the laity would necessarily have been more dependent upon printed vernacular Bibles than the clergy. Notetakers who recorded in the meetinghouse, however, appear to be more dependent upon clerical phrasing, sometimes recording only partial verses and sometimes using only chapter and verse citation. Notetakers who record from memory at home, by contrast, might be more likely to refer to a print vernacular Bible. Henry Wolcott, for example, who probably compiled his shorthand sermon notes at home, heard Hooker preach on Acts 2:37 eleven times from 1638 through 1641, writing out the verse in its entirety each time. Although he vacillates between the phrases “at” and “in their hearts” several times, his phrasing remains remarkably consistent. If Wolcott is consulting a print Bible, he has access to the KJV, as evidenced by his consistent use of the phrase “the rest of the Apostles” (KJV) rather than “the other Apostles” (Geneva).20 The relative scarcity of books in the colonies in the seventeenth

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   149 century would likely have meant that whatever plausible translation was available would have to suffice. Perhaps time might also have eroded any polemic resistance to the King James Version. The doctrinal glosses in the margins of the Geneva Bibles were more offensive than the sum of the language itself. Among the published Rules to Be Observed in the Translation of the Bible that guided the various “companies” of translators, number six reads “No Marginal Notes at all to be affixed, but only for the Explanation of the Hebrew or Greek Words, which cannot without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be express’d in the Text.”21 Tellingly, the earlier print version of Hooker’s preaching on Acts 2:37 from 1683, The Preparation of the Heart, uses the Geneva phrase “the other Apostles” while the later version in 1656 uses the KJV phrase “the rest of.” Geneva commentary and marginal glosses reliably inform exegetical preferences, but in the majority of cases, the New England ministers seem just as likely (and possibly more likely) to cite the Authorized Version as the Geneva or other dissenting translations. More important, New England ministers often follow neither KJV nor Geneva translations to the letter, largely preferring their own translations, sometimes even translations apparently from memory. Modern editions of sermons and other Puritan writing include frequent corrections for original scriptural citations. While the printing process is no doubt to blame for some errors, some percentage should be attributed to the minor oversights, preferences, and opinions of the writers. Regardless of whether the minister works from memory or from notes or from Hebrew, Greek, or Latin sources, however, residual echoes of particular vernacular translations and commentary would inevitably affect phrasing and word choice. Even the physical layout of a particular print Bible might have an effect on the minister’s sense of the text. In the case of Hooker’s paraphrase of Acts 2:37, the physical location of the verb “prick” on the printed page of early Bibles likely would have informed his initial retention of the phrase, even if he preferred “pierce” in many of his doctrines. In multiple early editions of both the Geneva and the KJV, the running heads at the top of the printed page included the word “pricked”: the 1611 folio edition of KJV contains “The heart pricked,” and 1560 Geneva contains “The conscience pricked.”22 The King James Version draws greatly from the Geneva translation (or, perhaps more precisely, from Tyndale and other earlier translations). That the “authorized” version became a more or less stable textual referent does not undo its emergence via a long process of vernacular translations over time and across media, the product

150   Chapter 4 of a complicated, intertextual evolution rather than a single act of concerted translation.23 Furthermore, the principle of collation meant that a minister would seek to show how various places in scripture concurred with other places. William Perkins dedicates several full sections of his preaching manual, The Arte of Prophecying, to methods of “collation” and “reconciliation,” showing how verses from different books and with very different immediate circumstances can ultimately be reconciled to a unified scriptural whole. Returning to Hooker’s explication of Acts 2:37, we might consider whether the seepage of the specific term “pierce” into Hooker’s analysis might not come through its resonance with other uses of the verb. In the KJV, for example, Acts 2:37 seems to echo the use of the verb in John 19:34 (“But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water”), which in turn seems to echo its use in Ps. 22:16 (“they pierced my hands and my feet”) and Job 30:17 (“My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest”).24 The connecting of vernacular synonyms fosters a profound sense of scriptural unity across books, ultimately suggesting unity of Logos through contingent variation. Christ’s passion, suggested by the “piercing” in John, makes both vicarious atonement and the salvific “pricking” of hearts in Acts possible. Hooker’s linking of the two events through the uncommented substitution of English synonyms constitutes a nuanced typological reminder within the seemingly inconsistent vernacular citations. Variation in translation, that is to say, is simultaneously a manifestation of fallen human language (one tongue cannot be rendered perfectly into another) and the potential to transcend that failure (synonyms reveal typological truth and the unified coherence of the Word). Although they pursued the literal sense of scripture through plain-style explication in the vernacular, ministers consistently drew upon their own sense of the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, fully aware of translations over time. Though fundamentalists in their theology, they were also savvy scholars of linguistic difference and skilled rhetoricians who sought to render the Logos of scripture to the best of their ability. In practice, that commitment often meant advertising the malleability of translated meaning. They saw vernacular translation within a definable margin of applicable meaning. Conversely, the laity might study the scriptures directly, but their sense of the meaning of Logos would have been dependent upon the larger relationships between the letter as received through print vernacular translation, the verse as explicated by the minister, and their own lived experience of the doctrine as applied. In New England, that is, a ver-

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   151 nacular sense of scripture was primarily discursive and only partially indebted to available print translations. When necessary, ministers might also use the original language. Despite the plain style’s proverbial rejection of foreign phrases for show, Puritan preachers instructed their auditory in the nuances of Greek and Hebrew in practice whenever they judged it profitable. Samuel Danforth’s explication of Matt. 11:7–9 (given at the head of the print version as: “—What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? / But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft clothing, are in Kings houses. / But what went ye out for to see? A Prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a Prophet”) in A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness provides a typical example: “The general Question is, What went ye out into the Wilderness to see? He saith not, Whom went ye out to hear, but what went ye out to ´ σασθω. The phrase agrees to Shows and Stage-playes; plainly arguing see? θεα that many of those, who seemed well-affected to John, and flock’d after him, were Theatrical Hearers, Spectators rather than Auditors; they went not to hear, but to see; they went to gaze upon a new and strange Spectacle.”25 Danforth’s incorporation of the Greek into his explication would not have been perceived as “ornamental” use for show. Rather, Danforth can only reveal literal sense by incorporating the lesson in Greek into his plain-style explication. His auditory (and subsequent readers) would not have been expected to memorize the Greek as such but rather to retain an understanding of the nuances particular to the Greek original. Even when encountering the verb “to see” in everyday use, the reflective auditor might pause to consider what is and is not involved in sight, witness, and spectacle. The word in English, in its scriptural and mundane uses, becomes imbued with trans-textual intimations. Elsewhere in this sermon, Danforth uses other techniques that call attention to the linguistic and rhetorical construction of the passage from Matthew. My own undergraduates, when discussing this sermon, come quickly to the conclusion that Danforth is performing a kind of “close reading” with which they themselves are conversant. Danforth anchors his entire sermon with a formal rhetorical analysis of Christ’s words regarding John the Baptist, pointing out emblems here and rhetorical questions there, analyzing metaphors, and illuminating the complex strategies of Christ as rhetorician—for example, “This Elogie our Saviour begins with an elegant Dialogism, which the Rhetorican call­ eth Communication” and “This Interrogation is to be understood negatively and ironically.”26 In turn, Danforth utilizes many of those same strategies that he

152   Chapter 4 has just demonstrated in Jesus’ words in his own development of doctrine and application—metaphors, emblems, dialogism, irony, rhetorical questions—deliberately signaling his concerted literary and rhetorical maneuvers in the service of the literal sense of the scriptural text. Danforth’s rhetorical endeavors are authorized by Jesus’ own. Implied throughout Danforth’s famous critique of the community’s “Errand into the Wilderness” is a recognition of the conscious deployment of very human rhetoric in the words of the Savior, the preaching of the minister, and the contemplation of the auditor. The narrative of a simple, untroubled exegetical process—whether the translation of scripture into the vernacular or the plain-style explication of the literal sense—is a necessary doctrinal fiction, but the premise of that fiction remains at the core of Puritan literary theory and practice, informing both rhetorical and exegetical preferences. At the same time, those preferences reveal in practice the working of fallen human language and the limits of human literary-rhetorical endeavor, as the vernacular remains difficult to render in a single articulation and the literal sense requires multivalent explication through the rhetorical strategies of “Humane wisdome.”27 The pertinent question here concerns neither the letter of translation nor the proverbial denominational preferences for and repudiations of various prose styles. Rather, a seeming ambivalence regarding the letter of translation challenges conventional understandings of Puritan commitment to the plain-style explication of the literal sense of scripture. Because of (not despite) the proverbial, rigorous precision of their exegetical methods, New England Puritans maintained a somewhat agnostic attitude regarding the letter of translation, preferring instead to roam within a malleable margin of textual stability. Authorized in part by the premise of depravity and impaired linguistic capacity, New England Puritans cultivated a degree of hermeneutic skepticism regarding the prospects of vernacular translation that, in turn, allowed for a surprising amount of expressive creativity in sermon composition. As the diverse examples of writing by Weld, Adams, Hooker, Huit, and Danforth begin to suggest, a theory of language premised upon human debility is what creates a bridge between human and divine articulation.28 The debility of human language does not merely require accommodation; it contains within its very imperfections the means to accommodation.

The designation of “scripture” necessarily invites anxiety about the linguistic relationship between the human and the divine. To designate any text scripture

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   153 requires acts of canonization and many enfolded interpretive assertions. Specific contests over canonization, of course, raise questions about what criteria are sufficient to determine divine textuality. Doctrinal and ecclesiastic arguments invariably drive such contests, and these contests often implicate broader literary-linguistic assumptions in turn.29 In particular, attempts at translation inevitably reveal that the status of divine texts may be inextricably linked to language itself, and certain foundational translations additionally grappled with the vagaries of textual transmission in the ancient world. Reforming scholars working toward vernacular translation found themselves entangled in a series of complicated textual issues. Advances in humanistic learning increased the awareness of systematic linguistic difference. Grammatical structures themselves, however, sometimes provided unanticipated problems and even contributed to continuing theological divisions. Martin Luther’s struggle to clarify correctly the ambiguities of the verb forms of iustificare and iustificari in the Vulgate brought him to the conclusion that justification (the efficacious transformation of salvation) must, in some places, be simultaneously active and passive—a grammatical conundrum with the very greatest of implications for Western Christianity.30 William Tyndale’s translations of individual words caused controversy (for example, “congregation” versus “church” and “repentance” versus “penitence”), but the incompatibility of grammar systems from one language to another was even more problematic. Vulgate Latin was one stumbling block, but recourse to original languages only revealed that ambiguities of translation lay not in the meaning of words but, more perplexingly, in the very structure of language. Verbs proved particularly tricky, and key points of scripture could not easily be translated from Hebrew or Greek because English simply formed verbs differently.31 While the Logos of scripture would have been held sacred, discomfort at the inevitable divergence of res and verba had long created a self-consciousness of scripture as simultaneously a divine and human text. Classical literary theory bequeathed to Renaissance thought this basic dichotomy, contributing to a distrust of “rhetoric” and skepticism that language can perfectly convey truth. Puritan thinkers seemed to have added to this dichotomous view of language their notion of spiritus that often seems to move within the phenomena of res and verba. Perhaps a triangulated rather than a binary understanding of scriptural language—res, verba, and spiritus—allowed for innovations in pious writing and fostered a surprisingly confident view of the capacity of human language. While they could not hope to be pure authors of effectual language, Puritans

154   Chapter 4 conceived of pious writing as a kind of enabled passivity. Using such images as the writing of God’s words on the minister’s heart or of individuals as vessels for godly speech, Puritans sought to describe effectual language as words that were ultimately divine in origin. If res is a truth that human language may approximate but never accurately reproduce, and if verba is a malleable tool that might misrepresent as much truth as it reveals, then spiritus allows the human speaker to articulate truth with a confident (if subjective) humility. The sense of scripture as a human accommodation necessarily bound by the contingencies of linguistic particularity only becomes more explicit with every translation of scripture attempted. Concerted, sometimes competing, Reformation efforts to render scripture into the vernacular contributed to a preoccupation with the nature of language in a range of early modern writing, from poetry to treatises, and from plays to sermons. Similitude and figurative language may constitute the most familiar and readily apparent trope of linguistic self-consciousness in the tradition of the early New England sermon. In both the pulpit and in print, ministers regularly advertise their uses of figurative illustration and analogic argumentation. Perkins outlines a variety of useful tropes in his manual, and ministers regularly point out their own interjections of figural logic within doctrinal explication. The practice was so common that “similitude” appears everywhere in the marginal gloss in print editions of sermons, along with the other structural labels “doctrine,” “reason,” “use,” and so on. The “similitude,” in other words, was not merely a literary nicety or rhetorical ornament but part of the manifest technology of human explication of scripture. Similitude in sermons is not the irrepressible flourish of the would-be artist-minister breaking forth from the strictures of the plain style. Figurative analysis—whether soberly integrated as a scripturally sanctioned trope (as in Cotton) or vividly, even viscerally, spun out (as in Hooker)—might be understood more properly as part of the constituent technology of the sermon. Auditors register similitude in a variety of ways: Voracious Auditor attempts to preserve the entirety of Moodey’s pulpit eloquence on God as a very human father; Disposition Auditor allows the scriptural cadences of Norton’s “garden enclosed” to echo in his memory of the oral event; Robert Keayne notes but does not elaborate upon Sibbes’s opening of a figural Goliath; and Henry Wolcott silently elides Hooker’s figural insistence into the Ramist structure of the larger doctrinal argument. Figurative analysis and explanation are part of a technology of accommodation that, properly used, may be doctrinally consistent, pastorally

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   155 efficacious, and epistemologically plausible. In ordinary usage, however, figura is not ontologically inevitable. In all three synoptic gospels, Jesus explains his use of parables to his disciples. Echoing the problem at the heart of the parable of the sower, Jesus distinguishes between the truth told directly and the figurative stories that simultaneously conceal and reveal that truth.32 As Jesus explains in Matt. 13:10–13, when asked by the disciples, “Why speakest thou unto them in parables?”: “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.”33 All parables implicitly signify “as if.” The truth value does not lie in the letter of the parable but in its divine referent. The parable as preserved and disseminated via scripture eschews ontological equivalence (there is no need of a literal, historical Prodigal Son) in favor of epistemological reliability (the Prodigal Son is necessarily received into the father’s house) and narrative legibility (the story is a promise to the faithful). Furthermore, the parable exists as a textually phenomenal event. Having been spoken in a historical-literal sense by Jesus and having been disseminated in scripture that is also translatable into various languages, the parable text itself becomes phenomenal reality that may be further opened via subsequent explication. Thomas Shepard, for example, may open The Parable of the Ten Virgins (Matt. 25:1–13) in the pulpit over the course of several years and in print over the course of roughly 250 folio pages.34 The laity further deploy the phenomenal textuality of the parable through their notes, in memory, and especially by application of the text to their individual cases of conscience. The referent of the parable signifier continues to reveal itself across historical time in very real, very phenomenal time. The parables of the gospels constitute a special case, but figural language in scripture generally provides both phenomenal texts and legitimating models for ministers to use similar rhetorical devices in their own compositions. Ministers can embrace the figurative because the Bible already depends upon figurative language. Like Jesus’ parables, the minister’s similitude should be doctrinally consistent, pastorally efficacious, and epistemologically plausible. Hooker, for example, uses the following analogy in The Saints Dignitie, and Dutie in his explanation (supported by Acts 15:9, “he put no difference between us and them,

156   Chapter 4 purifying of their hearts by faith”) of how one might actively cultivate true faith in a corrupt heart incapable of effectual action: You may conceive it by a similitude, if a pot be boyling upon the fire, there will a scum arise, but yet they that are good house wives, and cleanly, and neat, they watch it, and as the scum riseth up, they take it off and throw it away, happily more scum will arise, but still as it riseth they scum it off. Thus it is with the soul, impurite will be in the heart wherein there is faith, and it manifesteth it self, and riseth up when the soul is in action, but yet the heart that hath faith in it, eyeth the soul, and as it discovereth any impuritie, though it be never so secret, or never so small, though it be never so agreeing to his naturall disposition, it scummeth it off, and it is his continuall work and desire to make riddance of any corruption which doth appear.35

Hooker is known for his dramatic use of imagery, and the precision with which he explores the process of purification by faith through the homely conceit makes clear particularly difficult theological points. The pot “boyling upon the fire” demonstrates the delicately balanced yet precariously oxymoronic preparationism that Hooker typically exhorts.36 The figurative boiling is vigorous and effectual, yet the pot does not boil on its own. Rather, the heat and the power of the fire bring the pot to boil much as the gift of faith brings capacity for effectual, vigorous activity to the soul. The simultaneously active and passive boiling (“when the soul is in action”) causes the impurities to “manifest” themselves. The purifying property of faith in the heart is to reveal innate corruption, not to remove or prevent it. The powerful rhetorical advantage of the homely analogy lies in its ability to catalyze meaning out of the ordinary. The similitude should never be taken as an ontological necessity, though. Pot scumming is not a divine truth, nor are Hooker’s words sacred text. Properly applied, similitude is a necessary rhetorical technology that aids effectual redemption. Nevertheless, it is a limited technology as figural language can signify only contingently. In contrast to parable, typology promises a model of figural absolutism. Generally, typology is understood as the relationship between a person, object, or an event in the Old Testament that is fulfilled in the New Testament in Christ. In one of typology’s strictest conceptualizations, there are a finite number of typological correspondences. In looser typologi-

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   157 cal thought, the number of corresponding types and their fulfillment might be continually revealed. In the loosest form of typology, an argument could be made for a type that is fulfilled outside of scripture in the unfolding progression of historical time (such as New England being the New Jerusalem). This last example is perhaps so loose as to no longer constitute a true type, however.37 While Puritan literature may demonstrate a faith in the continuum of typology loosely conceived, theology insists upon the strict formulation of specific fulfillment in Christ. And although the notorious disagreements between Roger Williams and John Cotton demonstrate that typological method guarantees no exegetical consensus when applied in the historical present, the nature of typological correspondence nevertheless remains the primary example of the figurative truth that is not only epistemologically and theologically correct but ontologically accurate as well. Strict typology reveals the equivalency of Christ as Logos, the utmost unity possible in scripture. Christian typological thought originates largely in Paul’s attempts to reconcile those places where Hebrew scripture and Christian dispensation seemed to contradict each other, importantly harnessing the logic of allegory and type. While typology could be schematized into strict guidelines that maintained the primacy of literal sense, Paul’s invocation of allegory at times necessitated careful negotiation on the part of Reformation translators. In Gal. 4:24, for example, when Paul uses the sons of Hagar and Sarah to figure old and new ʾ ´ μενα dicovenant, respectively, the King James Version renders αλληγορο υ rectly, giving the phrase as “which things are an allegory,” whereas the Geneva Bible couches the term by substituting the phrase with its near-etymological definition, “By the which things another thing is meant.” Jesus is particularly direct in his rationale for using parables, for example, repeatedly justifying them as a necessary accommodation until a more direct revelation of truth is possible. Quite literally, the eventual setting aside of figurative language will constitute an apocalyptic event. The number of proper types may be fixed, but everywhere scripture reveals the need to reconcile the manifold, divergent appearances of literal sense. The technique suggested by Perkins to help reveal more contingent incidents of unity in scripture is collation. Throughout The Arte of Prophecying, Perkins systematically presents various ways in which a minister might reconcile and crossreference disparate verses of scripture. Even seemingly contradictory verses might be revealed to conform to the larger, unified coherence. The staccato concatenations of scriptural citation that proliferate throughout Puritan sermons

158   Chapter 4 may appear to the modern reader antithetical to literary creativity. To the godly auditor or reader, however, the practice would have been legible as a dynamic, intertextual demonstration of the mutually corroborative nature of scripture. Collation constitutes yet another way in which the literal sense may be applied. In practice, Perkins’s sense of the “literal” appears to imply something like “indivisible,” as opposed to the fourfold exegesis that was viewed in Protestant thought to draw upon external traditions of exegetical equivalence rather than on inductive, intratextual hermeneutics. Puritan exegesis seeks to demonstrate this indivisibility in part through the proliferation of collated textuality. While Perkins demonstrates, as it were, the textbook method of collation, ministers sought to use the technique seamlessly in their sermons, making the very logic of the doctrine and use come out of intratextual play. Collation is perhaps most visible in the print record, where concatenations of scriptural cross-references appear as accumulated prooftexts or even legal citation. Not all notetakers recorded the close work of scriptural collation in their notes. A content auditor or structural auditor would have very little need to record collated verse because the argument achieved through collation is already manifest in the statements of doctrine, reason, and use. One suspects that memory preserved collation logic even when the auditor did not explicitly record citations on paper. Even an aural auditor trying to record speech verbatim might be more likely to record quoted scriptural texts without citation, creating a integrated pastiche of biblical language. Furthermore, the almost staccato punctuation of recorded conversion narratives with scriptural citation suggests that individual verses of scripture have long and complex half-lives in the spiritual consciousness of hopeful saints. Even before full articulation in conversion narrative, the resonance of collated scripture can be found in auditor sermon transcription. Mary Rock, a primarily aural auditor, recorded sermons by Cotton Mather, Samuel Willard, and others in a notebook in 1687. Rock records numbered heads (doctrine, use, 1ly, 2ly, and so on) along the way, but usually the structural coherence of the unfolding argument appears to be organized largely around collated texts. On October 7, 1687, Rock records Willard’s sermon on Heb. 11:31 (“by faith the harlot Rahab peirished not wth them that beleved not”), immediately noting that “in thes wordes ye have the last part of thos Chapt[?]er” in which Paul gives many examples from the Old Testament of God’s grace toward individuals.38 The chapter is a narrative list of the Old Testament’s faithful who illustrate Paul’s claim that “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   159 things not seen” (Heb. 11:1, KJV). Appearing toward the end of a list that includes Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, David, and others, Rahab stands out as an unusual exemplar of faith. Paul’s list is itself a collation that embeds the story of Joshua’s spies who are protected by Rahab, who in turn asks and is saved (along with her family) from the destruction of Jericho ( Josh. 2:1–24). Recording the occasion of Willard’s preaching, the verse, its context, and the translation difficulties of the passage, Rock emphasizes textual echoes reaching from Old to New Testament and into the meetinghouse at Boston. Rock records that in Hebrew, “Rahab signifies broad” and further preserves the contingent translatability of the embedded story, noting that hir occupation. as some thinke was an inkeper – but its Certayn the greek word only signifies a Comon Whore. =though she might keep a publike house too – hir ocupation was an advantag to EnCreas hir wickednes39

Determining Rahab’s name and occupation contributes to the complexity of the enfolded texts. While Rock’s notes do not make exactly clear what point of significance Willard draws from the Hebrew name (although one of the figurative meanings, “proud,” might give a clue), they both pay close attention to the linguistic construction of Rahab’s identity. The original Hebrew is more ambiguous about Rahab’s status. The word zânâh could mean “prostitute” but also “adulterous” or, figuratively, “idolatrous.” Possibly influenced by Paul’s unambiguous πο´ ρνη in Heb. 11:31, the Septuagint and Vulgate translations of zânâh indicate prostitute (γυναικο` ς πο´ ρνης and mulieris meretricis, respectively), while English translations generally have “harlot.” The fact that contemporary scholars no longer consider Hebrews to be an actual Pauline text (as Willard and Rock would have assumed) only amplifies the intertextual echo chamber of the explication. Willard’s apparent use of “whore” within his opening of the verse might echo Wycliffe’s “hoor” in Heb. 11:31 or might simply be his own choice to foreground the radical, transformative nature of faith. The etymological consideration of Rahab and her occupation apparently makes up points one and two of Willard’s initial opening, but Rock records these first two points without numbering them. Accordingly, her transcription tends to emphasize the unified coherence of Willard’s linguistic, historical opening of the text. As Willard continues to open his initial considerations of Heb. 11:31, Rock picks up the systematic numbering again:

160   Chapter 4 3ly we have the happy frut of hir faith she peireshed not : 4ly she is described by the singularity of hir preseruation s[h]e peireshed not when all Els peireshed 5ly she is described by the frut of hir faith she secured the spies. and descouered them not: it must needs be Justifieing faith: be Cause the apostel bringes it in a monge the beleivers. = ye[t] it showes the power of god to make the history of gods greatnes: to work upon hir hart.—the spt of god did wonderfully work upon the harts of his peopl in those dayes . even when thay had but dark. meanes. rahab resolued to Joyn wth gods people. this exsampel is most emen ent = considr hir ocupation a harlot. yet she is only lookt on in mercy.40

[spirit]

From out of the systematic opening of points three through five, Rock carefully traces the intratextual logic of the Pauline verse. The overall point expands upon the single point (“she is described by the frut of hir faith”) as well as the entire movement from etymological consideration to narrative detail. The full interpretation resonates with the phenomenal textuality of Rahab’s faith: the latent meaning of the Old Testament story in Joshua (“it must needs be Justifieing faith”) is made manifest by its reference in the New Testament Pauline epistle (“be Cause the apostel bringes it in amonge the beleivers”). Besides providing an example of a “most emenent” individual case, Rahab as a textual case “showes the power of god / to make the history of gods greatnes: to work upon / hir hart.” Rock records a series of collated New Testament passages after Willard’s statement of doctrine: — Hence ye doc that god some times singels out the most notorious siner to be a moniment of his mercy. she was an Idoliter. a Cursed cannaite - no better then any other. yt she must be saved. she was a lewd person. on obhored even by hir owne countrey. = 2ly consider what the favour god shewed to this woman 1 she obtayned not only a personall deliverans but the preser vation of hir kindred she was Joyned. to gods people—

[doctrine]

[one abhored]

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   161 she was a wife to one of the partrearkes. a grand mother 1 mat 5[th?]. of X Jesus acrding to the flesh.= she ob tained to be reseved into glory — she obtained to be put in among the Cloud of wittneses. thus did god favour ys poor siner.= such a on was mary magdelen — such a on 1 tim. 13.14 was Paul.-so 21 mat 31 . verily the publicans and harlots goe to heaven before you41

[patriarchs] [reseved : received] [on : one]

The doctrine (a pastoral point aimed at the Boston congregation) is immediately followed with the reminders of historical context (connecting the congregation to a specifically historicized past). Again, Rock records the overlapping of the personal case with its textually replicating afterlife. Making the point that in saving herself, Rahab saves her family, Willard implicitly raises the issue of halfway membership for non-confessing descendants of New England saints, again collating transhistorically the particulars of old and new covenant dispensation as well as scriptural and topical concerns.42 The citation from Matt. 1:5 (“And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse” [KJV]) brings the phenomenal textuality of Heb. 11:31 full circle, as Rahab’s biological line begets the human incarnation of the divine mediator whose saving power implicates Joshua 2 via Paul’s collation of the faithful in Hebrews 11. The retroactive signification of Rahab then resonates in a sudden cascade of collated verses, some explicitly cited (1 Tim. 1:13–14, “Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus”; Matt. 21:31, “. . .Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” [KJV]) and some textually integrated (“acrding to the flesh,” Rom. 1:3; “Cloud of wittneses,” Heb 12:1). The collation of Mary Magdalen—a figure with her own complex, enfolded textual presence43—further connects the interrelated dispensations of Old and New Testament harlots. Toward the end of Willard’s sermon, Rock records one final doctrine that offers the complexly embedded Rahab not only as an object for reading but as a model for saintly apprehension. Returning once again to the Joshua narrative that Paul collates into a roll call of the faithful in Hebrews 11, Willard addresses how Rahab came to protect the spies of Joshua in the first place. On the very last page of her sermon notebook, Rock notes accordingly:

162   Chapter 4 [page torn] faith gives the soule good security from . [page torn] [etern?]al perdition —be Cause faith puts the soule in a Condition to reseve life. 11 heb 6. by faith god is pleased. 2ly it intitles the soul in to the redemption purchased by X - 3ly -faith puts ye 2 ephe 5. belever under promise of sallvation how is faith servicabel ther unto .—by rahabes faith it apears. Rahab hears the report. 2 Joshua 10. of gods wonderfull workes. we know that god has given you this land - all faith is upon a report. 2ly she gives Credet or asent to this report none beleve ye report but rahab = wch apears by what she did afterward. 3ly she being by this awakned studyes wayes for her owne preseruation.: thus conuinsed siners ask what thay shal doe — hear upon she makes his peace with god & takes Efectuall Care for hir presaruation she takes ye opertunity to comply wth the spies she makes ym sware to hir. so a poor siner comes to X44

[receive]

[convinced]

[X : Christ]

The reasons that “faith gives the soule good security from . / [etern?]al perdition” are presented systematically, with verses from the Pauline epistles twice serving as collated prooftexts: [1] “be Cause faith puts the soule in a Condition to [receive] life,” Heb. 11:6 (“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him” [KJV]); [2] “it intitles the soul to the redemption purchased by [Christ]”; and [3] “faith puts [the] belever under promise of sallvation,” Eph. 2:5 (“Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, [by grace ye are saved]” [KJV]). The choice to highlight Pauline texts works well, as Paul himself is a collator of texts, drawing upon verses from across scripture to create a sense of doctrinal inevitability in the epistles. The Pauline texts also make the opening of the doctrine explicit regarding the reasons and the working of faith. Just as Perkins suggests in The Arte of Prophecying, reading “backward” through the canonical books of the Bible—from epistles, to the gospels, to the “dogmatical” books and prophets, to the historical books—allows for an enabled reading of scripture.45 Willard and Rock both move from the explicit, framing message of

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   163 the epistles into the textual genesis of Paul’s doctrinal collation of Old Testament exemplars. As Rock continues to record Willard’s final considerations of Rahab’s Old Testament narrative in the light of these explicitly doctrinal verses, an act of retrospective collation occurs again. The answer to the general question “how is faith servicabel ther unto” is answered “by raha[b]s faith / it apears.” Returning to the story in Joshua 2, Rock notes a parallel series of enabled realizations from Rahab’s perspective, suggesting that Rahab herself must be a kind of enabled reader. First she “hears the report . . . of gods / wonderfull workes,” in no small part indicated by the success of Joshua’s military advances (“we know that god has given you this / land”). The first stirring of faith for Rahab, then, is by mere “report.” Distinguishing herself from the other nonbelievers (presumably those with more outward respectability), Rahab “gives Credet / or asent to this report.” Finally, “being by this awakned,” she “studyes wayes for her owne / preseruation.” Rock does not elaborate the specific workings of report, intuition, self-preservation, and studious attention, but she does connect the general case (“thus conuinsed siners ask what thay / shall doe”) with Rahab’s particular case (“hear upon she makes h[er] peace with god & / takes Efectuall Care for hir presaruation”). From Rahab’s specific “opertunity to comply wth the spies” and make them “sware to hir” comes the general lesson “so a poor siner comes / to X [Christ].” The ventriloquized echo of Acts 2:37 (“Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?” [KJV], my emphasis) aligns with Rahab’s own particular case of conscience. Acts 2:37 is one of the most quoted phrases expressing anxiety over the Protestant pursuit of faith. Accordingly, Rahab’s situation signifies the case of any would-be Boston saint. Conversely, the everyman auditor—even Rock herself—comes to signify Rahab. The unlikely exemplar of faith is so deeply embedded in the enfolded textuality of scripture, sermon, and notes that her contingent identity has become universal, and every auditor in Boston is encouraged to find himself or herself in the unlikely specifics of Rahab’s case.

The theological and rhetorical necessity for collation suggests a provocative negotiation at play in Puritan sermon hermeneutics, reflecting the gap between the human and the divine. The exegetical principles of the literal sense premise unity, whereas the centrifugal compositional principles of plain style

164   Chapter 4 require divisibility. This potential to move outward from and inward toward the text, backward and forward through scripture chronology, contributes to the dynamic intertextuality of the controlling logic of sermon literature. This logic lies at the core of what we might understand to be the implicit literary theory of the sermon. Although it is arguably anachronistic to speak of a literary theory of the sermon, the specific practices of sermon culture suggest that complicated understandings of human and divine language undergird not only clerical preaching but lay hearing and application as well. Furthermore, it is through this lived experience that the sermon comes to dominate all forms of Puritan writing. Borrowing the terms of Aristotelian causation, we might break down the divergent ways through which the early modern practitioner of plain style might have understood the sermon to operate. The “final cause” of the sermon we might understand as faith, while the “efficient cause” would be the Holy Spirit that is understood to move within the letter of scripture. The “material cause” might be understood as scripture (already an accommodation to impaired postlapsarian capacity), while the “formal cause” might be plain-style explication and its attendant rhetorical strategies (Ramist logic, for example, as well as figural language) and manifestations in various media (including clerical speech, auditor notes, memory, and print). This illustration is not meant to suggest that the Puritan ministry subscribed to this or to any specific causality of the effectual working of the plain style (although ministers did use the four causes in their pastoral and polemic argumentation) but rather to show the way in which the sermon as ordinary means is easily conceptualized within the available vernacular of divisible, defining causality. The inscrutable, irresistible working of the divine within the flawed, contingent ordinary means is no inconsistency. Indeed, the two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of the ordinary means suggest that the sermon manifests itself as human-divine hybrid textuality. In his attempt to render legible the unity of Logos implied within a single verse, the minister deploys systematic opening and application, Ramist branching, and collation. Along the way, figurative language (sanctioned by, if not necessarily drawn from, scripture), text crumbling, citation, and other forms of “humane wisedom” are variously deployed. From the pulpit, these rhetorical strategies produce an eclectic copia of entry points for the individual auditor. Part of the challenge of a “mixed” auditory—a congregation of individuals each at divergent stages in spiritual awakening and with differing levels of theological savvy—was to make the sermon reach all.46 Manuscript sermon notes show

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   165 that independent of spiritual and intellectual development, divergent ways of hearing privilege different aspects of the oral sermon. Print sermons, in turn, reflect a full range of human contingency—from the vicissitudes of aurality to the idiosyncrasies of individual spiritual progress, from the nuances of translation to the balance between topical, personal, and universal applications. Ultimately, it is spirit working within the Word, and not wordiness itself, that can enable the fallen soul to recognize Truth in verbal acts. The disproportion of sermons continua that can spin hundreds of pages of explication from a single scripture verse may simply suggest that all plain-style lessons bear constant repetition. Furthermore, text-crumbling strategies, similitude yoked by violence, collation, and centrifugal explication are all techniques that can ultimately accommodate the perverted intellect of natural man. The most effectual ordinary means to salvation work not because they are neatly unified but precisely because they are partial and contingent. Accordingly, the rhetoric and technology of sermon literature draw upon those same vagaries of lived experience. Fallible human endeavor can work in tandem with the perfect unity of Logos because application—the lived experience of the literal sense—is always phenomenal contingency. As will be seen in the next chapter, individuals brought the incomplete coherence of spiritual revelation into the narration of conversion experience. False starts, misprision, and the collation of biographical detail with scriptural antecedent weave together in these textual assertions of enabled debility, and uncertainty and doubt become factors in the legibility and credibility of spiritual narration. Other genres of Puritan writing, such as history, similarly demonstrate selfconsciousness regarding whether human method and articulation can reveal truths that unfold over time. In an exemplary moment during which the vagaries of material textual creation seem to speak to a greater truth, William Bradford leaves his chronicle On Plymouth Plantation incomplete, with entries for Anno 1647. And Anno 1648.47

remaining blank toward the end of the volume. The aporia suggested by the empty headers, set to receive the revelation of worldly time in the godly colony, disciplines any possibility of saintly certainty. Elsewhere, Bradford pens a retrospective note to a 1617 letter copied into his narrative of the early negotiations for migration. The letter, from John Robinson and William Brewster, includes a promise that “We are knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond

166   Chapter 4 and covenant of the Lord,” a sentiment that causes a much older Bradford to muse: O sacred bond, whilst inviolably preserved! How sweet and precious were the fruits that flowed from the same! But when this fidelity decayed, then their ruin approached. O that these ancient members had not died or been dissipated (if it had been the will of God) or else that this holy care and constant faithfulness had still lived, and remained with those that survived, and were in times afterwards added unto them. But (alas) that subtle serpent hath slyly wound in himself under fair pretences of necessity and the like, to untwist these sacred bonds and tied, as it were insensibly by degrees to dissolve, or in a great measure to weaken, the same. I have been happy, in my first times, to see, and with much comfort to enjoy, the blessed fruits of this sweet communion, but it is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay and want thereof (in a great measure) and with grief and sorrow of heart to lament and bewail the same. And for others’ warning and admonition, and my own humiliation, do I here note the same.48

Bradford’s latter-day meditation serves as a painful reminder that glimpses of a godly community on earth may well prove transitory. The material palimpsest of incomplete human comprehension manifests in time, and the greater significance of historical events might not always be controlled by the human literary endeavor of chronicle and history. Other narrators of the godly community of New England, from John Winthrop and Edward Johnson to Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall, offer temperamental contrasts to Bradford’s textual doubt. Comparison of the private records, court records, and other public transcripts to retrospective narrative accounts of the Bible commonwealth show the seeming confidence that some elite men had in the legibility of providential history. Nevertheless, the fundamental instability of such efforts to chart overlapping provincial and providential trajectories reveals itself in many unexpected places. For example, the New England election sermon—and the jeremiad mode more broadly—raises questions about the reliability of scriptural exegesis applied to the vicissitudes of colonial politics. Beginning in the 1660s, the General Court published this yearly “state of the covenant” address on a regular basis.49 According to conven-

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   167 tion, the deputies and the magistrates took turns selecting a minister to deliver this important sermon on alternating years (a situation comparable to an imagined scenario in which the United States Senate and House of Representatives selected the speaker of the official State of the Union in alternating years). Whereas the partisanship of an election sermon such as Shepard’s “Bramble” sermon, preached in 1638 during the height of the Antinomian Controversy, was disseminated in a selective manner through notes, memory, and communal discourse, by the 1660s a fixed imprint of the yearly discourse would be distributed to every town in New England as well as to enemies and allies across the Atlantic.50 In the wake of the Half-Way Covenant compromise, the Stuart restoration, and increased scrutiny of the colonial charter by Parliament, the court came to the somewhat counterintuitive decision to disseminate publicly the contesting ideas on the state of the Bible commonwealth and, by implication, the capacity of scripture to provide clear direction for the body politic. The result was a surprisingly public dissemination of political and exegetical disagreement as ministers in successive years offered competing interpretations of scripture applied to civic identity. Poetry is undoubtedly the genre of writing that allows Puritan writers to grapple most directly with the problem of impaired human linguistic endeavor and graciously enabled insight. Acrostics and the anagrams based on the names of the pious quite literally allowed poets to play with language and to crumble textual identity. These verse forms were relatively common in the period but could have a particularly powerful valence in a Puritan literary context. Given a nominal resistance to poetry, the deliberately witty wordplay of “Puritan Scrabble” constitutes the concession that the baubles of human language are, nevertheless, the inevitable vernacular of Visible Saints.51 Particularly when offered as elegy, as Jeffrey Hammond has argued, “such devices as puns, acrostics, and anagrams” served as “extensions of the deceased’s textual legibility, and the verbal ingenuity required to discover them was equated with the spiritual insight demanded by proper mourning.”52 Tributes to the living might function differently from those to the departed. The two anagrams of Anne Bradstreet’s name that appear in the preface to The Tenth Muse (“Deer Neat An Bartas” and “Artes bred neat An”) are meant to corroborate the fact that the poet is, indeed, a poet, but the second version of Bradstreet’s name is introduced with the simple comment “Another,” seeming to cover the bases, as if conceding that secular identity is not inevitable but forged.53 By contrast, elegiac wordplay seeks to fix the spiritual meaning of a worldly life.54 Anagrams and acrostics written upon

168   Chapter 4 the death of the godly serve memorial as well as pastoral functions—a final revelation of the saint in the visible world—and are accordingly used in memorial writings and histories. Ultimately, the proper text crumbling of a mortal name might reveal spiritual truths, not just for mourners in celebration of the godly decedent but for the reader to apply the lesson to his or her own case. The difficulty in articulating true spiritual insight with the limitations of impaired human language is a central theme in much of Edward Taylor’s poetry. Scholarship has focused on Taylor’s giddy hyperbole, meiotic comparisons of himself with God, disconcerting breaches of decorum, and the idiosyncratic dialect. Faced with nothing but his circumscribed linguistic ability and partial spiritual insight, Taylor must leverage the very failings of his poetic inclination to serve his pious art. This thorny relationship between art and piety might be seen in poems such as Bradstreet’s “Contemplations,” too, but Taylor regularly places the problem of articulation at the very heart of the spiritual conundrum. Accordingly, he works out quite explicitly his own sense of hopeful enabled debility, crumbling both text and doctrine in his poetry in his attempt to work out the implausible concepts upon which the soul is dependent but against which human reason bucks. In the Second Series of the Preparatory Meditations, for example, Taylor confronts the puzzle of typology, the idea that certain things, people, and events in the Old Testament foreshadow their fulfillment through Christ in the New Testament.55 Taylor sees the illogic of typology on the surface as proof of the miraculous scriptural unity that lies beneath. Accordingly, he begins his meditation on Gal. 3:6 (2:5, “And to thy Seed Which is Christ”) with the legitimately perplexing question, “Art thou, Lord, Abraham’s Seed, and Isaac too? / His Promisd Seed? That One and Only Seed? / How can this bee?” Taylor uses orthodox theology to build toward a discomfortingly literal rendering of Christ the antitype of the sacrificial lamb, requesting the Lord to make his soul a pan to receive the drippings of “thy Rostemeate cooked up sweet, brown” so that he might sop up his “dry Bisket in thy Dripping Sap,” the salvific gravy of Christ’s sacrifice. For Taylor, there is always a very orthodox principle at stake in such breaches of decorum. While some critics see these poems as autobiographical expression (“Am I fit to administer the Lord’s Supper?”) and others see them as Taylor’s modeling the persona of the prepared communicant (“Are you prepared to receive the Lord’s Supper?”), these poems are not merely preparatory but exploratory exercises. Specifically, Taylor uses the occasion of the Lord’s Supper to chart the mysterious territory of divine union. Despite disagreement

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   169 over access to the sacrament, New England Puritans all essentially agreed that neither baptism nor the Lord’s Supper (the two sacraments retained in the purification of religious practice) constituted a saving event. The Lord’s Supper in particular was understood as a “seal,” a non-transubstantiating event in which something like union, or unification, might occur for the elect participant.56 The sacrament was a communication of a sort, but it was also a call and response, a seal and a sign, an event and a result, an emptying and an indwelling, a blurring of identity, an epistemological conundrum, and, for Taylor, an ephemeral glimpse of the concurrence of words and Word. Taylor’s poetry not only shows a complex struggle between human and divine language but proves instructive for its generic fluidity with sermon method, in particular his sermon series collected under the title Christographia (the title of which highlights the notion of Christ as Word). Several sermons in the series (in part occasioned by his disagreements with Solomon Stoddard over the Lord’s Supper) have corresponding poems in Prepatory Meditations. Taylor’s preoccupation with the nature of sacrament is revealed as an inherently textual problem in his sermon on John 1:14 (“The Word was made flesh, etc.”). Taylor is careful to point out “The Subject, or Person Spoken of, viz, the Word; i, e, not a Word Spoken: nor any Written. But, the Person of the Son of God So called.” Taylor continues his explication of this person of God by noting: “Now he is call’d the word, from the prophetical office that he attended: for as a word is the Conception of the minde, and being Spoken declares the minde to others: So Christ being Conceived in the Fathers minde comes forth of the Fathers bosom, and declares what is the minde of the Father unto others, i, e, unto the Children of men.”57 Although the occasion for the sermon is communion, the topic of the sermon is God incarnate, and Taylor is careful to point out that the nature of neither “Godhead” nor “Manhood” is altered in this “personall Union.”58 Accordingly, Taylor cannot help but suggest an analogical relationship between the unification of the persons of God and the union of God and man in the sacrament of communion. Furthermore, the choice of text (“word was made flesh”) calls attention to the role of “Word” and potentially “words” as well in the sacrament. The sacramental event is spiritual but also significantly verbal. In the accompanying poem to the above sermon (II.44, “The word was made Flesh”), Taylor begins a seeming critique of metaphysical wit (“The Orator from Rhetorick gardens picks/ His Spangled Flowers of sweet-breathed Eloquence”) with the confectionery question and answer “Shall bits of Brains be candid thus for eares? / My theme claims Sugar Candid far more cleare.” Immediately, how-

170   Chapter 4 ever, the problem of overintellectualized metaphysical style is trumped by the actual case of Incarnation: Things styld Transcendent, do transcende the Stile Of Reason, reason’s stares neere reach so high. But Jacob’s golden Ladder rounds do foile All reasons Strides, wrought of theanthropie. Two Natures distance-standing, infinite, Are Onified, in person, and Unite.59

The greatest example of transcendence apparently requires coinage (the verb “one-ify”) as well as punning verbal play (“In Essence two, in Properties each are / Unlike, as unlike can be. One All-Might / A Mite the other”). Taylor does not merely marvel at this unification; he uses God’s miraculous gift of “theanthropie” to taunt the angels with man’s fortunate fall (“You Holy Angells, Morning-Stars, bright Sparks, / Give place”), arguing that “The highest honour to our nature’s due. / Its nearer Godhead by the Godhead made / Than yours in you that never from God stray’d.”60 For Taylor, the ability to praise or to pray is always dependent upon that union, or that glimpse of union, between himself and God. In orthodox terms, that fleeting union is sacramental; in practical terms, that communion is also linguistic. He ends his meditation on the “word made flesh” with a glimpse of poetic fulfillment, the fleeting ability of the communicant to praise God: Unite my Soule, Lord, to thyselfe, and stamp Thy holy print on my unholy heart. I’st nimble be when thou destroyst my cramp And take thy paths when thou dost take my part. If thou wilt blow this Oaten Straw of mine, The sweetest piped praises shall be thine.61

Taylor returns throughout the Meditations to his inability either to praise or even to recapture that ephemeral sense of union. The cyclical struggle and recurrent conversations of the Preparatory Meditations resemble conversion narrative insofar as final assurance never comes to stay. For Taylor, the good-faith attempt to bridge the gap between divine legibility and human doubt requires a multivalent approach to genre.

Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling   171 *** In the face of unanimous presumption of scriptural unity, the methodical strategies of divisibility in sermon composition result in disproportion, excess, and, at times, a kind of linguistic and hermeneutic skepticism. The disparity between scriptural unity and compositional contingency creates the need for complex and often self-conscious intertextuality at the heart of sermon literature. Tangible systems of knowledge require linguistic accommodation when applied to the inscrutable workings of grace. In text crumbling, to name just one example, the grammatical analysis of scripture is a powerful strategy for simultaneously revealing the unity of literal sense and the difficulties of its exegesis in plain style. Grammar is recognized as a contingent element of fallen human language, and translation endeavors raise more questions than scholarship can definitively answer. The self-conscious advertising of similitude in the work of the sermon simultaneously references and deflects the scripturally sanctioned phenomenon of the parable and the more perfect correspondences of typology. The work of figural reasoning in sermons is theologically sound, scripturally justified, and pastorally effective, even though similitude and other such rhetorical devices can never be efficacious or causal. Collation, yet another rhetorical strategy employed to bridge the gap between divine and human understanding, is necessitated by the realities of Logos articulated through the faulty vessel of linguistic and historical particularity, but its very inconsistencies in turn render the unified perfection of scripture legible to the studious exegete in the pulpit or the pew. Clergy and laity can learn to parse the self-conscious grammar of vernacular scripture, weaving a tapestry of concatenated verses into a textually phenomenal whole. While the postlapsarian capacity of human intellect is always suspect, insights afforded by the analytic and rhetorical technologies of the sermon can also reveal the uncanny workings of scriptural unity. Deep intertextuality can create traction for the fallen human intellect to become enabled by its own debility—to participate in, recognize, and partially articulate the workings of grace. This traction allows for two seemingly contradictory propositions about scripture to coexist: the radical potential of Protestant vernacular (enabled by the working of grace in the soul or by the clarity of spirit in the letter) and the closed hermeneutic of the literal sense (rendered opaque by the innate debility of the human in the face of the divine). The textual friction between what is possible and what is impossible in the sermon allows speaker, hearer, writer, and reader a means to apprehend and

172   Chapter 4 articulate divine truths despite their fallen spiritual state and subsequently impaired capacity. It is commonplace to refer to preaching as the ordinary means, an admission that miraculous redemptions (Saul turned to Paul in an instant) and immediate revelation will not be the standard operating procedure of the New England Way. Sermons cannot create faith or hasten redemption, but they are nonetheless instrumental in the ordinary progress of the saint. The reading, writing, listening, and speaking saint accordingly has an even greater advantage if she or he can lay hold of textual promise through the accommodated letter of grace. Sermon culture—broadly conceived as not only the minister’s pulpit endeavors but the aural experience and its afterlife in speech, manuscript, and print, as well as its proliferation across genres—allows the hopeful saint to dwell profitably within that space of seemingly contradictory textual friction between divine and human articulation. In this intertextual space, the constantly unifying and dividing nature of scripture and its exegesis allows faith to cohere in linguistic acts of enabled debility.

Chapter 5

h Narrating the Soul D

uring one particularly tense moment in her trial, after repeated requests from her examiners that she offer a scriptural text to support her claims, Anne Hutchinson responds with the scornful retort “Must I shew my name written therein?”1 Her ad absurdum rejoinder cuts through the obvious frustrations felt on all sides of the theological impasse—Hutchinson’s insistent critique of the emergent New England Way, John Cotton’s increasingly elaborate qualifications of his own position, and the broader Puritan commitment to visible sanctity. In a single moment, Hutchinson’s heated comment reveals the untenable premises of the entire system—from the “active passivity” required of the individual in hope of justification, to the precarious lack of certainty for a life of presumed sanctification, to the conflicted nature of the literal sense of scripture. As all parties scramble for prooftexts upon which they must ground their respective arguments, the limits of scripture’s perfect applicability become manifest. Absurd as her rhetorical question is meant to be, it lies at the center of the local controversy and at the heart of the lived experience of New England Puritanism. Can one find one’s experiential self in scripture? Conversely, can the letter of scripture reveal the divergent stories of particular souls? The trick is to misapprehend neither happenstance of self nor the letter of scripture. A collated web of literal sense may be applied to lived experience, and vice versa, but in either direction, the problem is a textual one. The peculiarities of the New England Way require individuals to read and to narrate themselves into visible sanctity.2 At the same time, the direct textual evidence from such sources as sermon notes rarely offers up deeply personal insights about the emotional subjectiv-

174   Chapter 5 ity of the spiritual experience. Sometimes sermon notes appear implausibly bereft of emotional resonance. Robert Keayne, for example, notes in his English sermon notebook of 1627–28 that the Reverend John Wilson (soon to be Keayne’s minister in Boston after migration) preaches “at my fathers burial,” but other than this acknowledgment of the occasion, there is no hint of grief or distress in the notes themselves. Keayne’s habitual, conscientious recording style propels him through this sermon as it does through any other sermon. There is no reason to suspect any lack of emotional response by Keayne, either to the occasion or to the preaching. Rather, his notes simply belong to a different genre of expression. The Doubting Auditor who writes in and then crosses out of his sermon notebook his anxious admission that “I finde [illegible] distraction in preparation as I know not wt to doe” provides one of the rare examples of the tangibly personal utterance in the emotionally muted genre of sermon notes.3 Although explicit, emotive markers of Puritan subjectivity remain intangible in the numbered branches and doctrinal explanations of the sermon notes, the very fact of such notebooks testifies to their importance to lived spiritual experience. Keayne inscribes the very same volume in which he records his father’s funeral sermon with no discernible emotional difference or particular spiritual revelation, calling it “pretious.” Time and distance seem only to reaffirm the vital necessity of the sermon record. Still, seventeenth-century notebooks demonstrate the permeability of divergent genres of reading and writing. The relative scarcity of paper necessitated creative use of space in bound books. For convenience, owners would commonly flip their books, which enabled them to write from both ends as desired. John Hull, for example, recorded his private memoirs in one direction of his notebook, chronicling public matters in the other. Like Richard Russell’s morning and afternoon sermon notes running in opposite directions in a single volume, Hull’s interlocking texts are materially bound up with each other partly for practical reasons: Hull can flip back and forth to add details to his reminiscences according to their private or public application. Clearly, though, the texts inevitably enter into dialogue with each other. Thomas Shepard famously recorded the spiritual narratives of his congregants seeking membership in the Cambridge church in a single notebook (“The confessions of diverse propounded to be received and were entertained as members”). In that same notebook, running in the opposite direction, Shepard recorded notes on sermons delivered by his clerical colleagues ( John Cotton, Nathaniel Ward, Charles Chauncy, and others). A practical solution to spiritual record keeping,

Narrating the Soul   175 the material overlap of texts in Shepard’s notebook vividly illustrates the dialogic identities of Shepard the Minister, drawing out the spiritual experiences of his flock; and Shepard the Hopeful Saint, pursuing his own spiritual course by attending upon preaching, the ordinary means to salvation. The material volume implicates the record of sermon and soul in a permeable textuality.4 While spiritual revelation is implicit everywhere in print sermons and manuscript notebooks, the sermon features explicitly in conversion narrative. Of all the lay narratives extant, those testimonies for church membership recorded by ministers (such as the Cambridge confessions recorded by Shepard) exhibit the clearest “formula” for what is, properly speaking, a mysterious and inscrutable transformation.5 Each congregation requiring testimony had to work out some set of procedures and expectations in the face of certain uncertainty. No minister would suggest that there could be only one formula for assurance. By the same token, however, no minister would leave his flock without some indication, at the very least, of the most pertinent questions for which the potential saint must be able to offer a plausible answer. The “questions” and “objections” that crowd the marginal glosses of print sermons are only the most easily observed marker of this phenomenon. Within the semiautonomous gathered churches of New England, the sermon and the expectations for a compelling narrative of conversion come mutually to inform each other. Cynically considered, this somewhat closed system might appear to be the pastoral equivalent of “teaching to the test.” More generously construed, it appears that the laity are involved in a distinctly discursive process of discovering the relationship between individual salvation and ordinary means within a particular community. The confessions recorded by Shepard in his multivalent notebook provide the largest set of extant narratives and the best opportunity to analyze the theological assumptions, shared practices, and preferred style of a single community. Robert Daniel’s testimony for admission to the congregation at Cambridge— presumably prepared in accordance with advice from Shepard and the elders, as well as with the examples provided by previously admitted saints—suggests one set of expected questions that a confessor may be asked to address. Daniel begins his narrative by describing the course of his spiritual journey in broad terms: “Yet when my soul was at lowest the Lord held forth some testimony of love, but yet I did depend upon Him without assurance. And after this I had some assurance for whenever I did delight in my pleasures after I felt I did not.”6 Even for the famously streamlined Cambridge confessions, there is a notable

176   Chapter 5 dearth of details and specifics here. In fact, Daniel manages to summarize his entire spiritual experience in just five sentences. There is no way to ascertain with certainty whether Daniel’s brevity is uncharacteristically short, thus inducing Shepard to prompt him for further details, or whether his opening constitutes an acceptable preamble, but Shepard immediately asserts his scribal presence, summarizing “This generally” and then proceeding to “Particular questions asked; thus he answered.” The rest of Daniel’s narrative comes in response to a series of questions posed, likely by church elders, in a single, long paragraph: (1) How did the Lord bring you out of that estate of security into a state of fear and spirit of bondage? . . . (2) How hath the Lord brought you out of this estate unto the Lord Jesus? . . . (3) Question. How came you to assurance? . . . (4) How have you walked with God and what effect have you found of mercy in this land?7 These exact questions likely did not constitute a standard test set, but these four stages of spiritual awakening can be found in virtually all the Cambridge confessions.8 They become explicit in Daniel’s case, perhaps, because his impromptu delivery has not provided clear enough details to convince, or perhaps he suffered from the kind of mild performance anxiety or shaky memory that would require a certain amount of prompting. Daniel’s confession also makes clear the extent to which, even given a set of established questions, each individual’s experience makes for vastly different proportions, emphases, and, above all, obstacles. Daniel’s answers to the first two questions make up the majority of the remaining text, while the second question elicits two follow-up questions by the examiners: “Did you find it hard to lie down and yield to mercy?” and “How did the Lord draw you to mercy?”9 While other saints in Cambridge battled with the terms of assurance or with the long anticlimax of the post-assurance or post-migration period, Daniel’s fiercest battles were understanding the nature of his sin and the promise of mercy. The distinctiveness of Daniel’s failure in his testimony makes it both individual and, ultimately, persuasive. In addition to the explicit and implicit questions that guided narratives, confessors were also reminded to provide “particulars” of their experience. The term appears most frequently when the confessor admits an inability to provide details. Narrating part of her earliest spiritual revelations, Jane Palfrey states:

Narrating the Soul   177 “Neither can I speak any particulars but I was convinced of such sins as I durst not commit afterward.”10 As she continues to describe her spiritual growth, however, she manages to provide more and more particulars, including the names of specific ministers, reports of conversations, significant scriptural texts, and, above all, the precise conclusions and anxieties catalyzed by those scriptural openings. To provide “particulars” is, to some degree, a matter of being able to show one’s “name written therein.” Not all lapses in a confessor’s ability to provide particulars correspond to the early stages, however. By contrast, the lacuna in John Sill’s narrative corresponds to the onset of assurance for the hopeful saint. After speaking of “some of the promises that did stay me formerly and then,” Sill admits that “there was more than I can now remember or call to mind but sometimes come to me all that are weary” (my emphasis).11 The Matthew verse (“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” 11:28 [KJV]) must stand in for all the other comforting texts that Sill cannot immediately cite. Sill proceeds to other scriptural particulars, referring to several verses from Romans that “troubled” him. In Sill’s case, the particulars of doubt apparently leave a greater impression than the particulars of comfort. Although particulars could include many places, people, events, and specific cases of conscience, the Cambridge confessions demonstrate the primacy of scriptural particulars. The simplest and most potentially misleading understanding of the role of scripture texts in confessions is as a sort of legal citation.12 Scriptural citation simultaneously establishes the stable grounds of effectual conversion for the individual case and confirms the efficacious working of the Word as such. In fulfillment of its office to render the unfathomable mercies of God, the accommodation of human language works because of (not despite) the subjectivity of affective response. No single text can effectually turn every soul. Rather, part of the unified perfection of scripture consists of its ability to convert in accordance with the individuality of conscience and the contingent nature of lived experience. The minister is also implicated in the effectual working of the Word, and conversion narrative often reads as a Who’s Who of Reformed preaching. While the proliferation of names might appear to be so much pastoral namedropping, the practice seems more accurately to provide a kind of saintly pedigree whereby the reported effect of a certain text to an individual’s spiritual progress renders itself more certain for having originated with a godly minister. Conversely, a saint confers the status of godliness on a preacher’s ministry by citing his text. William Perkins and other theologians held that the minister

178   Chapter 5 was merely a kind of vessel for the transmission of the Word to individual hearers, but the physical presence and personal reality of the minister, the power of his speech, and the persuasiveness of his exegesis were experienced along with the text. The text, the person, and the performance were largely inseparable from the point of view of experience; one way of attempting to chronicle this vital but ultimately ephemeral phenomenon was to name the person and occasion of effectual hearing. The verse, along with its pulpit exegesis, inevitably becomes connected to the occasion of its preaching. Any given verse does not signify simply as it appears in the Bible but rather reveals itself in collated experience, pulling together accumulated memory, contemplation, comparison, and experimental application. The first stirrings of the soul attributable to the ordinary means of godly preaching create an important foundation, even though those initial movements of awakening do not generate efficacious faith. Such is the case for Mary Angier, who testifies in her confession to great anxiety occasioned by inconsistent attendance upon godly preaching. Initially under the “powerful ministry of Mr. Rogers of Dedham,” Angier goes to “a place of more ignorance and so rested more quietly, yet under powerful means had often stirrings. But finding no good she thought better sit still than go. Yet considering that it was the means appointed to go, she went. And hearing of New England, she thought if any good here it was. But when her husband was resolved to come, she feared if God should not help all would rise to greater condemnation. Yet one she spoke to of this said though sure to go to hell yet go under means”13 (my emphases). For Angier, means produce only fitful movement, and the very expectation that means ordinarily accompany salvation only alienates her more from her spiritual course. The advice that “though sure to go to hell yet go under means” suggests an exercise in necessary futility. Although continuing to pursue means, even migrating to New England in “thinking to get good,” Angier nevertheless repeatedly finds that means drive her further away from the desired end, kindling occasional hopes only to dash them all the more painfully: Every sermon made her worse and sat like a block under all means and thought God had left her to a hard heart . . . But hence continuing under means the Lord made me more and more sensible of my condition and so my condition very sad. Yet

Narrating the Soul   179 she durst not neglect any public means and thought that the Lord might speak something now . . . But speaking with one which did encourage her which was odious to her she continued under means and grew worse and worse and so thought it was in vain to use any more means and began to neglect Lord in private. And she saw she had not faith at all and there were many encouragements to such though all means made them worse.14

To the modern reader, these painfully chronicled failures suggest the insufficiency of ordinary means. To Angier, however, the insufficiency of means is merely a measure by which she learns intimately the extent of her own insufficiency, and the realization of her own utter dependency is ultimately the only revelation that can alter the course of her spiritual journey. Her concatenation of failed means ends, therefore, not with despair but with the unforeseen conclusion that “the Lord did incline her heart hereby to seek help in Him and had some encouragement from that [previously mentioned] sermon and so sought the Lord.”15 In general, narrators distinguish between “living under” means and “attending to” means. To “live under” often implies passivity and the mere habit of outward form. “Attending,” by contrast, though not necessarily any more fruitful initially, implies an active will to benefit from means. “Attending” to means usually follows some early, if imperfect, spiritual growth. Examples of “hearing” make up the most common markers of means, especially those means that begin to work effectually on the heart. The wouldbe saint records not only what was preached (and often who preached) but regularly narrates the circumstances and his or her responses (negative and positive) to the text. The confessors are specifically discouraged by Shepard from providing too much biographical detail,16 but the narrative tangents surrounding hearing are apparently much more acceptable than any other kind of meandering. In these narratives, to “hear” rarely signifies mere auditory experience; by common usage, the verb implies that the opening of scripture has stuck its intended target. In essence, hearing serves both as the end of means and the effectual mechanism of grace. A passage from Elizabeth Olbon’s narrative dealing with the prolonged onset of assurance illustrates a typical functioning of hearing in narratives:

180   Chapter 5 But she felt so much evil in her own heart she thought it impossible so poor a creature should be saved or received to mercy and so fell down in discouragements. And then hearing—arise and be doing and the Lord will be with you [1 Chron. 22:16]—and this quickened her again. And then she saw the Lord could but knew not whether the Lord would help her or no. Hence the Lord gave her a heart earnestly to seek after Him, and hearing they that mourn should be comforted [Matt. 5:4], she felt she could not mourn. And then she saw how duties could not help her because a man in prison must be always paying his debts. And hearing from 2nd Corinthians 5:20—I beseech you be reconciled unto God—yet she felt her will contrary to this.17

Olbon creates a synaesthetic causality of affect: hearing causes her to see, and seeing causes her to feel. For Olbon, feeling (deep knowledge, that is, not mere emotion) marks each progressive step toward salvation. Each new feeling reveals the next obstacle that stands in her way of closing with Christ. Accordingly, the process of hearing, seeing, and feeling must repeat itself. Olbon’s narrative continues in an asymptotic cycle, however, approaching but never quite reaching perfect assurance. Nevertheless, the clarity of the system is comforting by virtue of its linguistic intelligibility. She may never know with absolute certainty that she is saved, but she can be absolutely certain when she hears. The finite reliability of the terminology (“hearing,” “saw,” “felt”) enables Olbon to define the expanding limits of her grounds for assurance. Certainty is impossible, but the proximate terms of salvation can be linguistically marked. As with the use of means, the efficacy of hearing is sometimes revealed in the very act of doubting it. Ironically, John Sill’s first significant episode of hearing is generated by a scripture that rejects the mere auditory. Having been brought out from the “ignorant place” of his youth,18 Sill early on finds himself in a better place of “people and means”: “So, approving of their ways, he fell to imitate them and so by the ministry, I James 23, 24 [1:22–23]—be ye doers not hearers only—it pleased the Lord to point him out that he was the man to whom the minister did then speak. He had lived under means and been a hearer and not a doer and so he saw himself lying under the wrath due to such and this did work sadly upon him and the more by keeping it secret.”19 Like Olbon, Sill experiences hearing, which causes him to see. While Sill makes a distinction between “doers” and “hearers only,” the very discovery that he is in the second,

Narrating the Soul   181 condemned category allows him to move out of it. The verse 1 James 1:22–23 has opened to reveal the name John Sill (through application, if not by letter). The “hearer only” is Sill, who has “lived under means” but has not been affected by them. And although Sill has not moved beyond the inkling of wrath by the end of the passage, the mere intimation brings together the “hearing only” and the “doing.” Sill has heard truly in recognizing that he has hitherto “heard only.” For a member of the Cambridge congregation, true hearing is a kind of doing. Not just any scriptural passage can cause Sill to glimpse his desolate spiritual estate, but these specific words from James work in his heart. Presumably, since he has lived under means for a while, Sill has had ample exposure to the opening of many scripture texts. Not until “it pleased the Lord to point him out that he was the man to whom the minister did then speak,” however, does Sill truly hear. The sense that particular openings of particular scriptural texts fly like arrows at the heart of particular auditors pervades conversion narratives throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Verse, minister, and occasion blend in the textual accounts of effectual hearing. Perkins’s dismissal of fourfold exegesis depends upon his explanation that other senses, such as “Anagoge and Tropologie,” are simply “waies, whereby the sense may be applied.”20 Sill hears 1 James 1:22–23 and sees that he is “the man to whom the minister did then speak.” The minister, having opened the verse sufficiently, applies it for the benefit of the entire congregation, but his application of the text is not complete, in a tangible sense, until it transforms Sill. Indeed, the sermon is simply a dead letter unless John Sill—or someone—experiences application and confirms the sermon exegesis. When John Sill says that “it pleased the Lord to point him out that he was the man to whom the minister did then speak,” more is indicated than that he has been encouraged, deliberately or not, to engage in meditation and even autonomous interpretation. Sill’s experiential self becomes implicated in the exegetical process. What is perhaps unique to New England Puritan theology— exactly because of the congregational requirements of gathered churches—is the sense that the individual life is latent in the scriptural text. Sill heeds the implied directive to “shew my name written therein,” naturalizing the literal absurdity aimed by Hutchinson at her examiners. Sill does not find his name written in scripture, but the 1 James verse experientially implicates him, and so Sill, through his narration, textually implicates himself in 1 James. Like apparent “Anagoge and Tropologie” in scripture, Sill is himself a way “whereby the sense may be applied.” Like sermon notes, lay testimonies are discursive texts.

182   Chapter 5 They are documents that not only reflect doctrinal readings and rhetorical strategies presented by ministers but also vigorously test the viability of plain style and the applicability of literal sense. Essentially, lay testimony creates a textual proving ground, providing reciprocal witness to the efficacious working of godly preaching. Lay testimony grants its own imprimatur for the work of the pulpit, completing sermons by bridging exegetical manifestations of scripture and phenomenal outcomes of lived experience. Spiritual narrative offers back into the system of sermon culture its own text woven out of the intimate collations of biography and scripture. The confession of Jane Wilkinson Winship demonstrates the reciprocal witness of lay testimony quite vividly. Winship begins her narrative with two references to specific preaching by Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard that first began to bring her to a sense of her poor spiritual estate: “Hearing 2 Jeremiah 14—two evils broken cisterns [ Jer. 2:13]—I was often convinced by Mr. Hooker my condition was miserable and took all threatenings to myself. I heard by T[homas] S[hepard] the evil of sin that separated from Christ though so much pity and hence I was convinced of evil of sin. And was afraid to die and should forever lie under wrath of God and I heard He that had smitten He could heal Hosea 6. [Hos. 6:1]”21 As a woman, Winship probably delivered her confession in front of Shepard and a small group of elders. There is evidence in many confessions and other lay narratives, however, that individuals shared their stories with one another. Essentially, certain elements of the conversion narrative were undoubtedly rehearsed informally within the community, especially as an individual worked through various stages and began to consider whether he or she was fit to join the congregation. Many present for the confession (or who heard a version of it before or after the official performance) would likely have heard some of the very same preaching by Hooker or Shepard. Accordingly, Winship’s application to her own case would not only confirm the efficacy of the two ministers’ preaching on these particular texts; it would also open for the auditors new ways of construing the meaning and significance of those texts and that preaching. Particularly in her linking of different preaching occasions of Hooker and Shepard, Winship forges new connections between texts and their exegesis out of her experiential collation of them. As Winship proceeds in her spiritual development in the course of her narrative, the collation of preaching references becomes more dense and receives less of her own interpretive framing: “And hearing Mr. [Nathaniel] Eaton out of 80 Psalms—sickness in every family yet no peace made—and so went under

Narrating the Soul   183 many sad fears. Hearing Mr. [Nathaniel] Rogers speak every sermon account and Mr. [Ezekiel] Rogers of Rowley—woman great is thy faith [Matt. 15:48]. And hearing Mr. Wells [Thomas Weld] caused by want of confession I went I opened my heart about sin against Holy Ghost. I thought it impossible to have my heart change 2 Jeremiah—is there anything too hard for me [ Jer. 32:27]—I was comforted.”22 The staccato recording of the confession suggests the rapid efficacy of preaching on a receptive Winship in the visible churches of New England. Her narration offers little of Winship’s own interpretation; at this stage, Winship receives rather passively the working of the Word through specific occasions of preaching. As Winship’s spiritual state and understanding improve, so, too, does her exegetical control over the texts and preaching that affect her. Continuing her confession, Winship demonstrates increasing exegetical virtuosity in combining texts to reflect both the received interpretation and personal application: Hearing of doubts of saints, one was waverings of the minds, other of wills and minds. The one drew them from God, the other near to God. I saw it was not so with me. Hearing—say to them that be fearful in heart, behold He comes [Isa. 35:4]—Mr. Wells—pull off thy soles [i.e., shoes; ed. note] off thy feet for ground is holy [Exod. 3:5]. And hearing Exodus 34, forgiving iniquity [Exod. 34:7], I thought Lord could will, was He willing. But I saw how rich to forgive and hearing John 13 hearing in use offer to Christ to offer will lowered lose glory by me that have been so vile? Yes, there is hope for God hath recovered His glory [ John 13:31–32] and that nothing is required but to accept. But I cannot. Lord will draw [ John 6:44] but how know that if take Lord to free from misery and wrath and as king. And hearing of lecture sermon use, if content with Christ alone Lord will visit. Hearing whether ready for Christ at His appearing had fears [Matt. 24:44, Luke 12:40], city of refuge [Numbers 35; Josh. 20:2; 21:13, 21, 27, 32, 38]. Hearing had not Lord done that as if I could say there is no God like this, I found that by hearing—in Him fatherless find mercy [Hos. 14:3]. Hearing—oppressed undertake for me [Isa. 38:14]—eased.23

Winship’s text coalesces into a dynamic collation of scriptural reference, personal reflection, and framing narrative. Thomas Weld is specifically mentioned,

184   Chapter 5 and other unspecified references to hearing advertise the centrality of a discursive sermon culture to her continuing spiritual progress. The texts from John that Winship cites, however, are not necessarily connected directly to preaching. Winship cites texts independently (that is, not directly associated with preaching), weaving them imperceptibly in with those texts clearly received in the hearing of sermons. In yet another level of reciprocal witness, the individual offers back not only self-application of the preached text but her own personal texts of contemplation as well. Winship may well have heard these verses opened in the New England pulpit, but in this narrative—as transcribed by Shepard—they appear as her own. Winship’s recursive self-interrogation highlights her interpretive prowess. As she defines and redefines her personal obstacles to closing with Christ, each text that she applies simultaneously contributes to her spiritual state and to her increasingly enabled debility. Lay collation and the reciprocal witness it offers through conversion narrative provide a vital confirmation of the successes (and failures) of the New England Way. In particular, the efficacy of sermon culture is at stake—from the endeavors of the minister in his study and the pulpit, to the notes and transcriptions of the faithful, to the lived experience and articulated memory of the community of Visible Saints. The exegetical successes of the Cambridge confessors in weaving a plausible narrative of their hopeful salvation confirm their own role in the gathered community, as well as define the role of Shepard and other ministers. The transparent interdependence of sermon literature and conversion narrative may partially obscure the latter’s status as life writing. For many contemporary readers of early modern spiritual autobiography, the seeming elision of emotional markers and subjective perspective suggests an absence of interiority. As with the sermon notebooks, however, the genre determines content, tone, and structure. Expectations that these narratives will anticipate the advent of belletristic autobiography in the eighteenth century are often confounded. John Sill is no Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Winship is no Benjamin Franklin.24 The determination of literary genre is less the point than the realization that each narrator answers the vagaries of spiritual progress with a divergent set of generic premises and solutions. As I have suggested elsewhere, the sui generis Puritan conversion narrative—though it resembles various other genres—is best understood not as an anticipation of latter-day autobiography or the novel but as a subgenre of sermon literature. Ultimately, Puritan narrators must learn to set aside the impulse to tell the story of the self in order to learn how to narrate the progress of the soul.25

Narrating the Soul   185 In the same way that print sermons and sermon notes exhibit distinctive structural formulas, so, too, do Puritan conversion narratives demonstrate a recognizable pattern of cyclical stages of doubt and assurance. Over time, the narrator seems to encircle that elusive status of visible sanctity but never presumes to arrive at certainty. The Cambridge confessors, in particular, generally conform to the implied stages suggested by their minister, Shepard, but across the gathered communities of New England, there are more similarities in perceived conversion morphology than differences. To be sure, the Cambridge confessions triply reflect Shepard’s explicit pastoral directives: through his doctrinal emphases in the meetinghouse, in guidance in preparing testimony, and in his signifying presence as transcriber of the narratives. Indeed, we must see Shepard’s act of creation of the material-textual book “The confessions of diverse propounded to be received and were entertained as members” as a parallel act of the Keaynes, Rocks, Metcalfes, Wolcotts, Dispositions, Doubtings, and Correctings. The confessions may say as much about Shepard as they do about individual confessors, but part of what they reveal is the minister as auditor. Shepard must “hear” Olbon, Sill, and Winship, and what he hears is a narrative genre akin to autobiography (and even the protonovel) but yet distinct to its own idiosyncratic theological premise. The narrator of Puritan conversion must learn to tell the soul’s story rather than the self ’s story. The story of the self is inevitably a tale of development, based in biographical detail, reflective of self-interest, and cognizant of narrative expectation for what we might characterize as a beginning, a middle, and an end (or, barring the achievement of finality, a promise of direction). Part of the failure of conversion stories to fulfill narrative expectation is precisely their inability to arrive at conclusion. Many of the Cambridge confessions break off in medias dubias. Presumably, this is where Shepard, the gathered elders, and the narrator have found enough satisfactory evidence of visible sanctity to warrant full church membership in the gathered community. Nevertheless, the equivocation and ambivalence of the Cambridge confessors similarly characterize most New England narratives. In narrating his own prolonged conversion story for his descendants, John Dane weaves a somewhat picaresque tale of his wayward youth, graciously averted indiscretions, early stirrings toward faith, and migration from old to New England. Dane’s lively narration of “remarkable providences in the course of my life” offers an account of the self ’s progress but proves inadequate to frame the more vital struggle of the soul. As with many of the Cambridge confessors, movement across the Atlantic features prominently,

186   Chapter 5 often figuratively, in the soul’s story.26 For Dane, transatlantic migration seems also to usher in a new narrative strategy. Instead of details of his own sinful nature being foiled by the providential workings of God’s “restrayning grace,” Dane begins to relate his material and textual struggles in the New World (a geographic but also spiritual distinction, the reader suspects), only to trail off, deferring the enumeration of incidents “too tedious to mention.”27 In lieu of narrative plot, Dane has come to rely upon collation of scripture and memory to close his story as well as he might. Somber to his last syllable, Dane has successfully narrated the soul’s story by setting aside the generically implicated conventions of the self.28 In Dane’s story—as in many conversion narratives—the intertextual play between biographical phenomena and scriptural insight offers the best possible sense of assurance for a Visible Saint. There is a recognizable morphology of salvation with fairly reliable markers in the life of the would-be saint, but as with the rote formula of the sermon, mere prescriptive application provides no comfort. The textual weaving of scripture, doctrine applied in lived experience, verses recalled over time, and pyrrhic victories of biographical incident must argue each individual case of conscience. As demonstrated by Mary Rock in her notes on Samuel Willard’s explication of Rahab, the argumentative logic of collation can bridge the historical, literal sense with the contingencies of local hermeneutics to yield a transhistorical, doctrinal inevitability. So, too, the collated texts of the Danes and Winships of New England demonstrate how such doctrinal inevitability might be witnessed in conversion narrative and, conversely, how individual cases latent within the letter of scripture might be rendered legible. Shepard’s own autobiography demonstrates this prolonged recursive intertextuality at great length and with fuller detail than perhaps any other New England narrative. The probing elaboration of confession as it evolves into an ongoing chronicle of cyclical assurance and doubt disrupts the notion that these narratives ever conclude. Partly because the mundane details of existence interrupt a Visible Saint’s clearest articulations of the promise of grace and partly because only God knows the true numbers of the invisible church, Puritan autobiography can never really draw a definitive boundary around experience.29 Shepard’s preface to his autobiography, by contrast, is one of the few texts that attempt to frame the meaning of an entire life. Addressed to his son, the preface weaves together the lives and deaths of Shepard’s wives and sons, collating the entire family into a narrative of the inextricably linked spiritual estates of Shepard senior and Shepard junior.

Narrating the Soul   187 Shepard ostensibly composed his entire narrative for the benefit of his son, although he provides an exemplary method of conversion that might guide any reader of the Autobiography. Shepard narrates his son’s birth as a series of providential events, blurring time, identity, and event, ultimately pointing to the complex subjectivity of conversion and the way the familial reader may be implicated in the author’s own redemption plot. Shepard begins his address “To my dear son Thomas Shepard with whom I leave these record of God’s great kindness to him, not knowing that I shall live to tell them myself with my own mouth, that so he may learn to know and love the great and most high God, the God of his father.”30 Significantly, the story of Shepard Sr.’s redemption is identical to “God’s great kindness” to Shepard Jr. The final reference to “the God of his father” evokes the faith of Abraham and the promise of redemption to his line (an exegetical reading based on Paul that receives particular emphasis in Puritan New England).31 Shepard first tells his son of the family’s abortive attempt to escape to New England. The mother is already pregnant with Thomas Jr. (to whom the narrative is addressed), and the baby Thomas (the elder brother, also named Thomas) falls sick and dies. After losing the first Thomas, the second is preserved in the womb from various potentially fatal mishaps and eventually safely delivered while the family is back in hiding in England. A baby during the second, successful trip to New England, the surviving Thomas Jr. continues to be preserved from further near-fatal mishaps. The mother, however, soon dies in New England, expressing as one of her last fervent prayers that “if the Lord did not intend to glorify himself by thee, that he would cut thee off by death rather than to live to dishonor him by sin.”32 The son nearly dies of sickness and is temporarily blinded in New England, but eventually recovers from both conditions. The complexity of identity reveals itself immediately. The first son is named for the father, presumably, and the younger brother is named for the lost elder in turn, but there are simply too many Thomases, one suspects, either for a simple narrative or for easy family dynamics. The story of the youngest son Thomas begins even before the death of the earlier son Thomas. To add to the confusion of identity, Shepard constantly switches between second-person address and third-person description. The details related to the son in the preface are repeated in the main text of the autobiography, and the redundancy suggests that Shepard’s framing device does much more than inform the son of his prehistory for the sake of a pious guilt trip. Shepard’s point is not simply that the father suffered and that the

188   Chapter 5 mother and the elder brother died so that the son could live and live well in this world. Thomas Jr. is so completely implicated in the father’s conversion story in terms of time, identity, and anticipated outcome that he is beyond simple generational guilt.33 The redemption story of Thomas Jr., we suspect, is somehow already accomplished, but the framing device is a catalyst to his realization of that redemption. Simply put, Thomas Jr. is spurred on to conversion by being shown that redemption has somehow already occurred. The intimacy of the story provides an extraordinary means to salvation. The son, in some significant way already saved, will be all the more damned if through free will and willful sin he nevertheless proves reprobate. The specter of potential reprobation might conversely implicate the father’s own presumed redemption story as well. The shared redemption plot of Thomases (senior and junior) reveals the essential nature of every potential salvation or reprobation. Shepard’s preface to his son confirms the Calvinist hard line: the system is set in your favor, even already known; but if you fail to be saved by its gracious working, it is still the fault of your own fatal will. Shepard’s address to his son, accordingly, is just as relevant to his own uncertain case. The blurred identification of linked Thomases works backward as well as forward. The mother “in travail” with another Thomas offers a figure of how the text works. Shepard’s own conversion, along with the narrative of that conversion, struggles to be born out of the confusion of identity and time. Like the first abortive attempt to leave England, neither conversion nor narrative might come forth successfully. The confusions of collated biography may cause the coherence of autobiographical narrative to disintegrate. The echoes of labor and childbirth throughout recall the words of Paul in Galatians, “My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!” (KJV, 4:19). Having been miraculously converted himself, Paul now uses his regenerate insight to effectually persuade others. The experience of conversion, its narration, and its power to convert others all mingle in the text. Thomas Shepard—in fact, any Thomas Shepard—cannot truly realize his own conversion until he passes through the larger narrative and emerges again to rejoin his own biographical distinctiveness. Odd repetitions, retellings, and reframing often provide evidence of those sites of textual fragility that threaten to dismantle certainty rather than to build coherence. Conversion narrative related at a great reflective distance from a clear event (such as being accepted into full membership of a gathered church as a Visible Saint) is more likely to show this textual strain.

Narrating the Soul   189 Like Dane and Shepard, Roger Clap narrates his spiritual autobiography at a remove far enough to allow various textual strains and narrative complexities to reveal themselves. Clap’s conversion story appears at the very beginning of his Memoirs, a founder’s tale related in full confidence that the details of local history are adequate inspiration for the glory of God and the edification of generations. Clap’s spiritual narrative frames the tale of the early colony from his specific vantage point. Clap begins his Memoirs with a brief statement to his children of his intention to “leave with you some Account of God’s remarkable Providences to me, in bringing me into this Land,” noting that “Scripture requireth us to tell God’s wondrous Works to our Children, that they may tell them to their Children, that God may have Glory throughout all Ages.”34 A familiar expression of Puritan filiopiety, Clap’s opening implicates an even larger sphere of influence than his immediate family. Indeed, Clap’s Memoirs prove to be even more historical than autobiographical, and he weaves the two rhetorical goals together without embarrassment or hubris. The balance of personal and historical focus is maintained in great part by Clap’s tangential narrative style, which foils both simple chronology and a clear separation of the affairs of the fledgling community and of the autobiographical subject. A sort of New England Polonius, Clap meanders while offering personal anecdote, detailed historical account, pious ejaculations, and direct advice to new generations, taking up one thought as it occurs to him and concluding previous thoughts as they come again to mind. Most of the personal narrative, including the entire conversion account, comes at the beginning of the Memoirs and divides into three distinct movements. The first section, a historical and biographical account of his migration from old to New England, begins with a brief account of his immediate family and their estate (modest in worldly terms and hopeful in the spiritual). Almost in the same breath with which Clap establishes a picture of his home life, however, he expresses the desire to his father “that I might live abroad.” The father’s consent inaugurates a period of time in which migration is the main theme. What first appears to be adolescent restlessness turns quickly into a spiritual wanderlust as Clap moves about England from one pious household to another, always seeking to move ever closer to godly preachers (including John Warham, later a minister in Windsor, Connecticut, whose sermons Henry Wolcott preserves in notes). The climax of the migration narrative involves Clap being drawn to New England (“I never so much as heard of New-England until I heard of many godly Persons that were going there”), acquiring the encourage-

190   Chapter 5 ment of his current master and, finally, the permission of his own father (at first unwilling but soon amenable through the providential intervention of “the Reverend Mr. Maverick, who lived Forty Miles off, a Man I never saw before”).35 Biographical detail and spiritual development mingle indistinguishably even in this brief introduction. The section even provides an interesting version of social mobility in the seventeenth century: where restlessness in youth is encouraged by both father and master, where the meaning of mobility is not an economic but a spiritual venture, and where even the image of the Prodigal Son is refigured as a pious wanderer. There are two crucial spiritual points that Clap is careful to make about his early awakening in England. First, and most explicitly, all is accomplished by God’s providential care, as Clap reiterates in a point-by-point summary, including the inclination of his heart and the circumstances of his opportunity for migration. Second, Clap’s narrative overlay of spiritual and worldly movement ultimately argues for the cross-identification of new birth and New England. Ending the short introductory section with detailed specificity and spiritual inspiration, Clap tells his descendants: “It was God by his Providence that made me willing to leave my dear Father, and dear Bretheren and Sisters, my dear Friends and Country: It was God that made my Father willing on the first Motion I made in Person, to let me go: It was God that sent Mr. Maverick that pious Minister to me, who was unknown to him, to seek me out that I might come hither. So God brought me out of Plymouth the 20th of March in the Year 1629,30, [sic] and landed me in Health at Nantasket on the 30th of May, 1630, I being then about the Age of Twenty one Years. Blessed be God that brought me Here!”36 The diligent acknowledgment of providential intervention may be standard practice in spiritual narratives, but here Clap represents his peculiarly untroubled movement toward God, or at least toward New England, the site where God will move him to ask harder questions of himself concerning his spiritual state. Already Clap demonstrates three distinctive characteristics that continue throughout his Memoirs: a mixture of pious interpretation and historical detail; a general optimism toward the prospects of his spiritual estate; and a simultaneous goal of telling his own story and telling the tale of New England. Written quite late in his life, Clap’s personal narrative is at points indistinguishable from a narrative justifying and glorifying the whole New England project. Upon his arrival in New England, Clap begins to experience new phenomenal challenges to his spiritual comprehension. The practical concerns of the early colony dictate a number of revelations in Clap that he recounts decades

Narrating the Soul   191 later. Beginning with a description of the “vacant Wilderness, in respect of English” and a dire shortage of food during the first year, Clap nevertheless seems to acclimate to the early New England condition, noting: “Fish was a good help unto me, and others. Bread was so very scarce, that sometimes I tho’t the very Crusts of my Father’s Table would have been very sweet unto me. And when I could have Meal & Water and Salt boiled together, it was so good, who could wish better?”37 As Mary Rowlandson discovers in the course of her captivity, appetite can change under extreme conditions, but the change is not merely physiological if the sufferer pays appropriate attention to the providential lesson offered. The physiological phenomenon may simply be a manifestation of spiritual change. For Clap, who courts intimations of the Prodigal Son, the lesson of hardship is a lesson of joy, and the anecdote of starvation leads to his crucial recognition of “a great Favour of God unto me, not only to preserve my Life, but to give me Contentedness in all these Straits; insomuch that I do not remember that ever I did wish in my Heart that I had not come into this Country, or wish myself back again to my Father’s House.”38 While the Cambridge confessors frequently find transatlantic movement accompanied by disappointment and spiritual angst, Clap offers a rather optimistic response. The difference may be explained partly by the lack of immediacy of the narrative (confessions were usually delivered closer to the time of migration, and therefore active adjustment was, in many cases, ongoing) as well as the difference of rhetorical goal (the confessions were narrated for the community of elders and other firstgeneration saints rather than for the edification of subsequent generations), but Clap’s basic assurance of his own spiritual estate and the New England project proves to be as strong throughout the narrative as it is reported during this early starving time. The entire community appears to go through parallel adjustments, and Clap’s narration of initial hardships functions primarily as a prelude to his description of the spirit that drove the great migration of the 1630s. The equation of New England with a “New Birth” permeates Clap’s account of preaching and lay response. Crossing the Atlantic means not only facing new hardships but gaining new opportunities for spiritual renewal. Even the questions that the first migrants pose are perfected in the new location and context: “The Lord Jesus Christ was so plainly held out in the Preaching of the Gospel unto poor lost Sinners, and the absolute Necessity of the New Birth, and God’s holy Spirit in those Days was pleased to accompany the Word with

192   Chapter 5 such Efficacy upon the Hearts of many; that our Hearts were taken off from Old-England and set upon Heaven. The Discourse, not only of the Aged, but of the Youth also, was not, How shall we go to England? (tho’ some few did not only so Discourse, but also went back again) but How shall we go to Heaven? Have I true Grace wrought in my Heart? Have I Christ or no?”39 Clap, writing after the compromises of the Half-Way Covenant and after fulfilled threats to the charter, certainly has it in mind to offer an example of spiritual commitment to “Rising Generations,” and yet this passage exhibits not chastisement but wonder.40 Clap seems to relive the remarkable period through his vivid description. The migrants do not merely rejoice in hearing the Word; more important, they respond with the right questions (“How shall we go to Heaven? Have I true Grace wrought in my Heart? Have I Christ or no?”), which the ministers must answer in turn. Call-and-response is not merely initiated by the clergy to engage an otherwise passive laity; rather, the laity responds in kind with its own call.41 The sure sign that a transformation from worldly to spiritual concerns has been accomplished in migration is that not only “the Aged” but “the Youth” have learned to ask the right question. Heavenly aspirations displace worldly ambition and creature comforts. To the extent that New England symbolizes “New Birth” for Clap’s community, the desire for old England typologically indicates a perilous, deluding vanity. In describing the pious enthusiasm of 1630s New England, Clap emphasizes the testimony of the saints even more than the preaching of the ministers. Experiential testimonies appear to be the vessels of scriptural efficacy, and the lay narrators offer their own pastoral encouragement in the conversion of the community: Many were Converted, and others established in Believing: many joined unto the several Churches where they lived, confessing their Faith publickly, and shewing before all the Assembly their Experiences of the Workings of God’s Spirit in their Hearts, to bring them to Christ: which many Hearers found very much Good by, to help them try their own Hearts, and to consider how it was with them; whether any work of God’s Spirit were wrought in their own Hearts or no? Oh the many Tears that have been shed in Dorchester Meeting-House at such times, both by those that have declared God’s Work on their Souls, and also by those that heard them. In those days, God, even our own God, did Bless New-England.42

Narrating the Soul   193 The highly public nature of the phenomenon would have great relevance to the third generation of New Englanders, whose status in the churches would have been determined first by the conditions of the Half-Way Covenant. Clap’s account, however, privileges the genuinely communal over the merely public. Individual conversions are at the heart of the phenomenon; ultimately, it is the melding of personal and communal salvation plots that matters. Clap’s description of the “Tears” shed by speaker and hearer alike serves simultaneously as tool and as evidence of the conversion for the individual and the community—a salvific symbiosis.43 The wondrous indwelling of the spirit at the Dorchester meetinghouse had made joyfully evident that “In those days, God, even our own God, did Bless New-England,” but precisely this demonstration of God’s favor toward the community at large gives Clap his first sense of personal doubt. He does not experience what he hears and sees others express. In retrospect, and from hearing various narratives “publicly declared,” Clap knows that “God doth work in divers ways upon the Hearts of Men, even as it pleases Him; upon some more sensibly, and upon others more insensibly.” Clap frames his troubled realization with the verse that should but does not bring him the assurance that his own genuine conversion might not conform to the pattern he sees in others: “The Wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: So is every one that is born of the Spirit” ( John 3:8).44 Clap’s greatest doubt as a would-be saint in New England is his failure to discover in himself the “great Terrors” and sense of “lost Condition” that he hears in the narrated experiences of others in his community. The natural optimism of his temperament and his buoyant sense of assurance have stymied his further spiritual revelation. Clap admits to his descendants what he finally admits to himself: “If ever there were the Work of Grace wrought savingly in my Heart; the Time when, the Place where, the manner how, was never so apparent unto me, as some in their Relations say it hath been unto them.”45 This reflection concludes the first movement of Clap’s conversion narrative with its ample biographical detail, communal reflection, and historical relevance. The discovery of his own relatively unexamined state of assurance inaugurates a more deeply subjective account of his initial awakening. Having just narrated his spiritual progress in terms of migration from old to New England, Clap begins the second movement of the narrative, starting his story again from the very beginning, with very few details of persons, places, or dates but rather with an unflinching baring of personal experience.

194   Chapter 5 Clap promises his reader that he “shall hint a little unto you what I have found.” What follows appears to be a version of the conversion narrative that Clap might have given for admission into the gathered church at Dorchester.46 Clap essentially retells the story of the same period that he has just narrated from a different perspective and, apparently, with a different rhetorical goal in mind. Now instead of details about his family and their estate, he begins with a much more intimate estimation of his own spiritual condition, and he follows the same basic pattern and answers the same pivotal questions as do any number of formal, clerically recorded confessions. Since his youth in England, Clap had recognized a basic sense of his “corrupt Nature,” a “self prone to Sin,” and “a love to Sin.” While legal terror (“the Fear of Hell”) as well as friends and family played a role in “the Restraining Grace of God” that kept him “from committing of those horrid Abominations that some fell into,” Clap carefully notes that “yet am I not thereby Justified.” The caveat highlights a familiar doctrinal point. Clap’s life here provides the “text,” but the point of instruction is applicable to any soul that would be complacent in legality. Clap cites a particular weakness for playing on the Sabbath, noting that although “God was pleased to make my Conscience to be out of quiet, which made me Pray to God many Times in Secret; yet I had a Love to the Pleasure of Sin, and did love to see others Play though it were on the Lord’s Day.”47 Clap narrates at some length the episode in which his young self first turns from the outward practice of sin: But on a Time on the Lord’s-Day, when I was standing by, and seeing some Youths Play, they gave me those Points which they played for, to hold for them until their Game was out; and my Conscience not being quiet, God brought that saying of Saul, afterwards Paul, to my Mind, who did acknowledge that he was guilty of the Death of Stephen; for he stood by, and kept the Garments of them that slew him [Acts 22:20]; I then put down that which I had in keeping for them, and went away; and God did help me afterwards to delight more in Them that fear’d him. I did often go to hear the Word of God preached, with my Bretheren and others abroad, when we had no Preaching at home; and God inclined my Heart to love those that fear’d him.48

As with Augustine and his stolen pears, the specifics of the sin are less impor-

Narrating the Soul   195 tant than the perverse enjoyment of sin for sin’s sake, a point that is underscored by Clap’s passive yet culpable involvement in the Sabbath-breaking games.49 The passage does not end with Clap’s rejection of his sinful behavior. Instead, the incident is followed immediately by his account of the frequency and seriousness with which he sought out good preaching. Seeking out godly preaching is commonplace in Puritan conversion stories but also a likely indication of vocation (a stage in effectual conversion, albeit not saving in itself ) and confirmation of the importance of minister and sermon (the ordinary means of salvation). Read against the Cambridge confessions, Clap’s highly compact sequence of early memories echoes the familiar pattern of means, hearing, and reciprocal witness. Still, as a conclusion to a passage about conquering a youthful predilection for sin, the account of sermon attendance at first seems abrupt and tangential. The repetition of the phrase referring to those who “fear’d” God—first in relation to those who refused to game on the Sabbath and then in relation to those who seek the godly preaching—suggests a legal fear that, once obeyed, leads to a second fear based on a more profound, effectual understanding of God’s sovereignty. While the first fear causes Clap to turn away from a tangibly sinful act (simple, ineffectual behavior modification), the second fear causes Clap to turn toward fear and cleave to the preached Word. Hinting at the converted identity of Saul/Paul and its model of immediate conversion, the passage emphasizes the immediacy of spontaneous textual application. God’s restraining grace puts Clap in mind of the Acts quotation, and from this he sees his immediate situation as an opening of that text and his life as an application of its doctrine. For Clap, the incident has provided him an extra-pulpit textual application, a spontaneous mixing of experience and scripture. In the passage, Clap demonstrates that divorcing oneself from behavioral sin is an incomplete measure. His repetition of the “fear” phrase illustrates his progress from legal to gracious terror, as well as the unexpected movement from experiential application to the textual sovereignty of scripture. Within the general relevance of the spontaneous Pauline conversion, Clap’s recollection of Acts 22:20 also calls attention to the nature of sin. Associating himself with Saul the persecutor, Clap places the ostensibly mild transgression of enabling Sabbath-day sporting on par with standing by at the martyring of Stephen. In the radical process of conversion, Clap (or any saint) implicitly claims as radical a transformation as that from Saul to Paul. This collation of Clap’s actions with Saul’s indicates his true sight of sin. The juxtaposition of anecdote with scripture demonstrates that there are no degrees of sin; rather, all

196   Chapter 5 sins are equally violent and culpable. The “Death of Stephen,” with which Clap collates his ostensibly mild offense, evokes Christ’s death, the true cost of all sin, no matter how seemingly minor. Having provided a foundational account of early vocation and sense of conviction, Clap continues in the style of a formal narrative offered for church membership with a set number of answers to a single pointed question. Posing the possibly ventriloquized inquiry “Upon Examination of my self, whether I did love the Saints upon right grounds?,” Clap gives four numbered reasons why “I did and do still hope that my Love to the Saints was and is rightly grounded.” His first reason is the most specific: Clap describes his heart becoming “knit unto” a certain “very hard favoured Man” upon hearing “that he feared God.” Two other reasons speak generally to Clap finding that his “Heart doth contemn vile Persons,” on the one hand, and “most close with, and most highly prize those that are most excellent, most worthy Instruments of God’s Glory and his People’s Good,” on the other. Moreover, the fearing of God—or perhaps more important, the recognition of the same fear in others—becomes for Clap an occasion of joy and hope: “To this very Day if I perceive or do but hear of a Man or Woman that feareth God, let him be Rich or Poor, English or Indian, Portugal or Negro, my very Heart closeth with him.”50 Clap’s heart closing with the godly margin recalls a Pauline sentiment: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (KJV, Gal. 3:28). For Clap, the closing of his heart with others, regardless of station, offers vital evidence of his likely elect status as a saint, as he gives himself over to the radical transformation of identity that creates likewise radically new configurations of community. This second movement of Clap’s tripartite conversion narrative speaks more directly to the highly personal contemplation of doctrine and the collation of scripture in lived experience. Following the formal expectations and familiar structure of other New England confessions, this second version of his spiritual state through his migration to Dorchester presumably satisfies both the gathered community and, at least initially, Clap himself. Curiously, Clap does not begin with this more authoritative account of his elect status, choosing instead to embed narrative within narrative, effectively collating the diverse rhetorical goals of biography, history, and visible sanctity. While none of these three narrative goals can be concluded definitively during Clap’s lifetime, the prospect of visible sanctity proves to be the least stable at this stage in the Memoirs. As is typical in these narratives, the prolonged post-conversion stage brings an ex-

Narrating the Soul   197 cruciating new perspective on the familiar cycles of doubt and assurance. The exegetical friction between lives lived and scripture verses applied can be productive of some foundational grounds for assurance, but a life of visible sanctity is long and, in Clap’s case, will require at least one more narrative attempt to frame the soul story. The greatest textual strain in Clap’s larger narrative is not apparent in any single passage but in the necessity to write and rewrite his grounds for hope in three subsequent versions and with three divergent narrative strategies. Clap’s final configuration of his soul’s narration is apparently occasioned by the spiritual crisis that follows his successful admission to the Dorchester church in 1630. Ironically, Clap’s overall confidence in the inclination of his heart and his joy in New England fellowship provoke his greatest doubt regarding his spiritual state. Whereas in his previous narration, Clap emphasizes the gracious workings of salvation within the Dorchester meetinghouse, he now returns to the same scene to set the stage for his deeply latent doubts about the status of his soul: Jesus Christ being clearly Preached, and the way of coming to him by Believing was plainly shown forth; yet because many in their Relations spake of their great Terrors and deep Sense of their lost Condition, and I could not so find as others did, the Time when God wrought the Work of Conversion in my Soul, nor in many respects the Manner thereof; it caused in me much Sadness of Heart, and Doubtings how it was with me, Whether the Work of Grace were ever savingly wrought in my Heart or no? How to cast off all Hope, to say, and verily to Believe that there was no Work of Grace wrought by God in my Heart, this I could not do: yet how to be in some measure assured thereof was my great Concern.51

As Clap might have concluded from the John 3:8 verse that he cites earlier (“The Wind bloweth where it listeth . . .”), genuine conversion cannot be expected to take any particular form. As Clap watches an experimental norm evolve in his chosen community, he realizes his inability to participate in a publicly legible manner. Affective evidence proves all the more elusive for Clap partly because he has been relatively confident in his state all along. Clap never suspects himself of mere Christian “civility” or hypocrisy. Both despite and because of his basic confidence, Clap carefully pursues the experiential difference as a

198   Chapter 5 matter of evidence rather than substance. The tacit suspicion arises that the four “reasons” previously offered have constituted encouragement but not effectual conversion. Despite his admission to the gathered church of Dorchester, Clap remains uncertain whether he is “thereby Justified.” In the tripartite movement of his conversion narrative, Clap circles repeatedly around the moments of his greatest spiritual crisis in New England, as if driven to offer a satisfactory narrative, whether or not that narrative still has any immediate functional goal (for example, of membership in a gathered church) or public good (for example, as a pious chronicle for posterity). The final version of his soul story is the most private and is narrated for his own sake. Once identifying his central concern “to be in some measure assured” of the “Work of Grace wrought by God in my Heart,” Clap first reports having “no little Support” until “hearing Mr. Cotton Preach out of the Revelations, that Christ’s Church did come out of great Tribulation, he has such a Passage as this in his Sermon, ‘That a small running Stream was much better than a great Land Flood of Water, tho’ the Flood maketh the greatest Noise: So, saith he, A little constant Stream of godly Sorrow, is better than great Horrour.’”52 Cotton frequently preached and published on Revelation. Clap apparently was present on at least one preaching occasion, and his recollection of doctrine (“Christ’s Church did come out of great Tribulation”), along with his recital of a fully articulated explanation (“such a passage as this”), strongly suggests that if Clap did not have direct access to notes on Cotton’s preaching (his own or someone else’s), he could still recall the aural event with the proclivities of a content and an aural/ verbatim auditor. The reported speech (“sayeth he”) coming via Clap’s memory in the narration blurs the boundaries between scriptural text, doctrinal teaching, Cotton’s explication, and Clap’s application. The modern reader of the Memoirs cannot arrive at a definitive genetics of the explication, but that seeming failure accurately reflects the status of the spiritual narrative that now collates together again its own disseminated trajectory. Ultimately, as Clap notes, “God spake to me” by the enfolded explication of the unspecified Revelation text. Clap offers his own doctrinal opening of the well-traveled passage, reporting that “God helped me to hang on that Text (and through thro’ his Grace I will continue to do so) viz. This is a faithful saying & worthy of all Acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the World to save Sinners.” Clearly, the verse from Revelation is the instrument, but God has worked meaning into the iterative exegesis of scripture, bringing Clap to the necessary sense of promise. The use of texts, finally, allows Clap to set aside the need for

Narrating the Soul   199 texts: “God has made me sensible that I am a Sinner, and Jesus Christ came so save Sinners, and why not me, tho’ a very sinful man: Thro’ the Grace of God I desire to rest alone upon Jesus Christ for Salvation.”53 Finally laying hold of the promise that is suggested by applied textuality but ultimately proffered by the more immediate infusion of grace, Clap exerts his own enabled reasoning to search his soul. During his “saddest Troubles for want of a clear Evidence,” while meditating “upon my Bed in the Night, concerning my spiritual Estate,” Clap comes to the key moment of his full conversion. With a precision of phrasing perhaps adopted from actual questions that he has heard posed to and by others making their formal confession, Clap puts his “self upon this Trial, How my Heart stood affected to Sin?” Clap’s enabled debility allows him to formulate an even more pointed version of this question after “pitching upon that Sin which I did confess my natural Corruption most inclined me to”: “Whether if God would assure me that I should be saved, although I should commit such a Sin, my Heart were willing to commit it or no? And my very Heart and Soul answered, No, I would not Sin against God, though I should not be damned for sinning, because God has forbidden it.”54 Clap reaffirms his rejection of sin for sin’s sake rather than for legal terror, essentially returning to the same conclusion that he had come to earlier in England during the Sabbath gaming. This latter-day revelation exhibits several qualitative differences. In the latter case, the rejection of sin is purely theoretical and not occasioned by an actual transgression. Furthermore, a deliberate, painful self-interrogation (rather than a spontaneous Pauline verse) is the means by which God “helps” Clap to the right conclusion and ultimately to his pivotal conversion to lasting hope of assurance. Clap’s interior dialogue concludes with the heightened emotion that he has hitherto found elusive: “At that Time my conscience did witness to me that my State was good: And God’s holy Spirit did witness (I do believe) together with my Spirit, that I was a Child of God; and did fill me Heart and Soul with such a full Assurance that Christ was mine, that it did so transport me as to make me cry out upon my Bed in a loud Voice, He is come, He is come. And God did melt my Heart at that time so that I could, and did mourn and shed more Tears for Sin, than at other Times.”55 Clap’s transcendent moment of spiritual revelation constitutes what a modern reader might characterize as subjective mysticism, an eighteenth-century critic might label enthusiasm, and a seventeenth-century Puritan might find bordering on antinomianism (despite cautiously tentative qualifying phrases such as “I do believe”). Although Clap has initiated the diffi-

200   Chapter 5 cult self-interrogation to arrive at some “clear Evidence” of his “good Estate,” the immediacy of witness might not have served him well as a formal conversion narrative. We can imagine Shepard instructing Clap to distill the fullness of the rapture into a shorter and more discrete formulation, for example. Conversely, we might also recognize in the shorthand of formally recorded confession narratives the great personal dramas they represent. For Clap, however, the goal has been to find a necessary sorrow consistent with his temperament of spiritual confidence. This he finds in the paradox that “When I had most Assurance of God’s Love, I could mourn for my Sins.”56 In the relief of sorrow, Clap seems finally to articulate New England conversion. Yet this final iteration of conversion may not conclusively resolve his soul’s narration. In confronting the expectant need to find his “clear Evidence” in a moment of elevation or crisis, he does achieve a climactic moment. The onanistic quality of Clap’s description of his nighttime interrogations points us in several directions simultaneously. In one sense, the immediacy of revelation provides yet another version of the antinomian problem, not only in terms of an ungovernable subjectivity but in the suspicion of a kind of spiritual selfgratification (an interesting correlative to proverbial charges of “familist” sexual license). In another sense, the intense privacy of the moment suggests the problems inherent in the articulation of personal revelation of any kind. Clap seems to call attention to these knotty problems of Puritan conversion inadvertently, but the critique of solipsism is no less trenchant. Clap suggests that despite any amount of ordinary means in the meetinghouse, salvation will be accomplished only within the private space of the individual saint’s own mind and heart. Despite the need for the gathered community to witness conversion experience, the confirmation must be mediated through acts of narration. Clap is quite willing to narrate and re-narrate his story for family, for community, and for history, but he also recognizes that, at its most basic level, salvation is an essentially secret knowledge and, as such, textually suspect. One of Clap’s strongest recommendations to his children is not that they appeal to ordinary means (although that, too, is necessary) but that they “Slight not serious Examination: It is good to commune with your own Hearts upon your Bed.”57 Furthermore, Clap’s final movement reveals full affinity with the very structure of the plain-style sermon. What Clap wishes to open satisfactorily is no single text of scripture or even one providential biographical incident but, rather, his own experiential soul. The fact of Clap’s visible sanctity (signaled by his admission to the church at Dorchester in 1630) must be opened, ex-

Narrating the Soul   201 plicated, and applied because personal doubt and the uncertainty of narrative alone cannot account for his curious case of conscience. Clap begins to open his case with historical facts (“After God had brought me into this Country, He was pleased to give me Room in the Hearts of his Servants”), context (“I could not so find as others did the Time when God wrought the Work of Conversion in my Soul”), and consequence (“It caused in me much Sadness of Heart, and Doubtings how it was with me”).58 Although he has yet to prove his case of conscience, Clap’s implied conundrum serves as his doctrinal point: “How to cast off his Hope, to say, and verily to Believe that there was no work of Grace wrought by God in my Heart, this I could not do.” Clap’s experiential text opens to an individualized, possibly unique, doctrine. Similarly, the questions and objections that arise from Clap’s case are also unique and subsequently answered not by universally applicable casuistry but by personal experiences. To his own first question regarding how he might find “some measure” of assurance, Clap answers himself with Cotton’s explication of the Revelation text. (Properly speaking, that is, neither the Revelation verse nor Cotton’s specific sermon answers the question but rather Clap’s recollection and reconstruction of that aural event.) To his own plaintive objection regarding Clap’s lack of “a clear Evidence of my good Estate,” Clap responds with the nighttime examination of his “spiritual Estate,” initiating a further series of questions and answers, each more exacting than the previous, until reaching his climactic infusion of assurance, “He is come, He is come.” Objections and questions having been resolved, Clap concludes the narration of his conversion experience with three implicit “uses.” Although drawn from the opening of his own idiosyncratic case and explicated by way of experiential contemplation, Clap’s uses are not for his personal benefit but are potentially applicable universally. To his children (and, we imagine, the broader readership that might encounter his memoirs), Clap first offers a use of exhortation, “Slight not serious Examination: It is good to commune with your own Hearts upon your Bed.” A short prayer completes the first use, and Clap continues with two further points of application: a use of instruction in the formulation of a partial scripture verse, “He that Believeth shall be saved,” (Mark 16:16) and a use of comfort that reading Clap’s memoirs “may be some Support unto you, altho’ you cannot find that methodical Work in your Conversion, as some say they find in theirs.”59 In a distinct reversal of the expected pattern of conversion narrative, in which explicated scriptural texts offered to all auditors generally are applied privately to individual cases, here Clap opens the unique case of

202   Chapter 5 his own soul and applies his idiosyncratic doctrine universally, even explicating his own biographical literal sense into scripture. The narrative and exegetical anxieties demonstrated in conversion narrative—whether for the discrete rhetorical goal of admission to a gathered church or for the even more elusive goal of personal assurance—originate in its inherent contradictions. The notion of a formula, which is so noxious to Hutchinson and so unattainable for Clap, suggests simultaneously the absolute coherence of grace and the fallible contingencies of human self-knowledge. The attempt to articulate assurance from inside this contradictory proposition greatly exacerbates the problems already inherent in any personal narrative. The typical form of the conversion narrative, based on extant examples, only superficially suggests the genre that will develop into autobiography in later centuries. Conversion narrative is not autobiography, but neither is it a static morphology or a reliable taxonomy of evidence. The Cambridge confessors and other narrators may consistently offer reciprocal witness according to the conventions of gathered community, but their specific articulations do not constitute the only mode of exegetical collation. Shepard, for example, demonstrates that biographical incident may be collated with the inter-narrative logic that Winship achieves in her confession. Indeed, Shepard’s collation of the mutually implicated estates of himself and his family might also recall Mary Rock’s collation of Rahab’s unfolding narrative or even Hooker’s weaving of vernacular peregrinations of the main verb in Acts 2:37 over several decades and two continents. Conversely, Clap effectively shows how the case of an individual soul might lead toward scriptural literal sense rather than being formed in response to its plain-style explication. Reversing the presumed directionality of Hutchinson’s retort, Clap does not find his name in scripture so much as he finds scripture in his own experience. The carefully negotiated enabled debility of Puritan exegetes in seventeenth-century New England reveals itself throughout the material-textual archive. Sermons, sermon notes, conversion narratives, poetry, and prose genres of all kinds demonstrate a simultaneous confidence and doubt in the capacity of human language to cohere with divine articulation. The limits of certainty circumscribe Puritan writing, but doubt itself has its uses, creating a productive exegetical tension apparent throughout their literature. The entire community of hopeful saints is implicated in the abundant uncertainty of the entire enterprise. In the end, every genre of Puritan sermon literature must come to terms with its own proscribed capacity. Sermons branch and meander, buckling under

Narrating the Soul   203 the weight of their theological precision; confessions restrain personality while moments of assurance return to doubt; poems advertise their own absurdity; prayer remains elusive throughout. There is little more for the conscientious Puritan to do than try to trust that God will correct any missteps. As Norton writes in the print epistle to “The Christian Reader in New England” at the beginning of The Orthodox Evangelist, “The Lord who in rich grace hath not only Sanctified the tongue of the Preacher, but also the pen of the Scribe unto the edification of his; So bless all our labours that both Speaker and Hearer, Writer and Reader, may rejoyce together in that day, that they have not run in vain.”60

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Notes

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Introduction 1 Daniel B. Shea, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ ton University Press, 1968), 94. 2 Cotton Mather, The Great Works of Christ in America: Magnalia Christi Americana (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), 1:301. 3 Ibid., 275. 4 Ibid., 311–12. 5 Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4. 6 Jonathan Mitchell’s preface to Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied: Being the Substance of Divers Sermons on Matt. 25:1–13 (Lingonier, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990, 1852), 8. 7 Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough, eds., The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3. The prominence of scholarship on the early modern English sermon has continued to grow in the past decade. By 2010, Arnold Hunt could cite “a remarkable flowering of new scholarship devoted to preaching, making it more and more difficult to sustain the claim that sermons are languishing in critical disfavor,” a viewpoint bolstered by the 2011 publication of The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon; Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2. See also Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Despite the early example of Larzer Ziff, who pointed out the inevitably “misty 8 margin” of the term “Puritan,” American literary scholarship has largely been able to defer the core question that consumes much thought on the English side; Larzer Ziff, “The Literary Consequences of Puritanism,” ELH 30.3 (1963): 293–305. In a sense, the issue of orthodoxy is the more salient, contentious term. See, e.g., Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984); Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Michael P. Winship, Making Her-

206   Notes to Pages 4–7 etics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 9 “Saint” is the term used to distinguish a full member of the gathered churches of New England. A full confession of faith and persuasive narration of one’s spiritual narrative was typically required for admission to the church as a “Visible Saint,” and participation in the sacraments of baptism (of one’s children) and of communion (invariably referred to as Lord’s Supper)—along with some civic rights—was restricted to full members. See Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963). 10 For a concise and perceptive overview of these two influential preaching manuals, see Lisa M. Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003). 11 The late Elizabethan Puritan divine William Perkins called his preaching manual The Arte of Prophecying, and scholars have noted the potential paradox in his title. On the one hand, as Terese Toulouse points out, the act of prophesying is simultaneously divinely inspired (as it is in the prophetic books of scripture) and simply the technical term for explicating biblical verses (as taught in English universities beginning in the late sixteenth century); Terese Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). For a detailed study of the intellectual training of first-generation ministers, see John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning, and Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 12 Hunt points out that English Puritans argued for the necessity of sermons to aid the proper application and understanding of scripture, inadvertently mirroring the Roman Catholic position on the insufficiency of scripture on its own; Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 40–42. 13 Robert Daly’s explication of this famous apology forms the basis of his foundational work on Puritan poetry: God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 14 Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, in Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, ed. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola (New York: Penguin, 1998), 43. 15 Scholarship in the past few decades has succeeded wonderfully in revealing the true range of Puritan poetic achievement. See, e.g., Daly, God’s Altar; Peter White, ed., Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986); John Gatta, Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989); William J. Scheick, Design in Puritan American Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992); and Jeffrey A. Hammond, Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). Hammond focuses particularly on the writing of poetry to work out the lived experience of Puritanism, while Scheick emphasizes the role of linguistic pressure in poetry (what he terms “logogic crux”) to wrangle with theological conundrum. 16 Taylor’s choice to focus on the Lord’s Supper sermons reflects the centrality of the sacrament for Puritans. (Baptism and communion were the only two sacraments preserved in the nonconformist “purifying” of Anglican ritual.) For a more detailed account of Taylor’s deep involvement with pressing questions of communion, see Edward Taylor’s Treatise Con-

Notes to Pages 7–11   207 cerning the Lord’s Supper, ed. Norman S. Grabo (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966). Louis Lohr Martz defends Taylor against the charge of being simply a “burlap version” of George Herbert in his preface to The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), xviii. Barbara Lewalski elaborates on Taylor’s resemblance to early seventeenth-century English religious poets in Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). For the “ludic impulse” in Taylor’s unusual poetry, see Gatta, Gracious Laughter. 17 Within the field of book history, the works of several scholars have been highly instructive in the development of my approach to early modern material textuality. Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). 18 Hunt, The Art of Hearing. 19 An archival study of sermon notetaking by laity is foundational to this book. Referenced frequently by scholars of Puritanism, sermon notetaking is a practice long known but little studied. Winfried Herget’s “Writing After the Ministers” is the first thorough investigation of the practice in New England. More recently, Hunt has integrated excellent analysis of English practices (largely rooted in pedagogy) in his study of the aural experience of sermons. Ann Blair has illuminated continental contexts of (mostly scholarly) notetaking practices under the rubric of “information management” in the medieval and early modern world. Winfried Herget, “Writing After the Ministers: The Significance of Sermon Notes,” in Studies in New England Puritanism, ed. Winfried Herget (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1983), 113–38; Hunt, The Art of Hearing; and Blair, Too Much to Know. 20 Stout, The New England Soul, 5. 21 C. Mather, Magnalia, 1:337. 22 As Mary Morrissey succinctly describes the relationship between preaching and the primacy of Word in Reformation thought: “Scripture is not merely a record of the sayings of Christ; it is a revelation of God under the ‘veil’ of its words. Consequently, preaching is more than merely informative on morality or godliness: the sermon was to make that particular part of Scripture operative for the hearers.” Mary Morrissey, “Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53.4 (2002): 689–90. 23 See David D. Hall, “A Ministry of the Word,” in idem, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 3–20l; and Hunt, “The Theory of Preaching,” in idem, The Art of Hearing, 19–59. 24 Jones and Jones emphasize the process of ordinary means, particularly the accommodation for a “mixed” auditory of souls at different stages of spiritual renewal, in their useful sermon anthology Salvation in New England: Selections from the Sermons of the First Preachers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977). 25 [ John Pinch/Pyncheon?], Sermons collection, 1640–1875, in box 3, folder 26, mss. boxes “S,” American Antiquarian Society.

208   Notes to Pages 12–16 26 Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 27 Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 28 C. Mather, Magnalia, 1:342–43. 29 William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying (London, 1607), 148. This sparse prescription for sermon composition is frequently cited in contemporary scholarship, e.g., Gordis, Opening Scripture; and Michael Warner, American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1999). 30 Greg Kneidel identifies “four basic sermon forms—the homily, the thematic sermon, the classical oration, and the doctrine-use scheme,” all of which had been “theorized, taught to, and practised by English preachers” in the early modern period. “Ars Prædicandi: Theories and Practice,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17. While W. F. Mitchell and Perry Miller early on made much of the perceived sectarian differences of this “plain style,” Morrissey argues that a focus on teaching rather than on rhetoric exaggerates the divergence in English preaching of the period. See William Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of Its Literary Aspects (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: Macmillan, 1932); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939); and Morrissey, “Scripture, Style and Persuasion.” 31 For Calvin’s structure and style, see T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Preaching (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), esp. 79–92 (“The Expository Method”). Parker’s book also contains an instructive account of scribal practices that brought Calvin’s sermons into publication. See “The Transmission of the Sermons,” 65–75. 32 Kneidel, “Ars Prædicandi,” 12–13. 33 Edward Davidson and J. W. Blench, quoted in Gordis, Opening Scripture, 32. 34 As Kneidel confirms, “The influence of Ramist method is everywhere apparent in William Perkins’ seminal Puritan preaching manual”; “Ars Prædicandi,” 13. From Miller onward, scholars have dwelled upon the influence of Peter Ramus’s logic upon Puritan learning and sermon composition. See, e.g., Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Of particular importance in my study is the branching structure advocated by Ramus as an alternative to Aristotelian argument forms. Typically, Ramist branching begins with a single proposition for scrutiny and bisects the concept into its general and specific components. Each component subsequently can be subdivided, providing a methodology of seemingly limitless elaboration and narrowing. For a thorough study of Ramus and his influence, see Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 35 Gordis, Opening Scripture; and Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying. 36 Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, 81; and Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 95. 37 Cf. Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 97–98. 38 Gordis, Opening Scripture, 16, 17. 39 For one of the fullest accounts of the process of sermon composition, see Babette May Levy, Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History (Hartford, Conn.: American Society of Church History, 1945). Wilson H. Kimnach’s wonderfully detailed account of Jonathan Edwards’s composition process is necessarily focused on the specific working method of the later minister, but the introduction is extremely instructive for early New

Notes to Pages 16–20   209 England preaching generally: “General Introduction to the Sermons: Jonathan Edwards’ Art of Prophesying,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, vol. 10 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 1–258. 40 Quoted in Gordis, Opening Scripture, 19. 41 James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007). 42 Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, chap. 4, pp. 30, 31. See also Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, 88; and Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 49–50. 43 James Simpson has raised ethical issues inherent in fundamentalist thought, reexamining the premises of “literal” readings of scripture with a deeply historically and rhetorically grounded study of Erasmus and Tyndale. Simpson critically reassesses the liberal humanist valorization of Reform religious culture as a movement “of the book.” Drawing on deep linguistic and historical analysis of key polemics, Simpson keeps ethical considerations center stage. His readings of the “textual hatred” that underlies Protestant reading and writing usefully complicate familiar narratives of the empowerment of sola scriptura. Simpson’s critique of Protestant “textual hatred” proceeds in part from what he argues is a relatively unexamined scholarly tradition celebrating liberal humanism—the primacy of the book and the individual, an untroubled acquiescence to a dominant Protestant narrative of the overthrow of received tradition and interpretive hierarchies; Simpson, Burning to Read. 44 Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, chap. 4, p. 31. Augustine’s early influential approach to handling obscure or contradictory places in scripture can be found throughout De Doctrina Christiana; Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 45 William Tyndale, Tyndale’s New Testament, ed. David Daniell (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). 46 Levy, Preaching, 132. 47 Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, chap. 3, p. 7. 48 Ibid., chap. 3, p. 17. 49 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 50 C. Mather, Magnalia, 1:346–47. 51 For background on Ames, see Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). For the influence of Ames on first-generation ministers, see Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Hunt points out that Ames is a particular proponent of plain style as opposed to grand, a dichotomy reaching back to Quintilian that he seeks to disrupt; The Art of Hearing, 82. In Orthodoxies in Massachusetts, Knight similarly recognizes Ames and Perkins as having a style distinctive from, say, that of Richard Sibbes and John Preston but casts the difference in terms of a kind of intellectual-pastoral genealogy characterized as “Intellectual Fathers” and “Spiritual Brethren,” respectively. 52 While J. Morgan’s Godly Learning is the classic source on clerical education, Hunt’s Art of Hearing offers the most recent work on how training affects pulpit practice. For the New England context, Gordis demonstrates in Opening Scripture how the virtuosity of ministers in rendering their explications inculcated a sense in the laity that they, too, might delve directly into difficult exegesis, with some notorious results. 53 Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, chap. 4, pp. 26–27. 54 Ibid., chap. 3, p. 18.

210   Notes to Pages 21–27 55 Gordis, Opening Scripture, 27. For a full discussion of the theory and practice of collation, see ibid., 23–31. 56 John Templestone, Sermons Copied by John Templestone, 1686–87, Mss. Dept. SBd-227, Massachusetts Historical Society. 57 Competing title pages within Templestone’s book simply complicate our sense of how and why this volume was created. Templestone’s volume is created out of two gatherings of folded paper sewn together. According to physical and textual evidence, but for no absolutely clear reason, Templestone seems first to have copied out the Moodey sermon (first published in 1686, second edition in 1687), leaving pages between the title page and the first pages of the sermon copy blank (with a few pages remaining blank at the end of the sermon). At some later point, Templestone copied the heads of the Cotton sermon (delivered November 1687) into the blank pages before and after the transcribed Moodey sermon. Since Templestone dates “His BOOK” February 14, 1687—after the first publication of Moodey’s extract and the first delivery of Cotton’s sermon, presuming “old style” dating—his inscription might indicate a creation date (when he first manufactured a volume intended for the compilation of sermons), a completion date (either when he finished adding the first or second transcription), or even an ownership date (when he decided to “seal” the fruit of his work and declare it his own). Subsequent owners (Sarah Appleton, Timothy Aldin) left their marks, too, but Templestone’s status as material author/transcriber/creator remains dominant. 58 The catalog record at the Massachusetts Historical Society offers the following details: “Notes: Small book of sermons most likely copied by John Templestone. The sermons were written by Rev. John Cotton of the First Parish in Plymouth, Mass. and delivered at Ipswich, Mass., 24 Nov. 1687 and by Rev. Joshua Moodey of the First Church in Boston and delivered in Boston, 6 Mar. 1686. Sarah Appleton’s name appears on the first page. Formerly cataloged as ‘J. Moody.’ Old shelf marks : 91.56, 18.7.” 59 The context of Moodey’s execution sermon (along with the history of James Morgan’s execution, the circumstances of the sermons delivered on that occasion, and the publication of those sermons) has been well documented in Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1676–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 49–54. 60 Ibid., 50. 61 Ibid., 52. Cohen analyzes Dunton’s savvy compilation of the sermons into a single publication, noting that, especially after additions to the second edition, “the dramatic structure of the anthology tended to shift the reader’s attention away from the subtleties of ministerial doctrine, feelings of revulsion at Morgan’s crime, or vindictive satisfaction at his judicial death and toward an aroused concern over the condemned man’s spiritual fate.” Ibid., 53. 62 Ibid., 51. 63 Ibid., 52. Nor was the first print edition the final articulation concerning the event. The second edition, with its significant addition of the hitherto private conversation between Increase Mather and Morgan, confirms that the compilation, accumulation, and reinterpretation of meaningful textual events do not cease. 64 Moodey’s excerpt is included in Increase Mather, A Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder (Boston, 1687), [unpaginated gap, ca. 59]. 65 Wherever possible, and unless otherwise noted, scriptural citations are transcribed as they appear in the manuscript or print original. Here, for example, Templestone

Notes to Pages 27–30   211 records an abbreviated version of Heb. 12.1, which reads as follows in the King James Version (also known as the Authorized Version and hereafter cited as KJV): “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.” 66 See Stout, The New England Soul, 47–49. 67 The permeability and flexibility of print and manuscript continue to enjoy particular attention in early modern English studies. See, e.g., Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham, eds., The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Two important recent contributions in earlier American literary studies include a collection of essays edited by Sandra M. Gustafson and Caroline Sloat that uncovers a range of American contexts for the permeability of print, oral, and manuscript culture through 1900 as well as work by Matt Cohen that has applied and expanded upon book history approaches, reframing the theoretical premises of textual production—particularly that of encounter literature—in seventeenth-century New England; Sandra M. Gustafson and Caroline Sloat, Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); and Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 68 In my analysis of lay sermon notes, I have perhaps drawn even more upon book history models than I have on recent scholarship of early American oral culture. Scholarship on early American oral culture and the formation of national identity in the eighteenth century is well known. Christopher Looby and David S. Shields, e.g., have both opened up Michael Warner’s discursive model to privilege oral culture as well. For the seventeenth century, Jane Kamensky, Phillip Round, and Sandra Gustafson have each elaborated the importance of speech acts to the formation of culture and power. Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Phillip H. Round, By Nature and by Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620– 1660 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999); and Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory & Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 69 In a field where the “sociology of texts” has come to complement (if not eclipse) conventional bibliographical analysis, the ambiguities of the publication process are presumed, and the idiosyncrasies of distribution, consumption, and redeployment are expected. See D. F. (Donald Francis) McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986). To give just one set of examples, the ways in which the lay auditor is implicated in various stages of print sermon production recall the “communications circuit” suggested by Robert Darnton, illustrating the production of books not as a linear process but as a cycle that is perhaps initiated by the interaction between publisher and author but that

212   Notes to Pages 30–35 comes full circle though the hands of various agents, including printers, shippers, booksellers, and readers; Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9–26 (originally published in Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History [London: Faber and Faber, 1990]). The argument for the overlap between oral, manuscript, and print is perhaps better illustrated by another “communication circuit” created by Darnton to schematize a hypothetical model in which the lines of influence of oral modes of information (such as gossip and ballads), manuscript (such as letters and poetry), ephemeral printing (such as broadsides), and print books crisscross in a frenzy of overlapping textual activity. Darnton, “Communication Networks,” in idem, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 181–97. A revised communications circuit suggested by Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker—focusing on the book artifact rather than the agents of book production—offers yet another model, perhaps even better suited to create theoretical space for contemplating the simultaneous creation and circulation of manuscripts alongside print production. Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker replace “the six groups of people who make the ‘Communications Network’ operation” with “five events in the life of a book—publishing, manufacturing, distribution, reception, and survival—whose sequence constitutes a system of communication and can in turn precipitate other cycles”; “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Nicolas Barker (London: British Library, 1993), 15. 70 Most notetakers in this study are Anglo men, although there are a few Anglo women represented. Some are experienced, trained notetakers, while others exhibit evidence of rudimentary education and indirect knowledge of university-taught techniques. One hopes that further studies of sermon notetaking and related manuscript archives will make available an increasingly diverse field of auditors. Although the recovery of nonwhite aural culture in seventeenth-century New England has been largely beyond the scope of this book, recent scholarship on seventeenth-century Indian literary culture suggests approaches that might be fruitful in recovering Indian sermon aurality. See, e.g., Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); and M. Cohen, Networked Wilderness. For a rich collection of primary texts, see Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss, eds., Early Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 71 My approach here has benefited from recent studies of early modern English literature that imagine the materiality of textual production, including Judith H. Anderson, Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); and James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Cummings’s work on Reformation literature proved extremely useful in understanding how theories of language and theology are inextricably bound together in the early modern period; see The Literary Culture of the Reformation.

Chapter 1 1 “John Davenport to John Cotton, May 6, 1650,” in John Cotton, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargent Bush Jr. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 436–39. In the letter, Davenport speaks of his weekly lec-

Notes to Pages 35–36   213 ture “wherein my intendment was to stablish the hearers in assurance that Jesus the sonne of the Virgin Mary is the onely true Messiah.” Earlier published in Davenport, Letters of John Davenport: Puritan Divine, ed. Isabel MacBeath Calder (New Haven, Conn.: Published for the First Church of Christ in New Haven by Yale University Press, 1937), 83–86. Later in the letter, he makes specific reference to his opening of Phil. 2:6–8, which deals with the messianic status of Christ as evidenced in the crucifixion. The sermon, eventually published as The knowledge of Christ indispensably required of all men that would be saved (London, 1653), takes for its scripture text Acts 2:36, the more declarative formulation “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made the same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.” 2 Cotton, Correspondence, 437. 3 Ibid., 437; and Davenport, Letters, 84 n. 4. Thomas Hooker had a manuscript lost on the same vessel (cited in Cotton, Correspondence, 439 n. 8). 4 Cotton, Correspondence, 437. 5 Quoted in Phyllis M. Jones and Nicholas R. Jones, Salvation in New England: Selections from the Sermons of the First Preachers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 19. While the issue of unauthorized publication has often been treated as a simple 6 bibliographical problem, recent work by Jonathan Beecher Field seeks to understand the complex transatlantic network of authorized, unauthorized, and quasi-authorized publication; see his Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2009). While the anxiety felt by New England ministers over unauthorized printing is almost proverbial in the field, Ann Blair shows that such authorized and unauthorized printing of “oral events” is a broad phenomenon: “Printing certainly raised the level of the rewards, both to finances and to reputation, that one could hope to reap from printing a set of notes, with or without the speaker’s tacit or explicit consent. Printing may have amplified, or simply made more visible to historian, the unauthorized circulation of notes relative to medieval antecedents.” Ann Blair, “Textbooks and Methods of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe,” in Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Emidio Campi et al. (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 47–48. 7 In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, notetaking was common among many Protestant auditors. For readers of early modern England, John Manningham is one of the most famous. See John Manningham, The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–1603, ed. Robert Parker Sorlien (Hanover, N.H.: Published for the University of Rhode Island by the University Press of New England, 1976). Although readers of Puritan New England accept the common practice of sermon notetaking, Harry S. Stout is one of the few scholars who has conducted extensive work in the manuscript archive, and Charles Lloyd Cohen is one of the few scholars to look specifically at the relation between notes and the preaching upon which it is based. See Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and C. L. Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Blair notes that “the practice of the reportatio or taking notes from normal rates of speech continued in many contexts. Sermons continued to be principal object of these practices, now also among Protestants who often applied special zeal to recording sermons. Protestant preachers also relied on assistants, or, in a new development, on their wives to record their sermons. Listeners could keep notes of sermons for their personal use, or try to profit from them by printing them illegitimately” (“Textbooks and Methods,” 47). For sermon notetaking in Reformation England, see Arnold Hunt, The

214   Notes to Pages 36–39 Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 95–114. 8 Cotton, Correspondence, 440. 9 The important work of Walter J. Ong in establishing the differences between the experiences of “orality and literacy” is largely premised upon the eclipsing of the former mode by the latter. Subsequent scholarship has developed a more nuanced understanding of the overlap of various media in the early modern period. In particular, the work of Harold Love has been fundamental in showing the permeability of print and manuscript culture. See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London; New York: Routledge, 1991); and Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). 10 Following the insights of Harold Love on early modern scribal publication, David D. Hall has worked specifically with the New England context. See David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practices and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 11 The notion of “unauthorizing” the Puritan minister that I am suggesting naturally suggests Foucault’s “author function.” Ultimately, I am suggesting a more literal sense of disseminated authorship, too, in which the entire community is materially implicated in the production of texts and textual meaning. Authorship in Puritan New England, I argue, is disseminated and discursive across time, place, person, and media. See Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). 12 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), vii. 13 Three exemplary studies that tease out the broader course of Puritan preaching by treating individual ministers in turn include Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Lisa M. Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). John Cotton and Thomas Hooker tend to dominate single-author scholarship. Cotton’s popularity as a subject is due probably not only to his prominent and problematic role in the Antinomian Controversy but also to the relative variety of his publications. Hooker, by contrast, may have become a popular subject for his relatively sensational style as well as his singular focus on the theology of preparation. 14 Knight, in Orthodoxies in Massachusetts, adapts the terms “Intellectual Fathers” and “Spiritual Bretheren” from William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism; or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). While the suggestion of two dominant clerical strains is really just the opening for Knight’s much more nuanced mapping of affiliation, style, and theology among New England clergy, the basic distinction remains useful in sorting out allegiances and disagreements in the first generation. 15 Michael J. Colacurcio, Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 16 Seventeenth-century readers, it would appear, came to associate certain ministers not only with specific themes or controversies but with certain scriptural passages. Desiderata booklists in clerical notebooks, for example, often do not identify specific titles but rather

Notes to Pages 39–41   215 “Mr. X,” e.g., on “topic Y.” John Wilkins’s extremely popular preaching manual Ecclesiastes was published almost continuously through the second half of the seventeenth century and included updated lists of the best writers on specific theological topics and books of scripture. Minister-authors came to be known for their prevailing pastoral themes. 17 The most readily available edition of the confessions is collected along with Shepard’s autobiography and journal in the excellent collection of Michael McGiffert, ed., God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). A more complete edition of the confessions can be found in George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley, eds., Thomas Shepard’s Confessions (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981). Additional confessions are included in Mary Rhinelander McCarl, “Thomas Shepard’s Record of Relations of Religious Experience, 1648–1649” (Notes and Documents), William and Mary Quarterly 48 ( July 1991): 432–66. 18 Jones and Jones, Salvation in New England, 20. 19 Field, Errands into the Metropolis, 18, 19, 21. Exploring Phillip Round’s notion of “civil conversations” in transatlantic textual production, Field argues that Williams and many other New England dissenters create for themselves an authority in spite of local orthodoxies, utilizing the time and distance of transatlantic remove to plead their case in the print metropolis of London. See also Phillip H. Round, By Nature and Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999). 20 See Winfried Herget, “The Transcription and Transmission of the Hooker Corpus,” in Thomas Hooker, Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633, ed. George H. Williams et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 253–70. 21 These numbers are based on information available in Sargent Bush Jr.’s detailed bibliography in Thomas Hooker, Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland. Because of differences in titles, editions, and bound gatherings, these figures are meant to provide a rough picture rather than a definitive tally. 22 In addition to the first two books of The Application of Redemption, Cole also brought out A Comment upon Christs Last Prayer in 1656, which he described as the “Seventeenth Book made in New-England” by Hooker. As Bush explains in his essay “Establishing the Hooker Canon,” “This numbering certainly suggests that the printer had every intention of filling the gap numbering by issuing ‘books’ eleven through sixteen [of The Application of Redemption].” Bush presumes that in 1656, Cole “must at least have had additional Hooker papers in his possession or near at hand” (Thomas Hooker, Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 387). 23 Cotton Mather, The Great Works of Christ in America: Magnalia Christi Americana (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), 1:347. 24 Herget supports this claim in “The Transcription and Transmission of the Hooker Corpus.” Both the contemporaneous and the modern conclusion about Hooker’s authorship of the draft are instructively complicated by Mather’s account of the publication history. Mather comments that many English auditors “wrote after him in short-hand; and some were so bold as to publish many of them without his consent of knowledge; whereby his notions came to be deformedly misrepresented in multitudes of passages.” Accordingly to Mather, upon preaching on “the application of redemption” for the third time while in New England, it was his design to perfect with his own hand his composures for the press, and thereby vindicate both author and matter from the wrongs done to both,

216   Notes to Pages 41–48 by surreptitious editions heretofore. He did not live to finish what he intended; yet a worthy minister, namely, Mr. John Higginson, one richly able himself to have been an author of a not unlike matter, transcribed from his manuscripts near two hundred of these excellent sermons, which were sent over into England, that they might be published; but, by what means I know not, scarce half of them have seen the light unto this day. However, ’tis possible the valuableness of those that are published, may at some time of other awaken some enquiries after the unknown hands wherein the rest are as yet concealed.” (C. Mather, Magnalia, 1:347–48) 25 Bush, “Establishing the Hooker Canon,” in Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland. See also Herget, “Preaching and Publication—Chronology and the Style of Thomas Hooker’s Sermons,” Harvard Theological Review 65.2 (1972): 231–39. Figure 4 is an overview based on Sargent Bush Jr.’s “A Bibliography of the Published Writing of Thomas Hooker,” in Writings in England and Holland, which includes much fuller, complicated bibliographic information than this chart suggests (including details on multiple editions and variants for most titles, as well as idiosyncrasies of binding titles together, and even page numbers for corresponding text that is adapted from title to title). I am indebted to Michael J. Colacurcio and his “Puritan Big Books” seminar many years ago at UCLA for my first understanding of (and subsequent fascination with) the unwieldy Ramist structure of The Application of Redemption. 26 Hooker, Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland. 27 Sargent Bush Jr., The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventure in Two Worlds (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 311. See also Colacurcio, “Regeneration Through Violence: Hooker and the Morale of Preparation,” in idem, Godly Letters. For the most precise theological account of Hooker’s pastoral emphasis within the larger context of evolving Calvinist thought, see R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 28 Herget, “The Transcription and Transmission of the Hooker Corpus,” 258–59. 29 Ibid., 258. 30 C. Mather, Magnalia, 1:345. 31 George Williams, “Document VII: The Danger of Desertion; c. April 1631,” in Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 221–52. 32 Ibid., 221. 33 Ibid., 222, 227. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 242. 36 Quoted in George Selement, “Publication and the Puritan Minister,” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (April 1980): 220. 37 Ibid., 223–24. 38 Ibid., 224, 232. 39 This is one of the emphatic points of Harry S. Stout’s indispensable study of early sermon culture; see his The New England Soul. 40 Hall, Ways of Writing; and Love, Scribal Publication. 41 One exception would be John Wheelwright’s infamous fast-day sermon. Because of its controversial nature, the only means of circulation for this text was manuscript. See also David D. Hall, “Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century New England: An Intro-

Notes to Pages 48–56   217 duction and a Checklist,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 115 (2006): 29–80; 118 (2009): 267–96. 42 Although he speaks directly about sermon notes only in passing, Charles Hambrick-Stowe provides a detailed picture of family and communal devotional practices in “The Way of Godly Conversation,” in idem, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 91–193. Anne Hutchinson’s meetings to discuss the preaching of Boston ministers were only the most infamous example of public gatherings in which sermon notes likely played a role. See David D. Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 268. For English contexts, see Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 65–66. 43 John Rogers, “Sermon delivered by the Rev’d Mr. John Rogers of Ipswich, August the 16th, 1660: manuscript, [ca. 1660],” F9v, MS Am 1146, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Nan Foster, copyist. 44 See Alexandra Walsham, “Preaching without Speaking: Script, Print and Religious Dissent,” in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211–34; and Hunt, The Art of Hearing. 45 Henry Borlas, Notes on 10 sermons heard at Oxford, ca. 1605, 1r-v, V.a.23, Folger Shakespeare Library. 46 For examples of prominent pulpits, including St. Paul’s Cross, see Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough, eds., The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 47 This disproportionate publication of occasional preaching is a phenomenon that Harry Stout identifies as a primary cause of the misrepresentation of New England sermon literature, usually studied primarily through print sources; see his The New England Soul. 48 Borlas, Notes, 2r. 49 Norman S. Grabo, Edward Taylor, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 25. For a fascinating account of the practice of student transcription of textbooks at Harvard, a practice that undoubtedly informed Taylor’s construction of his personal library, see Thomas Knoles and Lucia Zaucha Knoles, “‘In Usum Pupillorum’: Student-Transcribed Texts at Harvard College Before 1740”; and Thomas Knoles, “Student-Transcribed Texts at Harvard College before 1740: A Checklist,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 109 (1999): 333–414, 415–72. 50 Richard Sibbes, “Certaine collections taken out of Dr. Sibbs his sermons preached by him att Grayes Inne in London and elsewhere,” V.a.4, Folger Shakespeare Library ( Joseph Hunton, former owner). 51 Uncataloged manuscript books, eleven volumes of sermons preached by Henry Wilkinson, Items 0495 through 0505 of the Mather Library, American Antiquarian Society. 52 Francis J. Bremer, “Williams, Roger (c. 1606–1683),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004–, online, October 2009, accessed 16 May 2012, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29544. 53 Robert Bragg, “A Bundle of myrrh for drooping Christians, or Select meditations fit for all persons, collected out of thirteen sermons preached by Mr. Bragg at his lecture at St. Johns near Dowgate Anno. 1652,” Ms. S-229a, Massachusetts Historical Society. 54 The four titles are bound together into a single volume at the Mather Library at the American Antiquarian Society. Compilation of works by Hugh Broughton, Mather Li-

218   Notes to Pages 56–62 brary 0248 b-w, American Antiquarian Society. The manuscript sermon is a copy of Broughton, An exposition vpon the Lords Prayer, compared with the Decalogue, as it was preached in a sermon, at Oatelads: before the most noble, Henry Prince of Wales [Amsterdam: s.n., 1613?]. 55 It is difficult to prove provenance of books bound together, but I suspect that the composite volume was likely purchased already bound (possibly during the trip to London in 1688–1691). Besides the dates of the original imprints (between 1590 and 1613) and hints within the book regarding which annotations appear to be or not to be in Increase Mather’s handwriting, the fact that a separate copy of Broughton’s A Concent of Scripture bearing Mather’s customary inscription “Crescentius Matheri” exists in the holdings of the Massachusetts Historical Society suggests that Mather might have taken the opportunity to expand his personal Broughton holdings with the compiled book. He is less likely to have purchased a superfluous copy of A Concent or to have bound in a superfluous title with the three other less common titles. For an account of the dissemination of the Mather family library through generations and archives, see Julius Herbert Tuttle, “The Libraries of the Mathers,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society n.s. 20 (April 1910): 269–356. 56 John Davenport, The Saints Anchor-Hold, in All Storms and Tempests (London, 1661), 2.

Chapter 2 1 Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, “The Apologia of Robert Keayne,” William and Mary Quarterly 7.4 (October 1950): 572. 2 Robert Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1627–28, Ms. N-1516, Massachusetts Historical Society. See also extracts in Robert Keayne, “Keayne’s Notes of Sermons, 1627–1628,” ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 50 (March 1917): 204–7. 3 Mather’s memoir of five “Johannes in Eremo” (“Johns in the Wilderness”) figures the role of first-generation New England preachers (the Johns Cotton, Norton, Wilson, and Davenport, plus the “honorary John,” Thomas Hooker) as John the Baptist harbingers of the Magnalia Christi Americana. Cotton Mather, The Great Works of Christ in America: Magnalia Christi Americana (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), 1:245. 4 According to the 1630 emigration broadsheet Proportion of Provisions Needfull for Such as Intend to Plant Themselves in New England, for One Whole Yeare, four shillings would also have bought, e.g., a dozen handkerchiefs (though the “poorer sort” might consider cheaper “blue calico”) or two fishing lines. Table reproduced in David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 113. For a sense of the recommended supplies for the transatlantic journey and their cost, see the chapter “‘Needful Provisions’: The Cost of Emigration,” 107–29. Books seem not to be included in such provision lists, though Francis Higginson does offer a blanket suggestion that “there are diuers other things necessary to bee taken ouer to this Plantation, as Bookes, Nets, Hookes and Lines, Cheese, Bason, Kine, Goats, &c.” Francis Higginson, New-Englands Plantation, 3rd ed. (London, 1630), D3r. For an account of Keayne’s struggles with the community, the accusations against 5 him of price gouging (and Keayne’s subsequent defense), the controversy over the ownership of Goody Sherman’s sow, and Keayne’s various philanthropic activities in early Boston, see Bailyn’s introduction to “The Apologia.” 6 See Lisa M. Gordis, “‘Goe Home and Consider’: Lay Responses to the Preached

Notes to Pages 62–66   219 Text,” in idem, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 97–111. 7 Douglas H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook Transcribed” (Ph.D. diss., State University of Iowa, 1957), 13. 8 Rehearsals of the many groundbreaking adjustments to Perry Miller’s foundational work are almost obligatory in any work of Puritan scholarship. Here let me simply point to the work of David D. Hall (especially Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment) and of Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe (whose The Practice of Piety is more directly a response to Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation) as examples of scholarship enabled by the American studies turn that has vividly suggested the possibilities of dynamic communities of cultural interpretation. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939); David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989); Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Louis Lohr Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962). 9 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, reprint (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), 119. 10 For a critique of Ong in the context of early American communications, see Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 5–6. Arnold Hunt offers a contrasting approach to reviving Ong’s insights to understand early modern sermon culture that is simultaneously oral and literate; see his The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 55–59. 11 Ann Blair’s recent work on “information management” greatly updates and expands upon our understanding of how early modern readers came to navigate and manage a perceived overload of information from print and other sources. While Blair is largely concerned with the relationship of information management to the rise of humanism in Europe, her work provides crucial context for understanding the broad range of practices whereby early modern readers and writers sought to “store, sort, select, and summarize information”; see her Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 3. 12 John Hull, The Diaries of John Hull: Mint-Master and Treasurer of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston: J. Wilson and Son, 1857), 231. According to this nineteenthcentury account, “Mr. Hull was not only a constant attendant on public worship, but took notes of the sermons and lectures he heard. Mr. Sewall, of Burlington, mentions ‘several manuscript volumes, in 12mo, containing above two hundred sketches of sermons and Thursday lectures, delivered at the First Church, Boston, between 1655 and 1661, written by him, partly in short-hand and partly at full length,’ as in his possession in 1840 (Am. Quarterly Register)” (ibid., 123). 13 Stout gives an overview of “the five parts of classical rhetoric as taught in the manuals of Cicero and Quintillian”: In those texts, the first part was called “Invention” (inventio), referring to the process by which the speaker “discovered” the subject matter and rhetorical

220   Notes to Pages 66–67 strategies of the oration. With subject matter firmly in mind, the speaker proceeded to the second stage of speech preparation, “Arrangement” (dipositio) or “the distribution of arguments in proper order.” Having settled on the subject matter and arranged it in proper order, the orator turned to “Style” (elocutio), or “the fitting of the proper language to the invented matter.” All of these operations preceded the study of “Delivery” (pronuntiatio), or “the control of voice and body in a manner suitable to the dignity of the subject matter and the style.” Finally, since speakers initially spoke without notes, they had to practice “Memory” (memoria), or “the firm mental grasp of [subject] matter and words.” (The New England Soul, 5–6) 14 Ibid., 32. 15 E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). 16 Blair distinguishes between provisional “first-order” notes taken by students attending lectures that were later copied out more neatly and cites the convenience of the German terminology (Mischriften and Rein- or Nachschriften, respectively); see Ann M. Blair, “Textbooks and Methods of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe,” in Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Emidio Campi et al. (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 40. This distinction is useful, but since many auditors appear to have kept what might otherwise be considered first-order notes as their main reference, the terms do not apply as clearly to New England sermon-auditing practices among the laity. The distinction between notes taken in the meetinghouse (what I will refer to throughout as in situ notes) and those notes made at home from memory is more important. Similarly, the recopying of notes for circulation does not appear to be an automatic stage in the notetaking process but, rather, depends upon specific reasons (a particularly valuable sermon, an interpersonal gift). Clerical notes are a different case, and much research remains to be done to understand exactly how ministers kept and developed notes taken of their own preaching (before and after delivery) and on the preaching of other ministers. As Blair explains in her chapter “Notetaking as Information Management,” notes and manuscripts are often discarded or destroyed in the publication process; see her Too Much to Know. 17 Thomas Knoles and Lucia Knoles’s work of Harvard student-transcribed notebooks and Hall’s “Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century New England” are two examples. Combining analysis with descriptive bibliography, both studies ultimately raise even more questions about the production, use, and function of these respective types of manuscripts than they can definitively answer. Although neither study deals with sermon notebooks directly, close examination of these categories of manuscript helps illuminate the work of auditor notes. Thomas Knoles and Lucia Zaucha Knoles, “‘In Usum Pupillorum’: Student-Transcribed Texts at Harvard College Before 1740,” and Thomas Knoles, “StudentTranscribed Texts at Harvard College before 1740: A Checklist,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 109 (1999): 333–414, 415–72; and David D. Hall, “Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century New England: An Introduction and a Checklist,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 115 (2006): 29–80; 118 (2009): 267–96. 18 Two unpublished dissertations illustrate this. Helle M. Alpert’s 1974 transcription of one of Robert Keayne’s extant sermon notebooks is a valuable, painstaking work undertaken to illuminate the Antinomian Controversy (in addition to clues about Keayne’s somewhat notorious biography). Scott Brenon Caton’s introduction to his 1998 transcrip-

Notes to Pages 68–72   221 tion of Jonathan Mitchell’s manuscript sermon cycle on Psalm 130 outlines the minister’s theological beliefs rather than his preaching style. Helle M. Alpert, “Robert Keayne: Notes of Sermons by John Cotton and Proceedings of the First Church of Boston from 23 November 1639 to 1 June 1640” (Ph.D. diss., Tufts University, 1974); and Scott Brenon Caton, “The Compleat Minister: The De Profundis Sermons of Jonathan Mitchel” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1998). 19 M. (Michael) Metcalfe, Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1689–92, MS Am 1065, Houghton Library, Harvard University. There are two outer pages. The outer page that begins Part 1 of the book (the first direction in which Metcalfe records sermons) primarily bears inscriptions related to occasion sermon deliveries from December 1689 through July 1692. The outer page that begins Part 2 of the book (the direction in which Metcalfe continues recording on every verso side of the leaves after filling in every recto side) bears the main inscription of creation, “This is my 2 vollam.” Text that runs in two different directions upon flipping the manuscript book is typically designated Part 1 and Part 2. 20 The following description of common aspects of auditor notebooks is based on extensive examination of more manuscript notebooks at the Massachusetts Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, Folger Shakespeare Library, Houghton Library, New England Historical and Genealogical Society, Congregational Library, Library of Congress, and Newberry Library. Only those specifically cited appear by name in the bibliography. My discussion of notebooks and manuscript culture has also benefited from discussions with Peter Drummey at MHS, Judith Lucey at NEHGS, and, especially, Tom Knoles at AAS. The insights and experience of these three experts of the archive have been tremendously helpful as I have developed my analysis of this odd genus of manuscript culture. 21 Richard Russell sermon notebook, Russell family, Sermon and sermon notes, 1649, Mss. Dept., Octavo vols. “R,” American Antiquarian Society. 22 Daniel Russell sermon notebook, in Russell family, Sermon and sermon notes, 1669–79, Mss. Dept., Octavo vols. “R,” American Antiquarian Society. 23 Thomas Knoles notes another atypical use of an oblong format notebook by Joseph Sewall to transcribe Harvard textbooks. Knoles and Knoles, “In Usum Pupillorum,” 352; and T. Knoles, “Student-Transcribed Texts at Harvard College before 1740,” 419. 24 Entries for Russell and Thomas Shepard III in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 2, outline the reasons for the problematic, deferred, and ultimately inconclusive call to fill the Charlestown pulpit upon Thomas Shepard II’s death in 1677. It appears that many wanted the youngest Shepard to fill the place of his father, but his youth and relative inexperience were cause for concern. Accordingly, Russell and Joseph Browne were both approached to supply mostly transitional and auxiliary services. Browne declined, and after years of disagreement, Russell died of smallpox, effectively settling the question in favor of Shepard alone. John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Charles William Sever, University Bookstore, 1873–85). 25 Daniel Russell sermon notebook, in Russell family, Sermon and sermon notes, 1669–79, 365. If these are notes for delivery, Russell does not exactly conform to the standard image of the minister who preaches with few or no notes. Some ministers, like John Davenport, were known for writing out sermons more or less fully in advance. Although later in the century, Cotton Mather still gives young ministers the advice not to depend too much on notes, there does seem to be variation in the amount of full ex tempore preaching from pulpit to pulpit.

222   Notes to Pages 73–83 26 [ John Pinch/Pyncheon?], Sermons collection, 1640–1875, in Box 3, Folder 26, Mss. boxes “S,” American Antiquarian Society. As a note in the finding aid points out, if the writer is John Pyncheon, he was likely a “boy of 15.” 27 Samuel Melyen, “Samuel Melyen commonplace-book, 1689, Ms. SBd-7, Massachusetts Historical Society. 28 Thomas Shepard, “The confessions of diverse propounded to be received and were entertained as members, ca. 1635–1640,” Mss. 553, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Department, New England Historical and Genealogical Society. 29 John Dane, Commonplace book of John Dane, 1682, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Department, New England Historical and Genealogical Society. Dane’s book is filled with his own auditor notes and original poetry, so the description “commonplace book” is a bit misleading. 30 The vast majority of identified sermon notetakers are male. I have identified only three probable female notetakers in this study. Faced by the absence of any internal evidence, and fully aware of the problems of using the masculine pronoun as if gender-neutral, I have preferred throughout to use “he,” “him,” and “his” for anonymous notetakers. Simply put, any given anonymous notetaker is statistically likely to be male, even though there is no reason to presume that the notetaker is male or female. I hope that the conscientious reader will supply “she” or “he” as he or she sees fit. 31 [Doubting Auditor], Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1681–82, second gathering, 7fv, MS Am 717, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Folio citation is given according to Part I orientation, even though this—and all verso pages in the notebook—are Part II. For an explanation of Part I and Part II orientation, see note 19 above. 32 [Disposition Auditor], Notes on sermons delivered in Boston, 1661, 5v, Ms. SBd77, Massachusetts Historical Society. 33 [Correcting Auditor], Notes on sermons delivered at the First Church in Ipswich, Mass., 1645–46, 140–41 [manuscript pagination], Ms. SBd-76, Massachusetts Historical Society. 34 One criterion that Charles Lloyd Cohen uses to assess the success of clerical performance and lay comprehension is the extent to which auditor notes “accurately” reflect what the minister has ostensibly preached. In an extraordinary foray into the collation of clerical manuscripts, lay notes, and printed sermons, Cohen demonstrates minutely how theological ideas are conveyed. Cohen stops short of imagining listening as a discursive practice rather than a method for the transmission of ideas and pastoral guidance, however; see his God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 35 Notes on sermons delivered by Thomas Shepard, 1637–38, 1-[4], Ms. N-982, Massachusetts Historical Society. A lowercase “i” in these manuscripts is frequently used interchangeably for “1.” 36 [Elegant Auditor], Notes on sermons delivered in Boston, 1661, 57v. There is some ink variation, even within a single sentence. Variation just in the darkness of the line might indicate simply that the ink runs light quickly and that the pen must be replenished frequently, but there is possibly some color shift as well, suggesting different mixtures of inks and, accordingly, multiple writing sessions. In certain places, darker ink (indicated by italics) seems as though it might be from a later addition, and there are also small spaces in lines that might be meant to allow for further additions. This kind of reading of the ink in order to understand the writing process can obviously be quite conjectural, but the range of possibilities helps to fill in our understanding of the range of possible practices.

Notes to Pages 85–97   223 37 Thomas Weld, Thomas Weld commonplace-book, 1669–95, 1 [manuscript pagination], Ms. SBd-69, Massachusetts Historical Society. 38 Robert Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1643–46, AIv, Ms. N-1518, Massachusetts Historical Society. 39 [Elegant Auditor], Notes on sermons delivered in Boston, 1661, 59v. 40 M. (Michael) Metcalfe, Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1689–92, 1r. 41 [Doubting Auditor], Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1681–82. 42 For a fascinating account of one self-created shorthand system, see Francis Sypher’s “The ‘Daily Obseruation’ of an Impassioned Puritan: A Seventeenth-Century Shorthand Diary Attributed to Deputy Governor Francis Willoughby of Massachusetts,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 91.1 (1981): 91–107. Sypher’s work with this unique writing system underscores common problems with deciphering seventeenth-century shorthand. While some used systems with published keys, there were many such systems in circulation in the seventeenth century from which to choose. Furthermore, many writers adapted shorthand systems to their own personal use, sometimes apparently reworking vaguely remembered symbols, sometimes apparently developing unique systems in order to provide secrecy. For these reasons, some notes may never be deciphered. A particularly poignant note appears in the hand of a nineteenth-century antiquarian who had been working for some time to discover the key to Thomas Danforth’s notes on a conference with leading ministers and magistrates of the day:

March, 18.1829 After considerable labor I despair of being able to decipher the short hand minutes of the conference, without other help than this book alone affords. I ascertain by comparison with the writing of the same period, that the alphabet [is] peculiar—but I find in both that the writers are not accustomed always to join all the letters of the [same] word together, as is modern practice, but in many instances to separate them even in short words. . . . From the pages of Scripture quotes we may gather the drift of the arguments, and possibly, in time, the whole alphabet . . . At best, it is bad chirography. Possibly some other by the same hand may be found plainer. (Thomas Danforth, Thomas Danforth notebook, 1662–66, Ms. SBd-128, Massachusetts Historical Society) In most cases, secrecy seems not to be the major consideration in sermon notes, however. Chickering, Pinch/Pyncheon, and Disposition Auditor are just a few examples of the many notetakers who integrate shorthand symbols into their recording. Henry Wolcott, whose notetaking is discussed in the following chapter, transcribes exclusively in shorthand. For a transcription of Wolcott’s notebook and an explanation of his adapted shorthand system, see D. H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook,” 32, 34–35. 43 [Voracious Auditor], Sermons: manuscript, 1689, 7r-7v, MS Am 974, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 44 Ibid., 9r-10r. 45 Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 6–41; and Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 119–23.

224   Notes to Pages 101–107 Chapter 3 1 Quoted in Lisa Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 38. Cotton directly references Rom. 10:17 (“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” KJV), in Sermon XII of his sermon cycle Christ the Fountaine of Life in his explication of 1 John 5:13 (“These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternall life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God”). John Cotton, Christ the Fountaine of Life (London, 1651), 181. Cotton’s point is that the written documents such as epistles are written for an elect, limited readership. Reading itself is not ordinarily productive of faith or understanding on its own. 2 While many scholars since Perry Miller have emphasized the influence of polemics on Puritan publication, Michael J. Colacurcio has offered one of the most recent and comprehensive accounts of individual “big books” of the first generation of publishing ministers in New England. In Colacurcio’s account, the unfolding development of the New England project continually informs the need for a variety of literature from history to sermon to autobiography, and the experience of New England fosters change in theological emphasis over time; see his Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 3 John Norton, The Orthodox Evangelist (London, 1654), A1v. This treatise shares many features of sermon structure but is not a sermon cycle. Accordingly to Colacurcio, Orthodox Evangelist serves as a kind of New England version of William Ames’s Marrow of Divinity, utilizing an even more methodical summa of Puritan theology than other comprehensive sermon cycles by authors like Thomas Shepard. Colacurcio conjectures that this work draws upon preached sermons. In fact, most sermon cycles challenge the generic distinction between sermon and treatise; see Godly Letters, 369–70. 4 John Cotton, “To the Judicious Christian Reader,” in Norton, Orthodox Evangelist, A3r. 5 Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). 6 Jonathan Mitchell, preface to Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied: Being the Substance of Divers Sermons on Matt. 25:1–13 (Lingonier, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria Publication, 1990, 1852), 5. 7 Ibid., 7, 8, 9. 8 I have adapted the use of the word “grammar” from Brian Cummings, who argues that grammar, rhetoric, and theology are essential, inextricable systems of knowledge and belief in the Reformation. Even more than “rhetoric,” the term “grammar” implies the logical connections and theological assumptions that undergird stylistic practice within “the vexed economy of religious writing.” Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 10, 11. For the permeability of grammatica, dialetica, and rhetorica within the trivium foundation of education, see 20–26. Helle M. Alpert, “Robert Keayne: Notes of Sermon by John Cotton and Proceed9 ings of the First Church of Boston from 23 November 1639 to 1 June 1640” (Ph.D. diss., Tufts University, 1974), 164, 267. Alpert’s transcription selectively highlights the periods during which the most direct fallout from the controversy is still legible on a weekly basis in the discussion of church business. The original notebook, located with two other extant notebooks by Keayne at the Massachusetts Historical Society, shows that other lay members

Notes to Pages 107–108   225 regularly asked Cotton for clarification on points of doctrine and explication. Robert Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1643–46, Ms. N-1517, Massachusetts Historical Society. 10 Marshall was one of many “principall stirring men” whose support of the petition on behalf of Wheelwright brought him before the General Court in October 1637. According to John Winthrop’s A Short Story, Marshall “justifyed the Petition so farre, that hee would not acknowledge any fault; yet hee answered more modestly then the former, therefore hee was not fined, but dis-franchised, and put out of his place [apparently at ‘Ferry-man’ in Boston].” David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 262. Alpert notes that after being disarmed in November of 1637, Marshall was later “chosen selectman in Boston from 1647 to 1658, a deacon, and a representative in 1650.” Alpert, “Robert Keayne,” 417. 11 For a background to Protestant catechism and casuistry publication, see Mary Hampson Patterson, Domesticating the Reformation: Protestant Best Sellers, Private Devotion, and the Revolution of English Piety (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). For devotional practices in New England, see Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); and for reading practices of these “steady sellers” in New England, see Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 12 See Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963); Michael G. Ditmore, “Preparation and Confession: Reconsidering Edmund S. Morgan’s Visible Saints,” New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters 67.2 ( June 1994): 298–319; and Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 13 There are two useful accounts of the Joan Drake case. George H. Williams focuses on Drake in “Called by Thy Name, Leave Us Not: The Case of Mrs. Joan Drake, a Formative Episode in the Pastoral Career of Thomas Hooker in England,” Harvard Library Bulletin 16 (1968): 111–28, 278–300, while Frank Shuffelton focuses on the specific influence in Hooker’s early sermons in “Pastoral Beginnings,” in idem, Thomas Hooker, 1586–1647 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 28–70. 14 Shuffelton, Thomas Hooker, 29. 15 John Hart, Trodden Dovvn Strength, by the God of Strength, or, Mrs Drake Revived. Shewing Her Strange and Rare Case, Great and Many Uncouth Afflictions, for Tenne Yeares Together: Together, with the Strange and Wonderfull Manner How the Lord Revealed Himselfe Unto Her, a Few Dayes Before Her Death. Related by Her Somtime Unworthy Friend, Hart On-Hi (London, 1647), 120. Both Williams and Shuffelton believe that the biographer is not John Hart, to whom the book is credited and whose name appears in the English Short Title Catalogue, but Jasper Hartwell. The Drake story went though three London editions: in 1647, 1654, and 1782. 16 Shuffelton, Thomas Hooker, 35. The technique used both to inform her understanding and to resolve her conscience was a close and thorough application of Ramist logic in framing answers to her questions and objections. The new logic was able to analyze each “argument” of a question, to divide the answer into multiple, finely reasoned parts, and to carry on the entire discourse without the use of unfamiliar or

226   Notes to Pages 108–112 confusing philosophic terms. Since Hooker was trained in the sermonic use of Ramist logic, he gave Mrs. Drake both reasoned answers to her objections and applications of the truth revealed in these answers. The rationale of the answer worked as an immediate corrective to her understanding, and the application of the truth served as a continuing guide to an errant reason. Hooker’s arguments thus not only refuted Mrs. Drake’s errors but also provided methodically organized formulae which, if observed, would help to maintain her in the truth. (Ibid., 36) 17 Ibid., 67. For two important pieces of scholarship on the extremely complicated publication history of the sermon cycle, see Frank Shuffelton, “Thomas Prince and His Edition of Thomas Hooker’s Poor Doubting Christian,” Early American Literature 5.3 (1971): 68–75; and Sargent Bush Jr., “The Growth of Thomas Hooker’s The Poor Doubting Christian,” Early American Literature 8.1 (spring 1973): 3–20. 18 Douglas H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook Transcribed” (Ph.D. diss., State University of Iowa, 1957), 100, 142. In one place, Wolcott specifies “here were many objections by scriptures alleged from historical faith and objections answered” (ibid., 393). 19 Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption, by the Effectual Work of the Word, and the Spirit of Christ, for the Bringing Home of Lost Sinners to God. The first eight Books (London, 1656), 150, 152. 20 T. Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied, 81, 83. 21 Miller’s remarkable passage bears quotation at length: The Anglican sermon is constructed on a symphonic scheme of progressively widening vision; it moves from point to point by verbal analysis, weaving larger and larger embroideries about the words of the Text. The Puritan sermon quotes the text and “opens” it as briefly as possible, expounding circumstances and context, explaining its grammatical meanings, reducing its tropes and schemata to prose, and setting forth its logical implications; the sermon then proclaims in a flat, indicative sentence the “doctrine” contained in the text or logically deduced from it, and proceeds to the first reason or proof. Reason follows reason, with no other transition than a period and a number; after the last proof is stated there follow the uses or applications, also in numbered sequence, and the sermon ends when there is nothing more to be said. The Anglican sermon opens with a pianissimo exordium, gathers momentum through a rising and quickening tempo, comes generally to a rolling organ-toned peroration; the Puritan begins with a reading of the text, states the reasons in an order determined by logic, and the uses in an enumeration determined by the kinds of persons in the throng who need to be exhorted or reproved, and it stops without flourish or resounding climax. There are, to my mind, several places when Miller perhaps mis-characterizes features and effects of the Puritan sermon, but the more interesting point here may be Miller’s instinct to convey stylistic effect via illustrative but anachronistic musical analogy. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 332–33. 22 In the discussion of formulaic opening and division in their introduction to Salva-

Notes to Pages 113–118   227 tion in New England, Jones and Jones suggest: “A significant advantage of the method was its predictability.” Phyllis M. Jones and Nicholas R. Jones, Salvation in New England: Selections from the Sermons of the First Preachers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 8. The jazz analogy is no more anachronistic than Miller’s symphonic one, and I hope that it is no more misrepresentative in its limited role of illustrating the larger, stylistic structure. Indeed, improvisational modes of music and other arts recur throughout historical periods. A more chronologically proximate (but, I suspect, no more deeply representative) analogy might be to Baroque music of the seventeenth century, particularly in the balance between composed and improvised structures in the works of Buxtehude and later J. S. Bach, but such a comparative, cross-disciplinary study is well beyond the scope of the present study. 23 Sargent Bush Jr., The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventure in Two Worlds (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 130. 24 Early accounts of plain style typically found it flat and formulaic (e.g., Miller, Levy). Challenges to Miller’s conception of the nearly univocal and ultimately untenable “New England Mind” led to fresh reconsiderations of plain style as a potentially expressive form (e.g., Ziff ). Most recently, book-length studies have gone further into the consideration of how individual ministers adapted and interpreted the dictates of plain style in accordance with their own theological and rhetorical tendencies (e.g., Toulouse, Gordis). Miller, New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; Babette May Levy, Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History (Hartford, Conn.: American Society of Church History, 1945); Larzer Ziff, “The Literary Consequences of Puritanism,” ELH 30.3 (1963): 293–305; Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying; and Gordis, Opening Scripture. 25 William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying (London, 1607), 148. 26 Robert Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1627–28, Ms. N-1516, Massachusetts Historical Society. Information about this notebook and the ministers recorded in it can be found in an account of the gift of the book along with a “table of contents” of the notebook (extracted by editor Worthington Chauncey Ford) in Keayne, “Keayne’s Notes of Sermons, 1627–1628,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 50 (March 1917): 204–7. Sibbes’s August 9, 1626 and February 29, 1626/7 sermons were published as “The Arte of Contentment” and “Ivdgements Reason,” respectively, in The Saints Cordials. Brinsley’s October 28, 1626, sermon was published in The Saints Cordials as “Experience Triumphing: or the Saints Safetie” (ibid., 205–6). Keayne’s notebook is apparently the only source of information for Brinsley’s authorship. According to English Short Title Catalogue records, three very different editions of The Saints Cordials were published, first in 1629 and again in 1637 and 1658 with omissions, additions, and other changes to the contents and with Sibbes listed as author. Further complicating authorship attribution and publication history are the subsidiary title pages, usually for each individual sermon within the collection. Ford used the 1629 edition of The Saints Cordials as reference when comparing Keayne’s sermon notes, and that edition is cited in this chapter. The Saints Cordials: As They Vvere Delivered in Sundry Sermons upon Speciall Occasions, in the Citie of London, and Else-where. Published for the Churches good (London, 1629). 27 Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 197. 28 Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1627–28, E2v. The wording that Keayne records is closer to the King James Version than to the Geneva version, and the full sermon makes use of the entirety of Philippians 11–13: “[4:11] Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. [4:12] I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things I am instructed both

228   Notes to Pages 119–129 to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. [4:13] I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” Already it appears that Keayne is likely recording in the meetinghouse rather than at home, in part because the transcribed passage does not exactly correspond to the specified Phil. 4:11 but rather includes the second part of 4:11 and the first part of 4:12. Ministers did not always feel bound by the relatively recent innovation of numbered divisions for chapter and verse. If Keayne had noted or remembered the text as Phil. 4:11 and written it out at home (either from memory or from referencing a Bible), he might have written it out more completely. Keayne also drops the second of the repeated main verb phrase “I know how to be abased and I know how to abound” (emphasis added), a minor omission that, for the present, we might provisionally attribute to Keayne’s recording of Sibbes’s preaching. 29 The Saints Cordials (London, [1629]), 3. 30 Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1627–28, E2v. 31 The exact words of the printed text may be prepared directly by Sibbes or by someone else (an unnamed notetaker, publisher, or other collaborator), but I will refer to the print voice of the sermon as “Sibbes” throughout, for convenience. “Keayne,” of course, is the voice of the manuscript notes. 32 Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1627–28, E2v-E3r. 33 Sibbes, The Saints Cordials, 3–5. 34 Ibid., 9. 35 Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1627–28, E4r. 36 M. B. Parkes emphasizes the development of punctuation in the West as means of rendering written language more compatible with speaking: “New conventions, such as word separation, features of layout and punctuation, were developed to make it easier for readers to extract the information conveyed in the written medium, and over the centuries these were gradually augmented and refined.” Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1. 37 Keayne, Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1627–28, E3r. 38 Ibid., E3v. 39 Ibid., E6r; and Sibbes, The Saints Cordials, 17. 40 Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption, by the Effectual Work of the Word, and the Spirit of Christ, for the bringing home of lost Sinners to God. The Ninth and Tenth Books (London, 1657), 208. 41 Shuffelton characterizes the prolonged, application heavy style of Hooker’s sermon elaborations well: The formal structure of the sermon kept the preacher to the point of discourse, but, paradoxically, it also allowed for a very complex exposition within the seemingly stark limits of the form. A clear sight of truth could only be obtained by concentrating upon God’s revelation, and at the same time this concentration could unfold the intricacy and richness of the truth. Hooker’s sermons were particularly complex—in fact he strained the conventional form—because of his passion for application. He would often introduce applications (uses) after each of the reasons to a doctrine and then include another set of application of the doctrine in the usual position. He was clearly maintaining the order of the parts of the sermon—no use before a reason—but many a listener must have had to push his attention to

Notes to Pages 130–137   229 the limit to remember the whole sermon without notes.” (Thomas Hooker, 1586–1647, 106–7) Hooker’s tendency toward disproportion fits neatly with Bush’s notion of his “activist aesthetic” (The Writings of Thomas Hooker, 311). For an early essay demonstrating fundamental structural differences between ministers, see Alfred Habegger, “Preparing the Soul for Christ: The Contrasting Sermon Forms of John Cotton and Thomas Hooker,” American Literature 41.3 (November 1969): 342–54. More recently, Gordis has demonstrated the distinctive structural differences among Cotton, Shepard, and Hooker in relation to their exegetical preferences; see her Opening Scripture. 42 Everett Emerson, ed., “A Thomas Hooker Sermon of 1638,” Resources for American Literary Study 2 (1972): 80. 43 Ibid., 81. 44 D. H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook,” 32, 34–35. Shepard decided in his transcription of the shorthand to expand and regularize the spelling of Wolcott’s text, reasoning quite rightly that “[s]horthand is not a foreign language to be translated by the clever use of approximating synonyms; it is, merely, the English language communicated by some set of symbols other than the more usual Latin alphabet.” Ibid., 14. Although some aspects of Wolcott’s act of listening and recording are necessarily obscured by this decision, the trade-off in terms of legibility and access seems warranted. 45 Ibid., 6–7. 46 Ibid., 319, 320. 47 Ibid., 53. 48 Ibid., 278. 49 Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee. Brown shows that the “steady sellers” of Puritan print culture in this highly literate community were not merely doctrinal lessons and pastoral guidance but pious “bricks”—material and textual sites of prolonged and repeated engagement. His sense of nonlinear reading practices is key to understanding how pious readers read throughout this period. Brown and Ann Blair have offered different accounts for the early modern technologies enabling meditation and contemplation. While Brown focuses on devotional print reading practices, Blair explores the need to systematize “information management” through various media. Both these recent studies describe specific materialtextual practices that complicate the more purely textual models of contemplation suggested by Louis Martz. Louis Lohr Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962); and Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). 50 Cotton Mather, The Great Works of Christ in America: Magnalia Christi Americana (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), 1:345. 51 D. H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook,” 305–6. 52 Bush, The Writings of Thomas Hooker, 311. Among the stylistically divergent ministers Hooker, Cotton, and Shepard, Babette May Levy finds Hooker “the most capable and forceful in his preaching” on account of his vivid (if “homely”) figurative elaborations. By contrast, Levy has a difficult time reconciling Cotton’s “plain, ‘untrimmed’ sermons” with his strong “evangelistic appeal”; see her Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History, 138, 141. 53 D. H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook,” 21. 54 Ibid., 159. This entry in Wolcott’s notebook corresponds to the disproportion-

230   Notes to Pages 137–144 ately long explication of the last use of doctrine 2 in the print version of The Application of Redemption, Book X. The same four points are made in the print version, even though the precise analogy that speaks to Wolcott on July 31, 1639, does not appear in the 1657 print edition. The unusual spacing is retained from Shepard’s typescript transcription. 55 Ibid., 239. This entry in Wolcott’s notebook (the third use of a doctrine “that gross and scandalous sinners are usually exercised under heavy breakings of heart / before he bringeth them effectually unto repentance”) corresponds to the explication of the fourth use of the almost identically worded ninth doctrine in the printed version; The Application of Redemption, Book X, 334. 56 The Application of Redemption, Book X, 355–56.

Chapter 4 1 Thomas Weld, Thomas Weld commonplace-book, 1669–95, 6 [manuscript pagi´ ρ in New Testament nation], Ms. SBd-69, Massachusetts Historical Society. The particle γa Greek is extremely common but also highly contextual. (Indeed, the single particle is the topic of numerous articles and dissertations.) Weld’s imaginary minister could not render meaning from the phrase without the full context of a surrounding passage. 2 Cotton Mather, “Cotton Redivivus; or, the Life of Mr. John Cotton,” in The Great Works of Christ in America: Magnalia Christi Americana (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), 1:274. 3 Weld, Thomas Weld commonplace-book, 1669–95, 5 [manuscript pagination]. 4 Ibid., 4 [manuscript pagination]. 5 In fact, Cotton Mather records many instances of Puritan humor in the Magnalia, often as a way of showing the humanity of the great men of the first generation. His account of John Winthrop uses several humorous anecdotes to demonstrate Winthrop’s compassion. Weld’s compilation includes jokes about imaginary ministers as well as anecdotes about real public figures. 6 Moving forward from the seminal intellectual history approaches by such scholars as Miller and Morgan, Teresa Toulouse has emphasized the various balancing acts that ministers struck in the apparent contradictions between, e.g., letter and spirit, learning and inspiration, and internal piety and external morality, while Lisa M. Gordis has elaborated the ways in which ministers sought to blend competing mandates of plain style. Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); and Lisa M. Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). John Davenport, The Saints Anchor-Hold, in All Storms and Tempests (London, 7 1661), 48–50. John Davenport, Knowledge of Christ: Proofs from Scripture That Jesus Is the Christ 8 (London, 1653), 10–11. Thomas Hooker, Book III in The Application of Redemption . . . The First Eight 9 Books (London, 1656), 165. Huit’s sermon of January 22, 1640, is recorded in the notes of Henry Wolcott. Douglas H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook Transcribed” (Ph.D diss., State University of Iowa, 1957), 388. 10 Cf. Brian Cummings’s argument for the grammatical basis of Reformation thought: The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Notes to Pages 144–149   231 11 George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 2004), 210–11. 12 Larzer Ziff uses this passage to illustrate Herbert’s affirmation of plain style, but, as demonstrated below, it might as well be applied to excessively precise Puritan explication as to overly witty Anglican preaching; Larzer Ziff, “The Literary Consequences of Puritanism,” ELH 30.3 (1963): 299. 13 J. Sears McGee, “On Misidentifying Puritans: The Case of Thomas Adams,” Albion 30.3 (October 1, 1998): 401–18. 14 Thomas Adams, Mystical Bedlam, or the Vvorld of Mad-Men (London, 1615), 1–2. 15 John Norton, The Orthodox Evangelist (London, 1654), π4r. Cf. James Simpson’s notion of Protestant “textual hatred,” in Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Simpson characterizes “Lutheran reading” that informs subsequent Protestant evangelical theology as “a permanent experience of recession, a Tantalus-like situation of reaching out to something that is inevitably beyond one’s grasp. The point of the reading is not to offer the model but to underline that the reader is too sinful to profit from the model. That is, the immediate point of reading (and only reading will save) is to provoke despair. That despair is part of the emotional dialectic of salvation” (ibid., 86). 16 Sermons delivered on September 22, 1639, and January 10, 1640. See D. H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook Transcribed,” 179, 380–81. Cf. Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 17 Thomas Hooker, The Soules Preparation for Christ. Or, A Treatise of Contrition (London, 1638). 18 Ibid. The remaining eight doctrines are based on variation of “[They said to Peter and the rest of the Apostles,] men and brethren, what shall we do?” 19 In England as well as in New England, Bibles used for reference and citation tend to belie simple denominational preference. David Daniell notes that “a study of more than fifty sermons by bishops between 1611 and 1630, including [Lancelot] Andrewes, the chief of the KJV revisers, and [Archbishop William] Laud, the enemy of all things evangelical, shows that in twenty-seven sermons the preacher took his text from the Geneva version, and only in five from the Bishop’s [Bible]. Of the remaining twenty-odd, only about half quote from KJV, and half seem to have made their own version.” The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 295. Current scholarship increasingly credits physical considerations—such as size, format, price, and market proliferation—as literary usage by seventeenth-century English writers with blurring of older notions of strict denominational preferences in the early modern period. See, e.g., John N. King and Aaron T. Pratt, “The Materiality of English Printed Bibles from the Tyndale New Testament to the King James Bible,” and Hannibal Hamlin, “Bunyan’s Biblical Progress,” in The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 20 Wolcott records Hooker’s sermon continua on thirteen occasions from January 9, 1638/39, through January 13, 1640/41. See D. H. Shepard, “The Wolcott Shorthand Notebook Transcribed,” 118, 119, 126, 129, 149, 158, 168, 189, 216, 228, 239, 269, 384. Wolcott’s notes reflect the fluidity between the terms “pricked” and “pierced” that characterizes the print version of Hooker’s explication. 21 Quoted in Daniell, The Bible in English, 439.

232   Notes to Pages 149–156 22 The Holy Bible: Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New (London, 1611); and The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2007). 23 See Daniell, The Bible in English. 24 I am indebted to Jay Twomey for the suggestions of intertextual echoes of Acts 2:37. Many valuable conversations at the conference “The King James Bible and Its Cultural Afterlife” (May 2011, The Ohio State University) were likewise helpful in my analysis of translation issues in sermon exegesis. 25 Reprinted in Michael Warner, ed., American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1999), 151, 152. 26 Ibid., 152, 153. 27 Quoted in Gordis, Opening Scripture, 31. Gordis emphasizes Perkins’s directive to the minister to conceal “Humane wisedome” in sermon composition. 28 In this chapter, I have adapted the term “debility” from Charles Lloyd Cohen, who emphasizes “original debility” as key to Puritan psychology of lived religion; see his God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 29 See, e.g., Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 30 See Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 88–95, who notes that Luther’s reading of Rom. 3:1–8 “makes complicated reading in English, but in Latin these circumlocutions are avoided by the pun in iustificare and by the simple converse forms of active and passive verbs (justificar[e / i], justific[at / atur], etc.). Man and God co-operate in an elegant symmetry of language: Deus iustificat, homo justificatur. God and man are reciprocally (and homonymously) iustificantur by faith. This grammatical parison gratifies Luther, who expresses his gratitude in his own tropes of linguistic pleasure, punning and rhyming with God: Unde haec diciture Iustia fidei et Dei” (ibid., 93). 31 Ibid., 196–206. 32 Matthew 13, Mark 4, Luke 8. The account of the parable in Matt. 13:3–9 in the KJV reads: “And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” 33 Cf. John 16:25, where Jesus says to the disciples, “These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall shew you plainly of the Father.” Although the KJV has “in proverbs,” a more direct translation of the Greek εν ͗ παροιμ´ιαις and the Vulgate “proverbiis,” the Geneva uses “parables,” rendering the connection between the sites more emphatic. 34 Thomas Shepard, The parable of the ten virgins opened & applied: being the substance of divers sermons on Matth. 25. 1,---13 (London, 1660). The smaller-format nineteenthcentury reissue of this sermon cycle runs over 600 print pages and is available in facsimile. Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied: Being the Substance of Divers Sermons on Matt. 25:1–13 (Lingonier, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990, 1852). 35 Thomas Hooker, The Saints Dignitie, and Dutie (London, 1651); idem, The Application of Redemption, 4–5.

Notes to Pages 156–166   233 36 “Preparationism” is a term used to describe the clerical emphasis of New England ministers who emphasized what might be done in pre-faith stages of redemption. Famously, many members of the Boston church agreed with Anne Hutchinson’s charge that such an emphasis constituted a “covenant of works” rather than a “covenant of grace.” 37 For the fullest treatment of typology in the New England tradition, see Mason I. Lowance, The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). For a probing analysis of strict and loose typological thought in New England, see Reiner Smolinski, “Israel Redivivus: The Eschatalogical Limits of Puritan Typology in New England,” New England Quarterly 63.3 (1990): 357–95. 38 The full KJV text of Heb. 11:31 reads “By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.” Mary Rock, sermon notebook, vol. 1 of 20 vols., in Edward Bromfield sermon notes, 1682–1803, bulk: 1682–1721, Ms. N-1936, Massachusetts Historical Society. Rock was Bromfield’s motherin-law. The collection of various sermon notebooks (and one early nineteenth-century “expense book”) belonging to four different members of the family is cataloged, listing Bromfield (senior) as “Creator.” N.b.: The Rahab sermon appears in the last two leaves of the unfoliated manuscript volume. Until proper foliation can be assigned, the interested reader should count in two leaves from the back to find the sermon in order to avoid unnecessary wear on the manuscript by counting leaves from the front. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 The Half-Way Covenant was originally a waggish characterization of the measure adopted in New England that dictated that descendants of confirmed “saints” could receive baptism as infants but not receive communion (Lord’s Supper) until confession before the gathered church. See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). 43 Mary Magdalen appears in all four gospels. For an excellent analysis of the persistent confusion over Magdalen and other New Testament Marys, see Debora K. Shuger, “Saints and Lovers: Mary Magdalen and the Ovidian Evangel,” in idem, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 167–91. 44 Rock, sermon notebook. 45 Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, chap. 4, pp. 26–27. 46 Phyllis M. Jones and Nicholas R. Jones, Salvation in New England: Selections from the Sermons of the First Preachers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977). Perkins also devotes much space to the challenge of a mixed audience in The Arte of Prophecying. 47 William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 385. 48 Ibid., 34–35 n. 6. For a discussion of this note in relation to Bradford’s larger project, see Michael J. Colacurcio, Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 99–102. 49 For an overview of early Massachusetts election sermons, see the introductory essay to A. W. Plumstead, The Wall and the Garden: Selected Massachusetts Election Sermons, 1670–1775 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968). Election sermons were preached after voting had been decided; the minister was not attempting to sway votes so much as set the agenda for the court session.

234   Notes to Pages 167–170 50 Thomas Shepard, “1638 Election Sermon,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 24 (1870): 361–67. For a list of sermons preached and printed, see R. W. G. Vail, “A Check List of New England Sermons,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 45 (October 1935): 233–66. 51 Joanne van der Woude, “Puritan Scrabble: Games of Grief in Early New England,” www.common-place.org 11.4 ( July 2011). Van der Woude suggests that anagrams and the like are popular through the medieval period but become a bit outdated in the Renaissance. Nevertheless, they appear scattered throughout seventeenth-century poetry. For the popularity of anagrams in the early modern period (and the unusual recurrence of interest in the twentieth century), see William H. Sherman, “Of Anagrammatology,” English Language Notes 47.2 (fall/winter 2009): 139–48. 52 Jeffrey A. Hammond, The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172. Hammond’s reading of elegiac wordplay is in contradistinction to Jeffrey Walker’s identification of a certain “Puritan gaudiness” on display in the showmanship of such verse, although Walker’s point, ultimately, is offered as a corrective to the stereotype of dour, humorless Puritan society. Jeffrey Walker, “Anagrams and Acrostics; Puritan Poetic Wit,” in Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, ed. Peter White (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), 248. See also William Scheick, “Tombless Virtue and Hidden Text: New England Puritan Funeral Elegies,” in Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, ed. Peter White and Harrison T. Meserole (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), 286–302. 53 Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 9. 54 Cotton Mather famously incorporates many such verse memorials as epigraphs to biographies of prominent New England ministers and other luminaries in his Magnalia. Many of these and other verse elegies are collected in Harrison T. Meserole, ed., American Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985). 55 While discussions of typology in Puritan literature have proliferated, especially since Sacvan Bercovitch’s edition of Typology and Early American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), Lowance provides the most in-depth look at Puritan ideas of typology and their afterlife in American literature in The Language of Canaan. For an excellent overview of Puritan typology within an important study of Taylor’s poetry, see the introductory chapter of Karen E. Rowe, Saint and Singer: Edward Taylor’s Typology and the Poetics of Meditation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1–23. 56 Kathleen Blake, “Edward Taylor’s Protestant Poetic: Nontransubstantiating Metaphor,” American Literature 43.1 (1971): 1–24, remains perhaps the clearest demonstration of how Taylor maintains Reform orthodoxy on the nature of communion while realizing the metaphoric potential of the event, the “‘orall kiss’ between God and man and man and God” (2). 57 Edward Taylor, Christographia, ed. Norman S. Grabo (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), 75. 58 Ibid., 76. 59 Edward Taylor, The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), 161. 60 Ibid., 161, 162. 61 Ibid., 162.

Notes to Pages 173–179   235 Chapter 5 1 David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 269. 2 The gathered churches of New England often required confessions of faith in order to attain membership. Members of these gathered churches were known as Visible Saints, distinguishing that group of people who were likely elect on earth from the “invisible” fellowship known only to God. See Edmund Sears Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963). For the textual construction of spiritual autobiography, see Rodger Payne, The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998). 3 [Doubting Auditor], Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1681–82, MS Am 717, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 4 John Hull, Octavo diary in Papers, 1624–85, Mss. Dept., Octavo vols. “H,” American Antiquarian Society; Russell family, Sermon and sermon notes, 1649, Mss. Dept., Octavo vols. “R,” American Antiquarian Society; and Thomas Shepard, “The Confessions of Diverse Propounded to Be Received and Were Entertained as Members,” Mss. 553, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Department, New England Historic Genealogical Society. 5 Morgan describes a “pattern . . . so plain as to give the experiences the appearance of a stereotype.” See E. S. Morgan, Visible Saints, 91. 6 George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley, eds., Thomas Shepard’s Confessions (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981), 60–61. 7 Ibid., 61. 8 See ibid., introduction, for a complete description of procedures in Shepard’s Cambridge and for the careful negotiation of the appearance of a formula. 9 Ibid., 61. 10 Ibid., 150. 11 Ibid., 48. 12 Michael McGiffert, God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), e.g., 138. It has been argued that the emphasis on effectual citation in the Cambridge confessions reveals a response to the anxiety over evidence, which, in large part, fueled the Antinomian Controversy. 13 Selement and Woolley, Thomas Shepard’s Confessions, 65–66. 14 Ibid., 66–67. N.b.: Shepard regularly switches between first and third person in his recording of the Cambridge confessions, a phenomenon coincident upon transcription that modern readers might find illuminating in contemplating the dissemination of authorship in sermon literature. 15 Ibid., 67. 16 Shepard advises in his sermon cycle on The Parable of the Ten Virgins that it is not fit that so holy and solemn an assembly as a church is, should be held long with relations of this odd thing and the other, nor hear of revelations and groundless joys, nor gather together the heap, and heap up all the particular passages of their lives, wherein they have got any good; nor scriptures and sermons, but such as may be of special use unto the people of God, such things

236   Notes to Pages 180–187 as tend to show, Thus was I humbled, then thus I was called, then thus I have walked, though with many weaknesses since; and such special providences of God I have seen, temptations gone through; and thus the Lord hath delivered me, blessed be his name, etc. The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied: Being the Substance of Divers Sermons on Matt. 25:1–13 (Lingonier, Pa.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990, 1852), 631. 17 Selement and Woolley, Thomas Shepard’s Confessions, 40. 18 Many confessions—indeed, Shepard’s own autobiography—describe a childhood spent in an “ignorant place.” Many others begin life “under means” or with “godly parents.” These distinctions make for more than narrative formulas for a saint’s “once upon a time”; rather, they suggest the great disparity in “good” preaching, with which the English nonconformists were extraordinarily concerned and which the New England Puritans still habitually chronicled. As the testimonies consistently demonstrate, however, there is seldom any clear advantage in being raised “godly,” since each person must experience redemption from scratch, as it were. If anything, being raised by “godly parents” is just as likely to foster spiritual complacency as an early sense of sin. 19 Ibid., 44–45. 20 William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying (London, 1607), 31. 21 Selement and Woolley, Thomas Shepard’s Confessions, 147–48. 22 Ibid., 148. 23 Ibid., 148–49. In order to make more immediately apparent the density of biblical texts within Winship’s own prose, I have moved the specific scriptural citations provided in the footnotes of Selement and Woolley’s edition into the main passage. 24 Some would argue that (often quasi-Weberian) notion of Protestantism informs the novelistic subject and, with some generic interdependence, the autobiographical subject. Cf., e.g., two classic studies: Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); and George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). 25 See Meredith Marie Neuman, “Beyond Narrative: The Conversion Plot of John Dane’s ‘A Declaration of Remarkable Providences,’” Early American Literature 40.2 (2005): 251–77. 26 Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Caldwell’s foundational study of the conversion narrative links the ambivalence and anticlimax of the accounts to the experience of transatlantic migration and to the ambiguities of a life of visible sanctity. 27 John Dane, “A Declaration of Remarkable Providences in the Course of My Life,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 5.3 (1854): 147–56. 28 Neuman, “Beyond Narrative.” 29 Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative. Morgan similarly emphasizes the “nadirs” and “zeniths” characteristic of these narratives; see E. S. Morgan, Visible Saints. See also Baird Tipson, “The Routinized Piety of Thomas Shepard’s Diary,” Early American Literature 13 (1978): 64–80. 30 McGiffert, God’s Plot, 35. 31 The genealogy of sainthood, or the expectation that a child will follow the spiritual estate of the parent, was a central concept in church admission practices, ultimately enabling

Notes to Pages 187–203   237 the compromises of the Half-Way Covenant in 1662. See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). 32 McGiffert, God’s Plot, 38. 33 Cf. Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 34 Roger Clap, Memoirs of Roger Clap, 1630 (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), reprint of Roger Clap, Memoirs of Roger Clap, Collections of the Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society, no. 1 (Dorchester, 1843). The original was published as Memoirs of Cpt. Roger Clap (Boston, 1731). 35 Ibid., 18–20. 36 Ibid., 19. 37 Ibid., 20. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 20–21. 40 See “Declension,” in Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 19–146. 41 In his sensitive reading of the relationship between minister and laity, Charles Lloyd Cohen proposes a system of “The Call of the Preacher” and a responding “Cry of the Faithful” and begins to delineate a more nuanced approach to the texts of Puritan practical divinity than had previously been offered. See his God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 42 Clap, Memoirs of Roger Clap, 22. 43 Cf. Abram van Engen, “Puritanism and the Power of Sympathy,” Early American Literature 45.3 (2010): 533–64. 44 Clap, Memoirs of Roger Clap, 21. 45 Ibid., 22. 46 David D. Hall speculates that Clap gains admission to the church before a formal requirement of public confession, but the second movement of Clap’s conversion narrative follows the style of offering evidence (e.g., the list of four reasons) that he witnessed so often in other formal confessions. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 143. 47 Clap, Memoirs of Roger Clap, 22. 48 Ibid., 22–23. 49 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 50 Clap, Memoirs of Roger Clap, 23–24. 51 Ibid., 24. 52 Ibid., 23–24. 53 Ibid., 25. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 25–26. 56 Ibid., 26. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Clap, Memoirs of Roger Clap, 26–27. 60 John Norton, The Orthodox Evangelist (London, 1654), A2v.

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Bibliography

h

Manuscript Sources and Sermon Notebooks

Nicknames given for anonymous notetakers in the main text are supplied here for ease of reference. [Anonymous]. Notes on sermons delivered by Thomas Shepard, 1637–38. Ms. N-982. Massachusetts Historical Society. [Anonymous, “Correcting Auditor”]. Notes on sermons delivered at the First Church in Ipswich, Mass., 1645–1646. Ms. SBd-76. Massachusetts Historical Society. [Anonymous, “Disposition Auditor” and “Elegant Auditor”]. Notes on sermons delivered in Boston, 1661. Ms. SBd-77. Massachusetts Historical Society. [Anonymous, “Doubting Auditor”]. Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1681–82, MS Am 717, Houghton Library, Harvard University. [Anonymous, “Voracious Auditor”]. Sermons: manuscript, 1689. MS Am 974. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Harvard University. Borlas, Henry. Notes on 10 sermons heard at Oxford. Ca. 1605. V.a.23. Folger Shakespeare Library. Bragg, Robert. “A Bundle of myrrh for drooping Christians, or Select meditations fit for all persons, collected out of thirteen sermons preached by Mr. Bragg at his lecture at St. Johns near Dowgate Anno. 1652.” Ms. S-229a, Massachusetts Historical Society.

240   Bibliography [Broughton, Hugh]. Manuscript copy of Hugh Broughton, An exposition vpon the Lords Prayer, compared with the Decalogue, as it was preached in a sermon, at Oatelads: before the most noble, Henry Prince of Wales. [Amsterdam: s.n., 1613?]. Bound with three annotated print titles by Hugh Broughton. Mather Library 0248 b-w. American Antiquarian Society. Chickering, John. Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1651–52. MS Am 804. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Dane, John. Commonplace Book of John Dane, 1682, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Department, New England Historic Genealogical Society. Danforth, Thomas. Thomas Danforth notebook, 1662–66. Ms. SBd-128, Massachusetts Historical Society. Hull, John. Octavo diary. Papers, 1624–85, Mss. Dept., Octavo vols. “H,” American Antiquarian Society. Keayne, Robert. Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1627–28. Ms. N-1516. Massachusetts Historical Society. ———. Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1639–42. Ms. N-1517. Massachusetts Historical Society. ———. Robert Keayne sermon notes, 1643–46. Ms. N-1518. Massachusetts Historical Society. Melyen, Samuel. Samuel Melyen commonplace-book, 1689. Ms. SBd-7. Massachusetts Historical Society. Metcalfe, M. (Michael). Notes: on sermons: manuscript, 1689–92. MS Am 1065. Houghton Library, Harvard University. [Pinch/Pyncheon?, John]. Sermon notes; possibly those of John Pinch (1625??). In Sermon collections, 1640–1875. Box 3, folder 26. Mss. boxes “S.” American Antiquarian Society. Rock, Mary. Sermon notes. In Edward Bromfield, Edward Bromfield sermon notes, 1682–1803, bulk: 1682–1721. Vol. 1 of 20. Ms. N-1936. Massachusetts Historical Society. Rogers, John. Sermon delivered by the Rev’d Mr. John Rogers of Ipswich, August the 16th, 1660: manuscript, [ca. 1660]. Nan Foster, copyist. MS Am 1146. Houghton Library, Harvard University. [Russell, Daniel]. Russell family, Sermon and sermon notes, 1669–79, Mss. Dept., Octavo vols. “R.” American Antiquarian Society. [Russell, Richard]. Russell family, Sermon and sermon notes, 1649, Mss. Dept., Octavo vols. “R.” American Antiquarian Society. Shepard, Thomas. “The Confessions of Diverse Propounded to Be Received

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Index

h

acrostics and anagrams, 167–68, 234nn51– 52 Acts, Book of: Acts 2:37 and Hooker’s Application of Redemption, 128, 133–38, 146–50, 202; Acts 2:37 and Rock’s auditing of Willard’s Rahab sermon, 163; Acts 22:20 and Clap’s spiritual autobiography, 194–95 Adams, Thomas, 145; Mystical Bedlam, 145 Adams, Thomas R., 212n69 allegory, 157 Allen, James, 93 Allen, Thomas, 70, 97–98, 131 Alpert, Helle M., 224n9 Ames, William, 108, 209n51; Cases of Conscience (or De Conscientia), 107; Marrow of Divinity, 224n3 Amesian method, 19–20, 108 Angier, Mary, 178–79 Antinomian Controversy, 38, 105, 107, 167, 199–200; and the Cambridge Confessions, 235n12; Cotton and, 116, 214n13; Shepard and, 38, 105, 167 auditors. See lay auditor notetaking; lay auditors and notetakers; sermon notebooks of lay auditors Augustine, 19, 209n44 aural auditing, 30, 61–62, 77–78, 92–98; and affinity between minister and auditor, 97–98; capturing rhythms, 93–96; Chickering, 91–92, 97–98; in contrast to structural/content auditing, 96; difficulty of, 92–93; Disposition Auditor, 77–78, 80, 93; Grant’s auditing of Hooker, 129–30; improvisation and spontaneous speech, 111–12, 129–30; and in situ transcription, 65, 67, 76–78, 82,

83–84, 92–93, 111–13, 115, 123–24, 148, 220n16, 228n28; Keayne, 119–27; and “legibility” of aural clues for the modern reader, 96–97; Metcalfe, 92–93; points rather than punctuation, 124–26; shorthand and self-fashioned symbols, 54, 74, 92, 93, 97–98, 223n42; Sibbes’s sermons, 119–27; and verbal markers, 123–24, 129–30; Voracious Auditor and Moodey’s sermons, 93–97, 154 authorship: and disseminated authority, 37, 58, 214n11; and lay auditor sermon notebooks, 21–25, 67–69; publishing ministers (clerical authorship), 35–47, 58; singular, 38–39; unauthorized publications, 35–37, 39–47, 213n6 Barker, Nicolas, 212n69 Baruch, ix–x, 56–57 Bay Psalm Book, 5, 6 Bernard, Richard, 4, 13, 15–16; The Faithfull Shepheard, 4 bibliographical issues: and authenticity of manuscript sermons, 46–47, 52–54; authorship notions and lay auditor sermon notebooks, 21–25, 67–69; unauthorized publications, 35–37, 39–47, 213n6 Blair, Ann, 213n6, 219n11, 229n49; on notetaking, 207n19, 213n7, 220n16 book history scholarship, 29, 30, 62–64, 211nn67–69 Borlas, Henry, 49–50, 51–52 Bradford, William, On Plymouth Plantation, 165–66 Bradstreet, Anne, 6, 167, 168; The Tenth Muse, 167 Bragg, Robert, 54–55

254   Index Brewster, William, 165–66 A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness, 151 Brinsley, John, 116, 227n26 Broughton, Hugh, 56, 57, 218n55 Brown, Matthew P., 229n49 Browne, Joseph, 221n24 Burroughs, Jeremiah, 54 Bush, Sargent, Jr., 41, 113, 215n22, 216n25, 229n41 Caldwell, Patricia, 12, 236n26 Calvinism: emphasis on innate depravity, 31, 141–42; and laity “cases of conscience,” 107–8; soteriology, 11 Cambridge Confessions, 12, 39, 72–74, 104, 174–88, 202, 235n14. See also conversion narratives “cases of conscience,” 75, 98, 107–9, 114, 155, 177 catchwords, 55–56 Chauncy, Charles, 74, 174 Chickering, John: aural auditing, 91–92, 97–98; content auditing and sermon table/index, 90–92; and shorthand, 92, 97–98, 223n42 Clap, Roger, 189–202; family migration narrative, 189–93; Memoirs, 189–202; self-interrogation and private revelation/salvation, 199–201; spiritual autobiography (tripartite conversion story), 189–202, 237n46; spiritual crisis/latent doubts, 193, 197–202 clerical networks and the laity, 116–17 clerical notes, 8, 61, 67–68, 72, 220n16, 221n25. See also publishing ministers (clerical authorship) Cobbet, Thomas, 85 Cohen, Charles Lloyd: on auditor notetaking, 213n7, 222n34; on “original debility,” 12, 232n28 Cohen, Daniel A., 210n61 Cohen, Matt, 211n67 Coke, Sir Edward, 54 Colacurcio, Michael J., 216n25, 224n2, 224n3; Godly Letters, 38 Cole, Peter, 41, 215n22 collation, scriptural, 21, 150, 157–63, 165, 171; and auditor notes, 21, 158–63; and conversion narratives, 158–63, 182–85, 186–88, 195–97, 202; Gordis on, 21; and the literal sense, 157–63;

by Paul, 162; Perkins’s on, 21, 150, 157–58, 162–63; Rock auditing of Willard’s sermon on Rahab, 158–63, 186; Shepard’s autobiography, 186–88, 202; and vernacular translation, 150 “communications circuit,” 37, 211–12n69 communion (Lord’s Supper), 168–69, 206n15 content auditing, 30, 61–62, 86–92; accuracy, 115, 119, 123–24; Chickering’s sermon table/index, 90–92; contrasted to aural auditing, 96; dialogic insertions, 109; discrete units of meaning, 86; Elegant Auditor, 86–88; Flynt’s sermon, 86–88; Metcalfe, 88–90, 115; recording portable touchstones, 88; and scripture citations, 88; sermons continua, 89–90; Wolcott, 133 conversion narratives, 32, 175–202; anxieties and inherent contradictions, 202; and autobiography, 184, 186–89, 202, 236n24; Cambridge Confessions, 12, 39, 104, 174–88, 202, 235n14; Clap’s tripartite spiritual autobiography, 189–202, 237n46; Dane’s, 185–86; descriptions of childhood, 180, 236n18; as discursive texts, 175, 181–85, 192–93; emotive markers, 174; genre issues, 32, 99, 174, 184–202; hearing in, 179–81; intertextual play/ recursive textuality, 184, 186–202; markers of means, 179–81; names of godly preachers, 177–78; and the New England Way, 184; on ordinary means of godly preaching, 11, 178–81, 200; “particulars” of the experience, 176–77; and Paul’s conversion, 10, 194–96; and private revelation/salvation, 199–201; and providential intervention, 190; questions and answers guiding, 176, 196; reciprocal witness of lay testimony, 182–85, 195, 202; scriptural citations, 177–78, 181, 235n12; scriptural collation, 182–85, 186–88, 195–97, 202; and sermon aurality, 98–99; and sermon notebooks, 62, 73–74, 98–99, 173–76; and Shepard, 39, 72–74, 104, 174, 175–76, 185, 235n14; and Shepard’s collated autobiography, 186–88, 202; and Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins, 104, 235n16; story of the soul (not the self ), 185–86; structural formulas, 185;

Index   255 and transatlantic migration, 185–86, 187, 189–93, 236n26; visible sanctity/Visible Saints, 173, 186, 196–97, 206n9, 235n2 Correcting Auditor, 78–80; and Norton’s Ipswich sermons, 78–80; numbered reasons and scriptural citations, 79–80; pacing, 80 Cotton, John, 39, 59, 74, 97, 154; and Antinomian Controversy, 116, 173, 214n13; “A Boston Conference,” 116; Clap’s account of a sermon on Revelation, 198, 201; Davenport’s letter to, 35–37, 212n1; on differences between spoken and printed word, 101, 103–4, 224n1; Keayne’s auditing of, 85–86, 107, 131; on minister as candlestick, 103–4; pamphlet war with Williams, 40; polemical prefatory epistle, 103; popularity, 2, 214n13; reading habits, 140; on Sibbes’s The Saints Cordial, 116; Spiritual milk for Boston babes in either England, 11; and typology, 157; unauthorized publications, 40 Cotton, John, Jr., 89; execution sermon and Templestone’s sermon notebook, 22–24, 26–28, 210n57 Cummings, Brian, 18, 224n8, 232n30 Dane, John: conversion narrative, 185–86; sermon notebook and original poetry, 74–75 Danforth, Samuel, 151–52 Danforth, Thomas, 223n42 Daniel, Robert, 175–76 Daniell, David, 231n19 Darnton, Robert, 211n69 Davenport, John, 59, 221n25; and Boston clerical network, 116; grammatical analysis of “therefore,” 143; The Knowledge of Christ (1653 sermon), 143; letter to Cotton, 35–37, 212n1; manuscript notes lent to “Brother Pierce,” 35–37; The Saints Anchor-Hold (explication of Lamentations and perseverance of prophecy), ix–x, 56–57 depravity, innate, 12, 31, 141–42, 152 dialogic voices and interjections, 106–11; auditor recording, 109; Hooker’s The Application of Redemption, 109; Keayne’s recording of, 107, 224n9; and polemic sermon cycles, 110–11; and Ramist

argumentation, 109, 111; Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins, 109–11 Disposition Auditor, 76–80, 82, 115, 119, 154, 223n42; accuracy, 115, 119; aural auditing, 77–78, 80, 93; contrasted to Correcting Auditor, 78–80; Norton’s Boston sermons, 76–78; and similitude, 154; structural auditing, 77–78, 80, 82, 93 disproportion, structural, 112–14, 128, 130, 132–34, 228–29n41; Hooker’s The Application of Redemption, 128, 130, 132–34, 146, 229n41 doctrine-use structure, 14, 15, 61, 208n30 Dod, John, 108 Donne, John, 3 Dorchester meetinghouse, 192–94, 197–98, 201 Doubting Auditor, 75–76, 92, 98, 174 Drake, Joan, 108–9, 225n16 Dunton, John, 25–26, 210n61 election sermons, 166–67, 233n49 Elegant Auditor, 82–83, 86–88, 222n36; content auditing of Flynt’s sermon, 86–88; structural auditing, 82–83 Elton, Edward, Gods Holy Mind, 131 enabled debility, 12–13, 16–17, 31, 32, 141–42, 152, 165, 168, 171–72, 184, 199, 202 English Civil Wars, 38 English Puritanism and the early modern English sermon, 3–4, 205n7. See also Puritan sermon literature The English Sermon Revisited (Ferrell and McCullough, eds.), 3 ex tempore sermons, 14–15, 112–14, 221n25 execution sermons, 22–27, 210n61, 210n63 experiential religion, 61, 62, 66, 107, 115, 192, 201 Fenner, William, 45 Ferrell, Lori Anne, 3 Field, Jonathan Beecher, 40, 213n6, 215n19 figurative language. See similitude and figurative language Flynt, Josiah, 82, 86–88 Ford, Worthington Chauncey, 227n26 Foster, Nan, 48–49, 51–52, 73

256   Index Foucault, Michel, 214n11 fourfold method of scriptural exegesis, 19–21, 181 fundamentalism, Protestant, 17, 209n43 funeral sermons, 27–28 gathered churches of New England, 63, 107, 175, 181, 194, 198, 202, 206n9, 235n2 Geneva Bible, 148–49, 157, 231n19 Goodwin, Thomas, 41 Gordis, Lisa M., 14, 15–16, 21, 209n52, 230n6 Grabo, Norman S., 52 grammatical analysis of scripture, 143–44, 171; Davenport on “therefore,” 143; Hooker’s, 143; Huit on conjunction “and,” 143–44 Grant, Matthew, 129–30 Great Awakening, 15 Gustafson, Sandra M., 211n67 Half-Way Covenant, 38, 161, 167, 233n42; and conversion narratives, 192, 193, 236–37n31 Hall, David D., 48, 220n17, 237n46 Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E., 97 Hammond, Jeffrey, 167, 234n52 handmade books, 22–28, 48–52, 68–69, 70, 73 Harvard College, 31, 52, 64 Herbert, George, 144, 231n12; A Priest to the Temple, 144 Herget, Winfried, 41, 43–44, 207n19, 215n24 Higginson, Francis, New England’s Plantation, 218n4 Hooker, Richard, 11 Hooker, Thomas, 39, 40–46; “activist aesthetic,” 41, 136, 229n41; advice to young ministers, 19–20; analysis of grammar, 143; The Danger of Desertion (English sermon), 45–46; homely imagery, 136–37, 156, 229n52; Mather’s anecdotes, 10–13; ministration to Joan Drake, 108–9, 225n16; The Poor Doubting Christian, 40, 108, 116; popularity, 214n13; The Preparation of the Heart, 149; preparationism and redemption, 41–43, 128, 156; proliferation of unauthorized print sermons, 40–46; pulpit eloquence, 133–34, 136–37, 229n52;

The Saints Dignities, and Dutie, 155–56; and similitude, 155–56; The Soules Preparation for Christ, 40, 146–47; and Winship’s conversion narrative, 182. See also Hooker’s The Application of Redemption (sermon cycle) Hooker’s The Application of Redemption (sermon cycle), 41–45, 127–38, 215n22, 215n24; Book III, 109; Book X, 128, 133, 147, 229n54, 230n55; density, exhaustive length, and affective power, 128–29; display of orality, 127–38; emphasis on application, 129, 228n41; Grant’s aural auditing of, 129–30; homely imagery, 136–37; laity dialogic interjections, 109; preparationism, 41–43, 128; proliferation of multiple versions, 41–45, 215n24; Ramist branching, 113, 128, 137–38; spontaneity and improvisational energy, 128, 129, 132–34, 228–29n41; structural disproportion, 128, 130, 132–34, 146, 228–29n41; text crumbling (“pierce”/”prick”), 146–47, 149, 150; verbal markers, 129–30; and vernacular translation, 147–48, 149–50; Wolcott’s structural auditing of, 130–38, 148–49, 154, 229n54, 230n55 Huit, Ephraim, 130, 143–44, 146 Hull, John, 64, 174, 219n12 humor, Puritan, 140–41, 230n5 Hunt, Arnold, 8, 205n7, 206n12, 207n19, 209n51; The Art of Hearing, 8 Hunton, Joseph, 52–53 Hutchinson, Anne, 41, 64, 173, 202, 217n42, 233n36 improvisation and spontaneous speech, 14–15, 111–14, 129, 132–33, 139; aural auditors, 111–12, 129–30; ex tempore sermons, 14–15, 112–14, 221n25; Hooker’s sermons, 113, 128, 129, 132–34, 146, 228–29n41; and implicit “grammar” of pulpit spontaneity, 106, 127, 129, 224n8; and the literal sense, 113, 114; musical analogies, 111–12, 129, 226n21, 226–27n22; and pacing variations, 112–14; and Ramist branching, 112, 113–14, 134–36; structural disproportion, 112–14, 128, 130, 132–34, 228–29n41 Indian literary culture and Indian sermon

Index   257 aurality, 212n70 in situ notetaking, 65, 67, 76–78, 82, 83–84, 92–93, 111–13, 115, 123–24, 148, 220n16, 228n28 Jeremiah, ix–x, 56–57 Jesus’ parables, 155, 232nn32–33 Johnson, Edward, 166 Jones, Nicholas R., 207n24, 226–27n22 Jones, Phyllis M., 207n24, 226–27n22 Keayne, Robert: aural-structural auditing and explication of text, 119–27; “book” numbering, 131; English sermon notebook, 59–60, 70, 85, 117, 174; and London/Boston clerical networks, 116–17; notetaking errors, misnumbering, and incompleteness, 118, 123, 124, 227–28n28; “points” and point style, 124–26; and “pretious texts,” 59–60, 118, 174; sermon notes on Sibbes, 116–27, 154, 227n26, 227n28, 228n31; structural auditing, 85–86, 119–27 Kibbey, Ann, 97 King James Bible (KJV), 148–50, 157, 227n28, 231n19 King Philip’s War, 38 Kneidel, Greg, 208n30, 208n34 Knight, Janice, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts, 38, 209n51, 214n14 Knoles, Lucia, 220n17 Knoles, Thomas, 220n17 Lamentations, ix–x, 56–57 language, divine and human, 10–13, 31–32, 58, 141, 152–54, 164, 171–72 lay auditor notetaking, 8–9, 15, 30, 36, 40–58, 59–100, 213n7; accuracy, 76–80, 114–27, 134, 222n34; activities of memorization, notetaking, and recitation, 64; affinity between minister and auditor, 97–98; aural auditing, 30, 61– 62, 77–78, 92–98; content auditing, 30, 61–62, 86–92; differences between two auditors of the same minister, 78–80; errors, misnumbering, and incompleteness, 118, 120–21, 123–24, 228n28; individual idiosyncrasies, 124–26, 132; ink variations, 82, 222n36; in situ verbatim transcription, 65, 67, 76–78, 82, 83–84, 92–93, 111–13, 115, 123–24, 148, 220n16, 228n28; Keayne’s on

Sibbes’s sermons, 116–27, 227–28n28, 227n26; levels of attention, 75, 135–37; and manuscript sermons for preservation, 15, 47–56; and minister’s delivery style (pronuntiatio), 66, 219n13; and ministers’ verbal markers, 123–24, 129–30; notes completed at home, 63, 65, 72, 82, 148, 220n16; pacing changes, 65–66, 76, 80, 112–14; penmanship, 70, 82; points rather than punctuation, 124–26; portable touchstones, 88; recording styles, 15, 30, 61–62, 75–98; semi-conscious decisions, 116; sermons continua, 84–86, 89–90, 130–38; shorthand and self-fashioned symbols, 54, 74, 92, 93, 97–98, 223n42; and similitude, 137–38, 154–55; structural auditing, 30, 61–62, 81–86; subjective aurality of, 8–9, 29, 60–61, 63, 75, 98; transcription of “heads,” 80, 81–82, 84, 134–36; and unauthorized publications, 36, 40–47; understanding of the “spirit” of the “letter,” 114–15; university training, 15, 212n70; and vernacular Bibles, 148. See also sermon notebooks of lay auditors lay auditors and notetakers: Chickering, 90–92, 97–98; Correcting Auditor, 78–80; Disposition Auditor, 76–80, 82, 115, 119, 154, 223n42; Doubting Auditor, 75–76, 92, 98, 174; Elegant Auditor, 82–83, 86–88, 222n36; female, 212n70, 222n30; Grant, 129–30; Metcalfe, 68–69, 72, 73, 88–90, 92–93, 115; Pinch (Pyncheon), 73; Rock, 158–63, 186, 233n38; Russell (Daniel), 71–72, 221n25; Russell (Richard), 70–72, 73; Voracious Auditor, 93–97, 154. See also Keayne, Robert; Wolcott, Henry Levy, Babette May, 17–18, 229n52; Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History, 17 libraries and manuscripts, 52–54, 56, 218n55 literal sense of scripture, plain-style explication of, 13–21, 31, 32–33, 113, 114, 139, 140–47, 152, 157–64; and auditor notes, 142; and collation, 157–63; contemplation of single words and grammar, 143–44, 153, 171, 232n30; and creative exploration in sermon

258   Index composition, 142–47, 152; and improvisational energy, 113, 114; Perkins on, 13–14, 17–21, 120, 142; and Protestant fundamentalist thought, 17, 209n43; and reading, 20–21, 231n15; and solas of Reformation theology, 16–17, 141–42, 146; and text crumbling, 32, 144–47, 165, 171 Love, Harold, 48, 214n9 Luther, Martin, 153, 232n30 manuscript sermon creators: Borlas, 49–50, 51–52; Foster, 48–49, 51–52, 73; Templestone, 22–28 manuscript sermons, 15, 29–30, 35–58; ambiguities of accuracy and authenticity, 46–47; authorship, singular, 38–39; authorship and disseminated authority, 37, 58, 214n11; bibliographical cataloging issues, 46–47, 52–54; books bound together (print and manuscript sermons), 56–57, 218n55; catchwords, 55–56; circulation and manuscript networks, 37, 47–51, 58; and common idiosyncratic features of bookmaking, 54–56, 58; created to resemble printed books, 54–56; and dissemination of “godly preaching” in Elizabethan England, 49–51; Hooker’s publication history, 41–45, 215n24; libraries and acquisitions, 52–54, 56, 218n55; manuscript copies of already-published print texts, 52–54; material appearance of, 51–52; movement from oral to manuscript culture, 37, 46–47, 62–64, 214n9; nonsermonic Puritan scribal publications, 47–48; the notational tag “lately of New England,” 39; occasional sermons (disproportionate publication of ), 47, 51, 217n47; prepared handmade booklets, 48–52; for preservation (from lay auditor notes), 15, 47–56; proliferations of multiple print versions, 40–46, 215n24; role of transcription and ownership, 52–54; and sermon notes of lay auditors, 36, 40–56, 213n7; unauthorized publications, 35–37, 39–47, 213n6. See also print sermons and oral sermon culture; publishing ministers (clerical authorship) marginalia and marginal glosses: auditor notebooks, 66, 70, 72, 81–82, 175;

left-margin structural markers, 81–82; ruled-off left-hand margins, 66, 70, 72, 175; and “similitude,” 154; and vernacular Bibles, 149 Marshall, Thomas, 107, 225n10 Mary Magdalen, 161, 233n43 Mather, Cotton, 59, 93, 166, 221n25; anecdotes about Hooker’s preaching (and relation between divine Word and human vessel), 10–13; and Dunton’s execution sermon collection, 25; on Hooker’s The Application of Redemption, 215n24; Magnalia Christi Americana, 2, 12–13, 215–16n24, 230n5, 234n54; memoir of “Johannes in Eremo,” 59–60, 218n3; and Puritan humor, 230n5 Mather, Increase: collection of manuscript copies of print texts, 53–54, 56, 218n55; Morgan execution sermon, 24, 25–26 Matthew, Gospel of: parable of the sower, 155, 232n32; Shepard’s sermon cycle on the Parable of the Ten Virgins, 104–5, 109–11, 155 McCullough, Peter, 3 Melyen, Samuel, 73 Metcalfe, Michael: aural auditing, 92–93; content auditing, 88–90, 115; handmade sermon notebook, 68–69, 72, 73, 221n19 Miller, Perry, 38, 47; on difference between “symphonic” Anglican and Puritan preaching, 111, 226n21; on the New England Mind, 3, 227n24 Milton, John, 3 Mitchell, Jonathan, 97–98, 105 Moodey, Joshua, 93–97; execution sermon and Templestone’s handmade sermon notebook, 22–25, 26–28, 210n57; Voracious Auditor’s recording of, 93–97, 154 Morgan, James, 22–28, 210n61 Morrissey, Mary, 207n22 New England Way, 63, 173, 184 Norton, John: Correcting Auditor of Ipswich sermons, 78–80; Disposition Auditor of Boston sermons, 76–78; on the literal sense, 146; Mather on popularity, 2; The Orthodox Evangelist, 102, 203, 224n3; polemical prefatory epistle, 102, 203

Index   259 notetaking. See lay auditor notetaking; lay auditors and notetakers; sermon notebooks of lay auditors Nye, Philip, 41 Olbon, Elizabeth, 179–80 Ong, Walter J., 63, 214n9 oral culture and manuscript culture, 37, 46–47, 62–64, 214n9, 219n11; book history scholarship, 29, 30, 62–64, 211nn67–69; and the “communications circuit,” 37, 211–12n69; libraries, 52– 54, 56, 218n55; literacy rates and book ownership, 66; permeability between print and manuscript, 29, 62, 211n67; reading and the literal sense, 20–21, 231n15; reading and the nonlinearity of the print sermon, 31, 134, 138–39, 229n49. See also manuscript sermons; print sermons and oral sermon culture ordinary means to salvation, 11, 178–81, 200, 207n24 Origen, 14, 19 ownership marks, 52–54, 57, 68–69, 210 pacing variations and auditor notetaking, 65–66, 76, 80, 112–14 Palfrey, Jane, 176–77 parables: Jesus’ use of, 155, 232nn32–33; parable of the sower, 155, 232n32; Shepard’s sermon cycle on Matthew’s Parable of the Ten Virgins, 2, 104–5, 109–11, 155, 235n16 Parkes, M. B., 228n36 pastoral concerns (about differences between printed and spoken word), 101–6, 110–11; and expressions of preemptive nostalgia, 103–4; prefatory epistles, 102–3, 203; sermon cycles, 101–2, 104–6, 109–11; Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins, 104–5, 109–11 Paul: conversion of, 10, 194–96; use of allegory, 157 pen testing (pen trial), 23, 68, 88–89 Perkins, William, 108; The Arte of Prophecying, 4, 13–21, 104, 115, 142, 206n11; on balance between oral and written sermons, 104; on godly ministers as vessels, 177–78; on the literal sense, 17–21, 120, 142; syllabus of biblical reading, 20–21 Peters, Hugh, 11, 59, 116, 178–81, 200,

207n24 Pettit, Norman, 41 Pinch, John (Pyncheon), 73, 223n42 plain-style preaching and sermon composition, 2, 4–5, 13–21, 140–72, 227n24; challenges of “mixed” audiences, 164–65; collation, 21, 150, 157–63, 165, 171; contemplation of single words and grammar, 143–44, 153, 171, 232n30; doctrine-use structure, 14, 15, 61, 208n30; ex tempore delivery, 14–15, 112–14, 221n25; explication of literal sense of scripture, 13–21, 31, 32–33, 113, 114, 139, 140–47, 152, 157–64; and implicit “grammar” of pulpit spontaneity, 106, 127, 129, 224n8; original languages, 140, 149, 150–51, 230n1; preaching manuals, 4, 13–21, 104, 142; “prophesying,” 4–5, 104, 142, 206n11; relation between divine and human language, 10–13, 31–32, 58, 141, 152–54, 164, 171–72; rhetorical strategies, 154–70; and scriptural interpretation/exegesis, 15–21; similitude and figurative language, 154–56, 165, 171; and the solas of Reformation theology, 10–11, 16–17, 141–42, 146; typology, 156–57, 168–69, 171; and vernacular translation, 147–54, 171. See also print sermons and oral sermon culture; Ramist branching; sermons continua and sermon cycles poetry, 5–7, 167–70, 206n15; acrostics and anagrams, 167–68, 234nn51–52; Dane’s sermon notebook, 74–75; elegiac wordplay, 167–68, 234n54; resemblance in sermons and sermon notes, 92, 97, 136, 137; sermonic logic of nonsermonic poetry, 5–7; Taylor’s, 6–7, 168–70; and typology, 168–69 pointing, 124–26 postlapsarian intellect, 12, 31, 142, 164, 171. See also language, divine and human preaching. See plain-style preaching and sermon composition preaching manuals, 4, 13–21, 104, 142 preparationism, 233n36; Hooker and, 41–43, 128, 156 print sermons and oral sermon culture, 31, 101–39; and auditor accuracy, 114–27, 134, 222n34; and auditor understand-

260   Index ing of the “spirit” of the “letter,” 114–15; dialogic passages, 106–11; differences between Sibbes’s print sermon and Keayne’s notes, 118–24, 127, 227–28n28, 228n31; and discursive nature of the sermon, 114; formal/rhetorical resemblance of oral and written sermons, 105–6; and Hooker’s Application of Redemption, 127–38; and implicit “grammar” of pulpit spontaneity, 106, 127, 129, 224n8; markers of improvisation and spontaneous speech, 111–14, 129, 132–33, 139; Perkins on balancing oral and written sermons, 104; print and manuscript sermons bound together, 56–57, 218n55; and publishing ministers’ apologia, 40, 98, 102–3; publishing-ministers’ polemic concerns, 101–6, 110–11, 224n2; Ramist branching, 101, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113–14, 127, 128, 134–38; reading and the nonlinearity of the print sermon, 31, 134, 138–39, 229n49; rhetorical devices and oral simulacra, 31, 106–39; structural disproportion, 112–14, 128, 130, 132–34, 229n41; verbal transitional markers, 113, 123–24, 129–30, 138. See also lay auditor notetaking; manuscript sermons; oral culture and manuscript culture; plain-style preaching and sermon composition publishing ministers (clerical authorship), 35–47, 58; and clerical notes, 8, 61, 67–68, 72, 220n16, 221n25; defined in political/theological context, 38–39; distinctive themes and individual emphases, 38–39, 214n16; eschatological/ millennialist concerns, 105; notational tag “lately of New England,” 39; polemic concerns, 101–6, 110–11, 224n2; and singular clerical authorship, 38–39; unauthorized publications, 35–37, 39–47, 213n6. See also manuscript sermons; print sermons and oral sermon culture pulpit eloquence, 10, 14, 61–62, 97–98, 106, 115, 133–37, 154 punctuation, 116, 228n36; Adams’s analysis of, 145; and auditor use of points, 124–26; and English Bible translations, 145 Puritan sermon culture, defining, 7 Puritan sermon literature, 1–33, 202–3;

aural/oral experience of, 7–21; discursiveness, x, 29, 114; and enabled debility, 12–13, 16–17, 31, 32, 141–42, 152, 165, 168, 171–72, 184, 199, 202; figures of spiritual “milk” and “meat,” 11–12; historical- and cultural-studies approaches, 1; and intertextuality, 164, 171–72; literary approaches, 1; material conditions and textual meaning, 9–10; mistaken premise that Puritan writers were reactive, 4–5; new American scholarship on, 3–4, 205n8; nonsermonic prose and poetry, 5–7; notion of a “sermon-ridden” literature, 1–2, 7, 29, 32–33; notions of genre, 5–7, 32–33; popularity of, 2–5; the sermon as controlling logic of Puritan literature, 5–7, 32–33; and solas of Protestantism, 2, 9, 10–11, 16–17, 99; subjective aurality of, 8–9, 29, 60–61, 63, 98–100. See also conversion narratives; lay auditor notetaking; manuscript sermons; plainstyle preaching and sermon composition; print sermons and oral sermon culture Rahab sermon, Willard’s, 158–63, 186, 233n38 Ramist branching, 14, 61, 65, 101, 107, 108, 112, 127, 128, 134–38, 208n34; balancing improvisational energy, 112, 113–14, 134–36; definition, 14, 208n34; dialogic passages, 109, 111; and Hooker’s ministration to Joan Drake, 108, 225n16; and Hooker’s The Application of Redemption, 43, 113, 128, 137–38; and Ramist logic, 14, 108, 208n34, 225n16; and structural auditing, 83–84; Wolcott’s numbering system, 131–32, 133 reading: literacy rates, 66; and nonlinearity of the print sermon, 31, 134, 138–39, 229n49; and plain-style explication of the literal sense, 20–21, 231n15 reciprocal witness, 182–85, 195, 202 Robinson, John, 165–66 Rock, Mary, 158–63, 186, 233n38 Round, Philip H., 215n19 Rowlandson, Mary, 5–6, 191 Rules to Be Observed in the Translation of the Bible, 149 Russell, Daniel: ministry career, 72,

Index   261 221n24; sermon notebook, 71–72, 221n25 Russell, Richard: and “book” numbering, 131; sermon notebook, 70–72, 73 The Saints Anchor-Hold (Davenport), ix–x, 56–57 The Saints Cordial (1629 sermon collection) (Sibbes), 116–27, 227n26 sermon notebooks of lay auditors, 8–9, 21–28, 30, 59–75, 173–75; authorship, 21–25, 67–69; back-to-front writing, 70, 71; bibliographical/archival issues, 21–25, 60–61, 67–69; books passed down in families, 74–75; and conversion narratives, 62, 73–74, 98–99, 173–76; cross-outs, emendations, and additions, 66; Dane’s, 74–75; as difficult to read, 65; emotive markers, 174; flipping/ recording in opposite directions, 70, 71, 73–74, 131, 174; genre mingling, 75; handmade books, 22–28, 48–52, 68–69, 70, 73; Hull’s diary of public occurrences, 64, 174, 219n12; in situ notetaking, 65, 67, 76–78, 82, 83–84, 92–93, 111–13, 115, 123–24, 148, 220n16, 228n28; Keayne’s English notebook, 59–60, 70, 85, 117, 174; marginalia and left-hand margins, 66, 70, 72, 175; Metcalfe’s, 68–69, 72, 73, 221n19; multiuse, 73–75, 82, 174–75; notes completed at home, 63, 65, 72, 82, 148, 220n16; oblong, top-bound notebooks, 72, 73; penmanship changes, 70, 82; portable books, 70–72; premade books, 70–73; scarcity of paper and materials, 72–73, 174; Shepard’s, 73–74, 175–76; shorthand recording, 54, 74, 92, 93, 98, 223n42, 229n44; vertical rules/horizontal rules, 70; Wolcott’s, 62. See also lay auditor notetaking sermons continua and sermon cycles: and “book” numbers, 131–32; dialogic voices and interjections, 110–11; Hooker’s The Application of Redemption, 41–45, 127–38, 147–50, 215n24; and manuscript sermons for preservation, 47; Metcalfe’s content auditing, 89–90; multiple versions, 41–45; polemic sermon cycles, 101–2, 104–6, 109–11; and Puritan poetry, 7; Shepard’s Parable of Ten Virgins, 2, 104–5, 109–11, 155,

235n16; structural auditing, 84–86, 130–38 Sewall, Samuel, 166 Shepard, Douglas H., 130–31, 229n44 Shepard, Thomas, 6, 13, 97, 200; and Antinomian Controversy, 38, 105, 167; “Bramble” sermon, 167; and Cambridge Confessions, 39, 72–74, 104, 174, 175– 76, 179, 182, 185, 235n14; as clerical author, 38–39; collated autobiography, 186–88, 202; Parable of Ten Virgins (sermon cycle on Matthew 25:1–13), 2, 104–5, 109–11, 155, 235n16; The Sincere Convert, 36; structural auditors of, 81–82; unauthorized publications, 36; and Winship’s conversion narrative, 182, 184 Shepard, Thomas, III, 221n24 Shepard, Thomas, Jr., 187–88, 221n24 shorthand recording, 54, 74, 92, 93, 98, 223n42, 229n44; Chickering, 92, 97–98, 223n42; Wolcott, 62, 223n42, 229n44 Shuffelton, Frank, 108, 225n16, 228n41 Sibbes, Richard: Blackfriars sermon on Phil. 4:11, 118–24, 121–24, 127; Hunton’s manuscript copy Divine Meditations and Holy Contemplations, 52–53; Keayne’s auditing notes, 116–27, 154, 227n26, 227n28; The Saints Cordials (1629 print sermon collection), 116–27, 227n26; verbal markers, 123–24 Sill, John, 177, 180–82 similitude and figurative language, 154–56, 165, 171; and auditors, 137–38, 154– 55; Disposition Auditor, 154; Hooker’s use of, 155–56; marginalia and marginal glosses, 154; Perkins on, 154 Simpson, James, 16, 17, 209n43, 231n15 Sloat, Caroline, 211n67 solas of Reformation theology, 2, 9, 10–11, 16–17, 31, 141–42, 146; and auditor understanding of the “spirit” of the “letter,” 114–15; and plain-style explication of the literal sense of scripture, 16–17, 114, 141–42, 146; sola fide, 2, 9–11, 16–17, 99, 141, 146; sola scriptura, 2, 9–11, 16–17, 20, 31, 99, 114–15, 141, 146 Stoddard, Solomon, 93, 169 Stout, Harry S., 2, 217n47; on auditor notetaking, 213n7; on New England

262   Index literacy rates, 66; The New England Soul, 8; on oral preaching culture, 8; and speakers’ delivery styles, 219n13 structural auditing, 30, 61–62, 81–86; accuracy, 115, 119, 123–24, 134; dialogic insertions, 109; Disposition Auditor, 77–78, 80, 82, 93; Doubting Auditor, 92; Elegant Auditor, 82–83; Keayne, 85–86, 119–27; left-margin structural markers, 81–82; and Ramist branching, 83–84; sermons continua, 84–86, 130–38; Shepard’s auditors, 81–82; Sibbes’s sermons, 119–27; transcription of “heads,” 80, 81–82, 84, 134–36; Wolcott’s numbering system, 131–32, 133; Wolcott’s recording of Hooker’s Application of Redemption, 130–38, 148–49, 154, 229n54, 230n55 Symmes, Zechariah, 70, 131 Sypher, Francis, 223n42 Taylor, Edward, 6, 52, 234n56; Christographia (sermon series), 169–70; God’s Determinations Touching His Elect, 6; poetry, 6, 168–70; Preparatory Meditations, 6–7, 168–70 Templestone, John, handmade notebook of execution sermons, 22–28, 210n65, 210nn57–58 text crumbling, 32, 144–47, 165, 171; Herbert on, 144; and Hooker’s sermon cycle (“pierce”/”prick”), 146–47, 149, 150 Toulouse, Teresa, 14, 206n11, 230n6 Tyndale, William, 17, 153 typology, 156–57, 168–69, 171; Cotton and, 157; and Paul’s invocation of allegory, 157; and poetry, 168–69 unauthorized publications, 35–37, 39–47, 213n6 Van der Woude, Joanne, 234n51 vernacular translation, 147–54, 171; and auditors, 148; Danforth’s close reading and other techniques, 151–52; as discursive process, 150–51; Hooker’s Application of Redemption, 147–48, 149–50; and human-divine linguistic divide, 152–54; and marginal glosses, 149; ministers’ individual interpretations of, 150–51; and ministers’ uses of

original languages, 140, 149, 150–51, 230n1; printed Bibles, 148–50, 231n19; and scriptural collation, 150; and Wolcott’s notes on Hooker, 148–49 visible sanctity, 105, 173, 185–86, 196–97, 200–201; Visible Saints, 173, 186, 196–97, 206n9, 235n2 Voracious Auditor, 154; accuracy, 115, 124, 135; aural auditing of Moodey’s sermons, 93–97, 154; and similitude, 154 Vulgate, 145, 153, 159 Walker, Jeffrey, 234n52 Ward, Nathaniel, 74, 174 Warham, John, 130, 132, 189 Weld, Thomas, 183–84 Weld, Thomas, III, commonplace book, 84–85, 140–41, 230n1 Wheelwright, John, 107, 216n41, 225n10 Wigglesworth, Michael: Day of Doom, 5, 6; God’s Controversy with New-England, 6 Wilkins, Henry, 54 Wilkins, John, Ecclesiastes, 214–15n16 Willard, Samuel, 93; sermon on Rahab, 158–63, 186, 233n38 Williams, George Huntston, 41, 45–46 Williams, Roger, 40, 54, 157, 215n19 Wilson, John, 2, 59, 85, 116, 174 Winship, Jane Wilkinson, 182–85 Winthop, John, 5, 166, 230n5; Modell of Christian Charitie, 5; A Short Story, 225n10 Wolcott, Henry: content auditing, 133; dialogic insertions in the sermon record, 109; numbering system, 131–32, 133; sermon notebook, 62; shorthand recording, 62, 223n42, 229n44; structural auditing of Hooker’s sermon cycle, 130–38, 148–49, 154, 229n54, 230n55; and vernacular Bible, 148–49 Writings in England and Holland, 1626– 1633 (Hooker), 41, 43, 45, 216n25 Ziff, Larzer, 205n8, 231n12

Acknowledgments

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ow fitting that this book about disseminated authorship across communities has benefited from so many individuals and institutions. Proving the suspicion that from small seeds greater things might grow, a summer stipend from the Alice Coonley Higgins School of the Humanities at Clark University in 2007 allowed me to immerse myself in Boston-area archives fulltime, running from one late opening to another and pestering any librarians who were generous enough to share conversation about the oddities of their archives. The larger project that grew out of that summer simply would not have been possible without the support of two long-term National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, one at the Massachusetts Historical Society and one at the American Antiquarian Society. The time and resources afforded by these two remarkable programs were further enhanced by interactions with extraordinary staff members and marvelous fellow fellows. At MHS, Conrad E. Wright fostered a vibrant intellectual community, while Peter Drummy was always generous with his time, insights, and delightful conversation. Elaine Grublin and the stellar staff shared the excitement of discovery at every turn, while Jeremy Dibbell provided contexts to archival oddities that continue to inform my work. At AAS, late-afternoon conversations with Tom G. Knoles invariably sent me rushing to my laptop to record as much of his deep knowledge of manuscripts as possible before closing time. David R. Whitesell’s understated genius for understanding the material meaning of print books has informed this and, I suspect, future projects, while Caroline F. Sloat’s unflagging encouragement has kept me pushing forward. Elizabeth Watts Pope and the entire reader services and reference staff made each day a little more productive and much more delightful. Paul J. Erickson worked his uncanny magic,

264   Acknowledgments dropping just the right hint, forging just the right connection, and raising just the right question at the moment when it mattered. Between these two remarkable fellowship opportunities, a month of support at the Folger Shakespeare Library allowed me to identify important English contexts for my New England project. Georgianna Ziegler and Elizabeth Walsh shared their vast knowledge of the collections and made my time there more productive, while a multitude of daily conversations with other readers have enriched the early modern outlook of this book. Less formally, the Houghton Library, the Congregational Library, the Library of Congress, and the Newberry Library have all opened their doors most graciously. The New England Historical and Genealogical Society and Timothy Salls and Judith Lucey, in particular, have made available wonderful resources for my research. This project was book-ended by two extraordinary seminar opportunities. An AAS summer seminar, “Books and Their Readers,” with Jay Fliegelman (in memoriam) laid the groundwork for the book history direction that this project would take. Ann Blair’s Folger faculty seminar, “Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,” helped me to fill out exciting new continental contexts and pull disparate pieces together as the manuscript was reaching completion. In the final stages of manuscript preparation, Kristina Bross and David D. Hall made extraordinarily generous and helpful suggestions. I can only hope that this book does some credit to their keen insights and deep knowledge. Jerry Singerman at the University of Pennsylvania Press faithfully shepherded this project throughout, Caroline Winschel helped to transform knotty formatting issues into fascinating opportunities to think about textual reproduction, and the Production Department found ways to convey the “thingyness” of the text. I have had more and better conversations in break rooms, between conference sessions, at reference desks, and over dinner and drinks than I can possible account for here. To mention just a few of these good souls, for tangible and intangible reasons: April Breeland, Joanna Brooks, Ed Cahill, Michael J. Colacurcio, Jonathan Beecher Field, Lowell Gallagher, Carl Keyes, Nina Kushner, Chris Looby, Muriel McClendon, Barbara Packer (in memoriam), Jackie Penny, Yvette Piggush, Amy Richter, Wendy Roberts, Debora Shuger, Reiner Smolinski, Laura Stevens, Bryce Traister, and Alden T. Vaughan. This list is incomplete, however, without mentioning the Society of Early Americanists as a whole, a group without which I would be lost in a world of anonymous

Acknowledgments   265 scholarly labors instead of richly networked with some of the smartest people in the world. The Women’s Caucus, in particular, deserves special mention here. My colleagues in the Clark English Department—Jay Elliott, SunHee Kim Gertz, Betsy Huang, Fern Johnson, Esther Jones, Lisa Kasmer, Steve Levin, Winston Napier (in memoriam), and Virginia M. Vaughan—teach me on a daily basis that a workplace might be not only sane and supportive but also a joyous home. Former students Jane Lindelof and Emma Siemasko were there in the early stages of this project, Katharine Gill rendered my handwritten chart of Thomas Hooker’s bibliography into a legible illustration, and Dana Aronowitz and Angie Woodmansee have aided the completion of this project with their generous labors and irresistible enthusiasm. Carolyn Eastman, Paul Erickson, Lisa Gordis, Doug Harrison, Jessica Lepler, Jordan Alexander Stein, Robert Strong, and Jay Twomey all read pieces of the manuscript along the way and offered invaluable insights and suggestions. Nina Kushner and Doug Harrison (again) were writing partners and sanity keepers during crucial summer months. Ask me, all of you, and I will gladly show you your names “written therein.” I was lucky to have been born into a bookish family, where passions for odd topics were always encouraged with good humor. The support of all my family has seen me through. Love? We are lousy with it. Dianne and Ron Neuman have been there unconditionally. My father, in particular, early on inculcated a sense of the early American that only later did I come to understand and make my own. My sister, Kristin Espinosa, braved many trails before me and always comes to sojourn by my side. Memories of my mother, Steff Neuman, and of my grandmother, Freda Petersen, fill these pages like an ache and a promise. The one inspires me to rigor and honesty in my intellectual pursuits, while the other brings this atheist to cherish the faith of all those who believe with great hearts. And then there is Danny Thompson, without whom nothing else is possible. You are my joy in the morning, my collaborator by day, and my comfort at night.