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 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 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, 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 plain-style 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