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 self-conscious 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. 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.
Chapter 1
Unauthorizing the Sermon
In a letter written to his old friend and colleague John Cotton in 1650, John Davenport requests advice regarding a sermon he is preparing for the press. Some time ago, Davenport had lent his own copy of notes on a sermon on “the knowledge of Christ” to “Brother Pierce,” a lay auditor who took notes at the delivery of the sermon.1 Davenport comments: “The Forenamed brother dilligently wrote, as his manner was, but finding that his head and pen could not carry away some materiall expressions, he earnestly desired me to lett him have my notes, to perfect his owne by them.”2 After some delays, Davenport sends the requested notes to Brother Pierce in New Haven, extracting two promises. Number one, that Pierce will return his copy when done via “a safe land=messenger” (four years earlier, Davenport had lost an entire manuscript sermon series on board a vessel known as the “phantom ship”).3 Number two, that when Brother Pierce “had transcribed them, he would shew them unto [Cotton], and make no other use of them then privatly for himselfe but by [Cotton’s] advise.” “This I added,” explains Davenport, “because I feared that he had a purpose for the presse, from some words that I observed now and then to fall from him.”4 Brother Pierce fears that he may have missed some fundamental points of Davenport’s argument—what he calls “materiall expressions.” In turn, however, the very materiality of those incomplete notes enables Davenport’s argument about “the knowledge of Christ” to circulate. The materiality of expression—created by his own hand as well as by Brother Pierce’s—makes Davenport’s preaching portable, accessible, and also vulnerable.
At first glance, Davenport’s letter seems simply to confirm the conventional sense of anxiety over unauthorized publication associated with Puritan print sermons. Complaints about unauthorized publication are ubiquitous. Thomas Shepard, for example, complains in a letter about the unauthorized publication of The Sincere Convert (a series drawn from his English preaching) that “it was a Collection of such Notes in a dark Town in England, which one procuring of me, published them without my will or privity; I scarce know what it contains, nor do I like to see it, considering the many [typographical errors], most absurd, and the confession of him that published it, that [it] comes out gelded and altered from what was first written.”5 Such disavowals (found in private writing as well as in the prefaces to subsequent editions and responses to unauthorized publication) are common among seventeenth-century clergy, especially (but certainly not limited to) New England ministers who may have felt the distance from the London publishing world even more keenly than their transatlantic brethren.6 Laity of all denominations took notes, but the practice was particularly common among those auditors with Puritan leanings who sought to privilege the primacy of the Word in the work of redemption.7
Davenport’s letter to Cotton complicates our notion of the relationship between the publishing minister and the well-intentioned lay notetaker (and, perhaps, even the less well-intentioned notetaker). His letter suggests that manuscript notes, by ministers and laity alike, might be kept in circulation, be used to check and confirm each other, and ultimately provide a complex network of authorship that might enable clerical publication. In his letter, Davenport’s primary concern is neither the return of his notes nor the suppression of any publishing ambitions on the part of Brother Pierce. (If Brother Pierce had succeeded in getting Davenport’s preaching into print, however, Davenport’s name, not his own, would be on the title page. In terms of both the notetaker and the publisher, there would be some combination of economic and pious motive rather than what we now may think of as personal, authorial ambition.) Davenport desires foremost that Cotton will comment on his explication. Cotton apparently takes up this request immediately and begins to draft his response to Davenport’s scriptural interpretation directly in the white space on Davenport’s letter.8 The letter as artifact becomes a palimpsest of communal interpretive endeavors. This particular shared endeavor implicates Davenport, Cotton, and Pierce in various overlapping roles. Davenport, of course, serves as the primary author or instigator of the text, while Cotton serves as the collegial advisor on matters of scriptural interpretation.