These qualifications to conventions of clerical demurrals do not delegitimize some of the very real problems of unauthorized publication in the period. John Cotton provides a prime example of the precarious conflicts that sometimes existed between manuscript, oral, and print manifestations of a minister’s words. The distance between New England and the publishing hub of London meant that few ministers of the first generations ever published on their home turf. Accordingly, as Jonathan Beecher Field argues, a “lack of authorial control is the rule, rather than the exception” for most publishing ministers, particularly Cotton, a man who found himself buffeted by more than one controversial tempest. Factors such as “unreliable transcription, untimely publication, and unauthorized publication” stymie an accurate representation of Cotton’s thought in extant print sources, and his entry into the infamous pamphlet war with Roger Williams might ultimately be characterized as “involuntary authorship.”19
The friction between Williams and Cotton may represent one kind of worst-case scenario of a minister’s loss of authorial control, but even a well-intentioned auditor might offer just as strong (if more subtle) a challenge to the publishing minister’s authorial prerogative. In many ways, the proliferation of multiple print versions of Thomas Hooker’s preaching—taken almost exclusively from devoted notetakers and put into print by publishers with personal and theological sympathies—raises even more fundamental questions about the means of clerical authorship than do the cases of controversial writings by Cotton. Hooker, who had in print only two sermons (The Poor Doubting Christian and The Soules Preparation) when he emigrated to New England in 1633,20 may not have had any significant amount of his preaching published had it not been for the unauthorized publications of his English preaching based on auditor notes. The year 1637 saw the publication of thirteen sermons or sermon collections by Hooker, all likely unauthorized and based on auditor notes, and those thirteen titles provided the basis for a total of six subsequent editions under the same or similar titles over the next eight years.21 In 1656 (almost a decade after Hooker’s death), the printer Peter Cole published the first two volumes of The Application of Redemption in England, introduced by Hooker’s former colleagues and continued allies in England, Thomas Good-win and Philip Nye, apparently part of a planned three-volume sermon cycle.22 This is Hooker’s magnum opus, and tradition holds that he had preached his way through the entire sequence of the stages of redemption (particularly the preparatory stages) at least three times—once in England and twice in New England, presumably refining and expanding the years-long sequence each time.23 Goodwin and Nye affirm that this posthumous publication is based on Hooker’s own prepared draft, an assertion that has been corroborated by the painstaking stylistic and content analysis of modern scholarship.24 Nevertheless, basic similarities of doctrine, scriptural explication, and even wording suggest that the English preaching—as preserved by the unauthorized early publications—provided the foundation upon which subsequent articulations were based. Hooker’s publication history is extraordinarily complicated. The combined bibliographic efforts of George Huntston Williams, Norman Pettit, Winfried Herget, and Sargent Bush Jr. in their edition of Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633 is no doubt the most comprehensive, conclusive treatment possible for such a tricky authorial career. Thanks to Bush’s painstaking bibliographic endeavors, for example, we can see the complex genealogy of Hooker’s lifelong preoccupation with the stages of redemption.25 (See figure 4.)
In one way, the complicated Hooker canon is a simple bibliographic conundrum—either intriguing or tedious, depending on one’s patience and point of view. But the vagaries of “establishing the Hooker canon”26 do as much to reveal the minister as self-conscious author as they do to unauthorize that authorial coherence. Clearly legible in Hooker’s nearly obsessive preaching and publication patterns is his “activist aesthetic” and what others (from Anne Hutchinson to current-day scholars) have characterized as disproportionate “preparationism” (emphasis on what one might do while awaiting justification through free grace or, arguably, what one might do to seek justification).27 Tellingly, The Application of Redemption is a two-volume, posthumous tome that, at more than a thousand total pages, is yet incomplete. The first eight books of The Application of Redemption were published in one volume in 1656, and the ninth and tenth books in a subsequent volume that same year. Hooker organizes the redemption process via Ramist branching, with each extant book addressing one specific aspect of the whole system: Redemption implies both the Purchase (Book I) and its Application; Application in general (Book II) and in its parts, Preparation and Implantation; Preparation may be considered in general (Book III) and in its particulars; Preparation is both Free (Book IV) and Fit (Book V); Preparation is required because we are Asleep (Book VII) and Unwilling (Book VII) and accordingly require Holy Violence (Book VIII). The second volume of The Application of Redemption includes Book IX (a brief summary of the case for preparation so far) and the disproportionately lengthy Book X on “Contrition.” Although the concluding books of the sequence are advertised by the publishers, they never come out in print as such. Hooker’s Application is final, we suspect, only because it is posthumous. For the scholar aware of Hooker’s preparationist reputation, his explication of redemption is comically incomplete. In a Puritan version of Zeno’s paradox, the sinner always approaches redemption but, like the book itself, never arrives.
Figure 4. A visual overview of the genealogy of Thomas Hooker’s print sermons on the stages of redemption, culminating in the posthumous publication of The Application of Redemption in 1656 and 1657.
By the same token, the grandiose incompleteness of Hooker’s sermon cycle instructs us that neither is the print version so static as we might imagine nor is the author so much in control. The 1656 articulation merely records one version of an ongoing and communal dialogue about the nature and likelihood of that elusive conclusion, redemption. In his attempts to bring bibliographic certainty to Hooker’s complicated publication history, Herget offers in the same exemplary volume (Writings in England and Holland) parallel passages from the earlier English preaching on redemption (printed from auditor notes) and the later print version of The Application (presumably prepared by Hooker himself). Where the earlier version asks, for example:
Men and Brethren, what shall we doe to be saved? as if they had said, The truth is wee have heard of the fearefull condition of such as have killed the Lord Jesus, and we confesse whatsoever you have said, he was persecuted by us, and blasphemed by us, we are they that cryed, Crucifie him, crucifie him; we would have eaten his flesh, and made dice of his bones; we plotted his death and glorified in it; these are our sins, and haply a thousand more that they revealed[,]
the later version declares:
Men and brethren you have discovered many sins and the dreadful condition of the sinners who are guilty thereof, loe we are the men, thus and thus we have done. By us the Lord was opposed and persued, by us he was derided, rayled upon and blasphemed, by us it was he was murthered, and we are they that have embrewed our hands in his most precious blood: we are they that cryed and desired it, Crucified him, away with him, not him, but Barabbas. Nay they roundly, readily told al[.]28
Herget offers many such parallel passages, characterizing Hooker’s own elaborated rendition as “not necessarily more readable.” While stopping short of expressing a preference for the earlier English preaching, he suggests: “With the greater attention it pays to logic and exactness, with its self-conscious effort to have a more balanced syntax and a greater copiousness of words, [The Application of Redemption] seems more labored where the earlier version is more direct and livelier, more ‘oral.’”29 Although Herget does not elaborate, the characterizations he uses for this judgment conform largely to classical (even contemporaneous) rhetorical criteria; qualities of syntactical balance and copia are those that Hooker—with