Chapter 2
Reading the Notetakers
When 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 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 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: 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