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
In 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, 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
Introduction
The 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 cultural-studies 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 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