of any two auditors of any one speech. Yet we might also marvel that the vagaries of unauthorized publication in the seventeenth century can produce even this much consensus regarding what Thomas Hooker might have said.
At some point, the knotty problem of establishing “authentic” texts of ministers such as Thomas Hooker becomes instructive. The ambiguities in establishing authenticity grow directly out of the ambiguities involved with producing these texts in the seventeenth century. If we think of authenticity as rooted in written, authorial originals, the task becomes impossible. Sermon literature in the seventeenth century was primarily oral. Written accounts of that orality, whether in print or in manuscript, serve only as approximations—useful because of their portability but inherently limited in their accuracy (our concern) and efficacy (the Puritan concern). The materiality of these records produces further ambiguities. On the one hand, the creation and transmission of these “materiall expressions” inevitably propagate any number of errant readings. Bibliography seeks to discipline these errancies by identifying (or compositing) authoritative texts. On the other hand, for all their limited literal accuracy, the material expressions of preaching (for example, auditor notes, variant print versions, and manuscript copies) might represent the real experience of hearing, recording, reporting, circulating, and reading rather well, producing an alternative form of accuracy with regard to sermon literature. The rest of this chapter explores this alternative accuracy glimpsed via the material expressions of the manuscript record, particularly in the form of manuscript sermons as written by lay auditors. The varied styles of these manuscript books reveal a mode of textual production and dissemination driven by entire communities of auditors and readers. In such a discursive community, idiosyncratic texts claim authoritative status, speaking simultaneously to the fact of delivery and the experience of hearing and reading. In this context, the print sermon—whether authorized or unauthorized—must be understood as just one iteration within the broader frame of creating and consuming sermon literature.
While Perry Miller depicted New England ministers who “‘sacrificed their health to the production of massive tomes’ and ‘counted that day lost in which they did not spend ten or twelve hours in their studies,’”36 subsequent scholarship has uncovered quite a different reality: “Far from sacrificing their health to write long and scholarly books, a full 66 percent of the practicing clergymen in New England never published anything, an additional 11 percent of them wrote only a single publication, and a mere 5 percent published ten or more tracts during their lives. … Actually, only a few prominent men in each of the five generations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ministers are responsible for the impression that New England pastors were publication-oriented, because an elite group of only twenty-seven pastors (out of a total of 531) wrote 70 percent of all ministerial treatises.”37 With only five out of 122 first-generation ministers in this “elite group,” about three-quarters of first-generation publishing was non-sermonic.38 And because early publication that was sermonic tended to be either sermon cycles (with individual sermons occasionally discernible within the larger structure) or occasional sermons, there are very few examples of “ordinary” preaching in print. While sermon cycles are based on “ordinary” preaching, and occasional sermons have much in common with their ostensibly non-topical counterparts, a complete picture of New England sermon literature cannot be achieved though print sources alone.39 Simply put, for every sermon that circulated via authorized or unauthorized print publication, many more sermons circulated via manuscript both as notes and as more fully realized prose worked up from notes.
David D. Hall has described an entire body of Puritan writing that he categorizes as scribal publication. Adding to scholarship by Harold Love and others, Hall reminds us that in the early modern period, the advent and spread of printing did not stop the production and circulation of manuscripts.40
Rather, both modes of “publication” coexisted. Love has shown that manuscript circulation was, in fact, preferred for certain kinds of texts and in certain literary circles. Hall is hesitant to include all categories of manuscript circulation, however, pointing out that even the reading aloud of a letter (a common practice of the period) might be considered a form of publication. Rather, Hall suggests that scribal publication be limited to manuscripts that are produced, usually in multiple copies and often by a single transcriber, for dissemination beyond a single corresponding group. Most of the modes of scribal publication he has identified are non-sermonic.41
While there is evidence that sermon notes were shared, either by individuals circulating notes or by notebook owners reading aloud,42 there are also instances in which the notes seem to be prepared for the express purpose of preservation and circulation on a more limited scale than the one that Hall describes. In 1660, for example, Nan Foster created a small ten-leaf booklet, hand-sewn with large thread stitches along the spine. An additional piece of paper folded around the main pages of the booklet functions as a title page, declaring the work (in what appears to be a different hand from that inside) “A Sermon, Delivered By the Revd Mr. John Roger Of Ipswich August ye 16th 1660.” Likely based on Foster’s own auditor notes, the manuscript seems to be reworked in the attempt to create a full and fair copy of a sermon that she has heard. Even though there are cross-outs and irregularities of penmanship throughout, the sermon booklet has been prepared for circulation, perhaps specifically as a gift. Close examination of the handmade books can reveal not only how individuals created such idiosyncratic artifacts but also what individuals understood books themselves to be. The vertical orientation of chain lines in the leaves of the main booklet suggest an octavo gathering. Curiously, leaves three through ten are conjugate and nested while leaves one and two appear to be single sheets, suggesting an improvised method of construction. Horizontal chain lines and the position of the watermark on the outer wrapper suggest a separate sheet of paper that was added in a final, separate step to make a cover for the main octavo gathering of the oddly constructed booklet. Nan Foster does not simply copy out a sermon on paper to disseminate it; she conceives her handmade artifact as a book object.
At the end of the book, Foster appends this explanation and apology:
Dear Brother there may Be some & is
Errors ^ & Blunders in the Transcribing of this But
But I trust you will Be able to
Correct’em [characters scribbled out] & free to Excuse ’em for it
has been a tedious piece of work to me
to pick it out &c
Nan ffoster43
This prepared manuscript sermon does not constitute scribal publication in Hall’s sense of the term, but it does indicate more casual, contingent forms of manuscript circulation. That is to say, Foster does not set about to “publish” the sermon with the intent to step in where the use of the press is impractical or otherwise undesirable. Rather, Foster’s main objectives seem to be the preservation of the text in a slightly more worked-up form than notes usually afford and the sharing of that text with another single individual. In offering the personal and spiritual gift of a hard-earned transcription, Foster advertises both the difficulty of the process and the irregularity of the product but offers no apology. These “Blunders” testify to the importance of the project and, in a sense, even add to the value of the gift. “Preservation circulation” and even “gift circulation” might more accurately express the intent of a manuscript creator like Foster.
The roots of a circulating economy of godly preaching did not originate in New England but can be seen in Elizabethan England, where the dearth of university-educated ministers made “godly preaching” a vital, pious commodity.44 In
1605, for example, Henry Borlas compiled notes on ten sermons he had heard while a student at Oxford. (See figure 5.)
