readers and auditors—contemplated the particular dissemination of the divine Word through the material vagaries of human language, oral and written. A final return to the opening of John Davenport’s 1661 London printing of The Saints Anchor-Hold (discussed in the Preface to this volume) illuminates the complex, overlapping modes of sermon circulation in a transatlantic context. The sermon, originally preached for the gathered saints of New Haven, forges connections between the godly communities on two sides of the ocean. Davenport’s doctrine, based on Lam. 3:24—“The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in him”—offers assurance simultaneously to the local auditor and to the remote reader: God will support His true believers with faith and hope. The Lamentations verse in Davenport’s sermon becomes a mul-tivalent message of perseverance, equally applicable to the inhabitants of old or New England who find themselves anxious about the Restoration of Charles II or who simply seek personal spiritual assurance.
Citing Broughton’s suggestion that Lamentations is an “Abridgement” of Jeremiah’s sermons, Davenport continues to describe “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.”56 As
discussed previously, this passage asserts the continuance of Davenport’s own New England sermon within a tradition of prophecy that is variously spoken, written, and rewritten across time and space. Davenport’s opening of the verse promises that the verbal means of hope (scripture, preaching) will survive current historical uncertainty. The word of God in Davenport’s description is indestructible. The king wields his “penknife” at cross-purposes to the tool’s primary function, destroying the manuscript rather than enabling the pen by keeping it sharp. Ironically, then, the king’s act finally enables Baruch’s pen, even writing the unrepentant king into the prophecy that he has sought to silence.
The word of God in Davenport’s analysis always touches upon the contingent circumstances of history, and the transatlantic dissemination of the sermon via the technology of the printing press allows him to align Restoration politics with biblical precedence, blending the language of scripture, the scholarship of Broughton, and the explication in New Haven. The respective roles of prophet and scribe, scholar and minister, auditor and reader cannot be easily disimbricated. The words of Lamentations, repeated and amplified first by Baruch and then by Davenport, circulate in written form to be read according to the interpretive agency of Jehudi’s court and later by the transatlantic seventeenth-century community. Davenport’s framing of the perseverance of the prophecy seems to anticipate the circuitous nature of sermon creation in Puritan New England, in which manuscript, print, and oral versions of preaching circulate simultaneously.
At the heart of this material phenomenon lies a second, more theoretical, consideration: the relationship between divine and human language. The Puritan sermon cannot be understood solely via its occasional iterations in print or as a static manifesto of theological viewpoints by a few elite ministers. Rather, the sermon permeates across print, oral, and manuscript forms, everywhere demonstrating its creation within complex interpretive communities. There is no direct line from the orality of the delivered sermon to an authoritative print edition. The route is circuitous and apt to produce multiple versions of texts. For every sermon that circulates via authorized or unauthorized print publication, many more sermons circulate via manuscript both as notes and as prose worked up from notes. Texts sometimes continue to evolve in manuscript even after they appear in print (through competing printings, manuscript transcriptions, and even such mundane practices as binding and annotation by book owners). Sermon notes and manuscripts circulate not only as reproduced and reproducible texts but as unique material texts created by individuals. The larger pattern that reveals itself is not, however, the indeterminate agency of book production, whether print or manuscript. The strong presence of the maker in the idiosyncrasies of individual book artifacts (of often anonymous origins) considered in relation to mass-produced print books (where a primary author can be identified, along with printers, booksellers, and other agents of publication) shed light on a surprising textual flexibility in sermon practice. The de-centering of the clerical author does not indicate indeterminacy of book production so much as it reveals iterative textual production throughout a community, between regions, and across time.
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
