status of a text that has particularly touched at least one auditor: John Templestone. Accordingly, Cotton’s preaching is preserved by a series of private acts of recording, organizing, and duplication. By literally enveloping Moodey’s direct address to the murderer James Morgan within the universality of Cotton’s sermon, Templestone inscribes both texts with his own subjective experience. In doing so, he also brings fulfillment to Morgan’s original desire that the ordinary sinner should heed the “monuments of divine justice” as preached by Moodey. Templestone inscribes his personal response into the meaning of the two sermon texts by creating his own book and authoring the textual relationship between the preaching therein.
Templestone leaves further clues to his rationale for putting the two sermons together by his design of their respective title pages. Around Cotton Jr.’s and Moodey’s respective title pages, Templestone inks in a thick black border, similar to the border that frames his own name on the front cover. The border has been drawn so thickly that the chemical makeup of the ink together with the physical pressure of pen against paper has caused the line to eat away the paper. At the open edge of the page, the paper has all but disappeared under Templestone’s emphasis of the border. No mere ornamental effect, the thick black line appears to be a deliberate inscription of what would be known as a “mourning border,” a design element found almost exclusively on printed funeral sermons of the period. Although the published collection of sermons on Morgan’s execution deals with death, the more precise theme is the applicability of the condemned’s fatal sinfulness to any given sinner’s spiritual estate. Accordingly, no mourning border appears on the title page of the print version. Templestone attaches the significance of the funeral to the Moodey excerpt, just as he does to the Cotton Jr. sermon notes, and even to his own name on the front cover, as if inscribing textual experience with an echoing frame of memento mori.
As modern readers in the archive, we can only try to reconstruct conjecturally the implication of proliferating mourning borders in Templestone’s odd manuscript volume, but the simple design element is the most explicit key to the subjective textual connection between the two enclosed sermons. To the extent that the genre of the funeral sermon implicates the individual hearer or reader with its universal applicability, Templestone quite literally inscribes the disparate works of Cotton Jr. and of Moodey with the same reminder of the universality of death. Perhaps rooted in his own subjective reading of published and preached sermons, Templestone retools the textual meaning of Moodey’s execution sermon and Cotton’s ordinary Thursday lecture. This realignment of textual meaning occurs in the material act of creating a book artifact and accordingly adds to the cumulative material textuality of James Morgan’s crime and subsequent execution, of the popular sermon collection occasioned by the execution, and of the otherwise ephemeral preaching of John Cotton Jr. in November 1687. It is no wonder that John Templestone’s book has too many title pages; the proliferation of covers mirrors the centrifugal potential of communal exegesis in Puritan New England as individual hearers, readers, and writers craft textual meaning according to their lived experience. Templestone’s creation of this complicated little manuscript book is not merely an act of compilation but an authorial act of creation and genre manipulation. In considering Templestone’s curious artifact, we are reminded that all books are physical acts of creating meaning, whether in print or manuscript or hybrid form. These physical acts of creating meaning leave traces that are simultaneously stable (in their materiality) and unstable (in their portability, their openness to readerly interpretation and reinscription, their vulnerability to further acts of dissemination). Templestone compiles texts written by others, and in doing so he collates his own lived exegetical perspective with those texts and with the various phenomenal events that occasion them, whether that be the execution of James Morgan or the general need of Cotton’s congregation for spiritual instruction on any given Thursday.
The seeming exegetical excess of sermon literature leaves material traces in notes on sermons and in the incredible complexity of print sermon bibliography because of the vagaries of early modern publication generally and because of the local practices of notetaking and manuscript circulation specifically. The material means of disseminating sermon literature were available throughout the gathered communities of New England as the laity heard, recorded, read, and shared the explication of their ministers. Acts of hearing, notetaking, and applying the sermon implicate the auditor in the work of the pulpit. Conversely, ministers responded to the responsive dissemination of their texts, creating not simply a circular loop from minister through laity and back again, but a discursive interpretive community. The laity’s central role in the material preservation of sermon literature made them agents in the formation of texts and textual meaning.
The first part of this book offers a challenge to conventional notions of clerical authorship and the traditional bibliographical faith in a singular authenticity of stable printed texts, suggesting the ways in which sermons circulate in print, manuscript, and hybrid forms. In this respect, my work dovetails with wider trends in book history, especially with regard to the overlap of print, manuscript, and oral culture in early modern England.67 Close analysis of manuscript sermon notebooks demonstrates the range of techniques by which acts of listening were recorded, preserved, and disseminated by lay auditors, illuminating the way New England Puritan laity shaped the meaning of sermon experience through hearing and recording the pulpit endeavors of the ministers.68 Later chapters turn to core questions of what, precisely, Puritans thought human language could accomplish in the work of redemption. The materiality and contingencies of vernacular translation, proliferating explications of scripture, and the practices of early modern sermon culture provide a background for the theoretical exploration of the relationship between divine and human language. Throughout, the alternately competing and complementary authority of print, manuscript, and oral expression continues to be in conversation, showing ultimately the coherence within textual variation in Puritan literature. The sermon-ridden literature of Puritan New England develops out of these uniquely discursive material practices in response to linguistic implications of theological belief and lived experience.
I begin in Chapter 1 by raising fundamental challenges to the notion of single authorship and sermon literature. Anxiety over unauthorized publication (on the part of the ministers) and textual authenticity (primarily on the part of modern scholars) has largely dominated modern approaches to the print sermon. By first tracing out the erratic peregrinations of sermons into print in light of notetaking, manuscript circulation, and the hybrid materiality of books in the early modern period, I show how determination of textual authenticity is perhaps futile and, ultimately, diversionary. In part, this reconceptualizing of the production of sermon literature as a discursive process confirms existing book history scholarship.69 My ultimate concern, however, is to reorient the questions we ask of sermons away from content (what was said and written by individual ministers) and toward the experience of sermon as it circulated through New England communities and beyond. The sermon did not end in the ephemeral speech act of delivery any more than it became fixed via the printing press. The permeable modes of material transmission (oral, print, manuscript) give us concrete methods for understanding the sermon as a text of discursive composition and eclectic circulation.
Chapter 2 demonstrates approaches to reading and analyzing sermon notes, a genre of writing largely inaccessible both for practical reasons (they exist in a handful of archives, cataloged with unpredictable descriptors) and through a lack of familiarity (even once handwriting is deciphered, the often skeletal records of preaching seem perhaps even less compelling than the more fully fleshed-out print sermons). My aim, therefore, is not only to make available some illuminating examples of notetaking but to provide a means of comprehending this idiosyncratic genre. The concrete evidence of typical notetaking practices and the more ambiguous traces of subjective responses in the notes both illuminate the aural experience of preaching. Discrete acts of listening recorded in notebooks are more suggestive than definitive, as auditors rarely commented on their immediate reactions to preaching in notes. Nevertheless, distinctive patterns of auditing notetaking styles emerge across a range of recorders.70 Accordingly, I suggest three basic tendencies found in notetaking: structural auditing,
