are emphasized; content auditing, in which discrete units of meaning are of paramount importance; and aural auditing, in which the sound and fullness of the minister’s language are privileged. Lay sermon notebooks are material as well as textual, so I consider the ways in which the physical artifact affects the textual experience of writing and remembering. Although auditor recording styles varied greatly, each notetaker clearly envisioned the material notebook as a unique, personal creation. Each sermon notebook exists as an autonomous creation by an individual auditor with his or her own idiosyncratic aesthetic, organizational, and textual logic. Each notetaker, that is, clearly authors his or her own aural experience within the larger conventions of sermon culture.
With a perceived disparity between the spoken and the written word, on the one hand, and the evident idiosyncrasies of aural experience, on the other, the printed word required special accommodation if it was to retain the vital efficacy and multivalent registers of New England sermon culture. Chapter 3 outlines common strategies employed to bridge oral, aural, and written permutations of sermon culture. Set within the basic framework of formulaic plain-style sermon rhetoric, strategic imperfections in structure and style conveyed oral spontaneity and aural subjectivity. Accordingly, the reading experience of the print sermon could remain distinctly subjective despite the formulaic aspect of the genre. Moreover, a reconsideration of print sermons—especially unwieldy sermon cycles—in light of sermon aurality suggests ways in which the structural formulae of plain structure can be understood as an expressive form. Ramist branching structures constantly build outward, apparently disseminating the explication of individual verses. The technique of collation similarly allows exegetes (the minister, the auditor, the reader) to open the Word associatively. Although the theological and rhetorical premises of plain-style explication of the literal sense suggest a closed system of meaning held in place by the structural technology of the sermon, the experience of the sermon is largely centrifugal, as interpretation and application move out from central text and doctrine. Especially visible in structural auditors, the capacity of form to regulate and shape centrifugal textual exploration marks the aural and written sermon experience.
In manuscript and in print, New England Puritans sometimes seemed to amplify rather than resolve the problematic relationship between the perfection of the divine Word and the contingent fallibility of human words. In Chapter 4, I suggest ways in which the self-conscious treatment of theological-linguistic conundrums allowed human literary endeavor to transcend its own impairment. The premises of postlapsarian intellect mirror the debility of the postlapsarian soul, so Puritan readers and writers turn to the very limitations of their linguistic endeavors to achieve a kind of enabled debility, finding in the gap between divine and human language accommodation for gracious textual engagement. I begin by tracing out the Reformation tradition of vernacular translation and the dictates of sola scriptura that dovetail with Calvinist notions of intellectual depravity. Characteristic features of Puritan preaching—such as an insistence on literal meanings, excessive explication of minute units of scripture texts, structural disproportion—are simultaneously an admission of human limitation and evidence of enabled capacity.71 As the individual experienced a sermon (whether by speaking, hearing, writing, or reading), he or she could participate in a range of practices such as scriptural collation, figurative reasoning, and even the excessive verbal analysis pejoratively termed “text crumbling” in order to bring contingent, lived meaning in line with unified, doctrinal revelation. This deep intertextual habit of expression and interpretation constitutes perhaps the most distinctive marker of sermon literature.
Conversion narratives forge a discursive relationship between individual lived experience and the doctrinal teachings of the sermon. An examination of conversion accounts in direct relation to preaching suggests that this peculiar style of Puritan life writing might more usefully be considered as a subgenre of sermon literature rather than an anticipation of latter-day autobiography. Chapter 5 shows that the Puritan laity not only used scripture in the narration of spiritual experience as “prooftext” but also adapted the methods of sermon composition. Through innovative narrative strategies, the laity sought to create persuasive conversion narratives that would not sacrifice the story of the soul to the story of the self. At a basic level, conversion narrative reveals another angle on the lived experience of sermon culture, as individuals narrate the story of their spiritual progress alongside a trajectory of recalled sermon aurality. At a deeper level, conversion narrative suggests ways in which the habits of exegetical thought developed through attendance upon the ordinary means of sermons across media and across genre. More than reflecting the efficacy of the pulpit, Puritan conversion narrative adapts the methodology of the sermon in order to narrate the unnarratable.
The example of conversion narrative invites us to return once more to the notion of a “sermon-ridden” literature. The universe of sermon literature necessarily expands greatly when we consider the proliferation of preaching via print, orality, and manuscript, while the notion of stable authorship declines in inverse proportion to the widened field of dissemination, especially through lay notetaking. The logic of literal sense and the methodology of plain-style explication are visible throughout Puritan writing. Literary endeavors are continually informed by the contradictory premise (or is it promise?) of enabled debility, and compositional techniques from collation to disproportion to self-conscious rhetorical artifice appear in every genre produced in seventeenth-century New England. The Puritan commitment to the plain-style explication of the literal sense of scripture transcends the generic boundaries of the sermon, and a certain malleable notion of genre dovetails provocatively with overlapping categories of material-textual creation. The symbiotic relationship between a commitment to the presumed legibility of scripture and the recurrence of interpretive doubt therefore reveals itself in a full range of sermon literatures. Evidence of this phenomenon can be found throughout the accepted canon of seventeenth-century New England writing as well as in the material archive of noncanonical and anonymous texts. Everywhere influenced by the logic of the sermon, Puritan literature seeks to achieve a balance between confidence in the legible truth of Logos and the proper degree of uncertainty of that final truth. Broadly considered, the Puritan sermon is not simply the dominant genre of this time and place but provides the controlling logic of all Puritan literature. The theory, form, practice, and application of the sermon is not restricted to the meetinghouse but rather permeates all forms and material genres of writing, making every member of the gathered community a participant in a shared literary endeavor.
Chapter 1
Unauthorizing the Sermon
In a letter written to his old friend and colleague John Cotton in 1650, John Davenport requests advice regarding a sermon he is preparing for the press. Some time ago, Davenport had lent his own copy of notes on a sermon on “the knowledge of Christ” to “Brother Pierce,” a lay auditor who took notes at the delivery of the sermon.1 Davenport comments: “The Forenamed brother dilligently wrote, as his manner was, but finding that his head and pen could not carry away some materiall expressions, he earnestly desired me to lett him have my notes, to perfect his owne by them.”2 After some delays, Davenport sends the requested notes to Brother Pierce in New Haven, extracting two promises. Number one, that Pierce will return his copy when done via “a safe land=messenger” (four years earlier, Davenport had lost an entire manuscript sermon series on board a vessel known as the “phantom ship”).3 Number two, that when Brother Pierce “had transcribed them, he would shew them unto [Cotton], and make no other use of them then privatly for himselfe but by [Cotton’s] advise.” “This I added,” explains Davenport, “because I feared that he had a purpose for the presse, from some words that I observed now and then to fall from him.”4 Brother Pierce fears that he may have missed some fundamental points of Davenport’s argument—what he calls “materiall expressions.” In turn, however, the very
