of expression—created by his own hand as well as by Brother Pierce’s—makes Davenport’s preaching portable, accessible, and also vulnerable.
At first glance, Davenport’s letter seems simply to confirm the conventional sense of anxiety over unauthorized publication associated with Puritan print sermons. Complaints about unauthorized publication are ubiquitous. Thomas Shepard, for example, complains in a letter about the unauthorized publication of The Sincere Convert (a series drawn from his English preaching) that “it was a Collection of such Notes in a dark Town in England, which one procuring of me, published them without my will or privity; I scarce know what it contains, nor do I like to see it, considering the many [typographical errors], most absurd, and the confession of him that published it, that [it] comes out gelded and altered from what was first written.”5 Such disavowals (found in private writing as well as in the prefaces to subsequent editions and responses to unauthorized publication) are common among seventeenth-century clergy, especially (but certainly not limited to) New England ministers who may have felt the distance from the London publishing world even more keenly than their transatlantic brethren.6 Laity of all denominations took notes, but the practice was particularly common among those auditors with Puritan leanings who sought to privilege the primacy of the Word in the work of redemption.7
Davenport’s letter to Cotton complicates our notion of the relationship between the publishing minister and the well-intentioned lay notetaker (and, perhaps, even the less well-intentioned notetaker). His letter suggests that manuscript notes, by ministers and laity alike, might be kept in circulation, be used to check and confirm each other, and ultimately provide a complex network of authorship that might enable clerical publication. In his letter, Davenport’s primary concern is neither the return of his notes nor the suppression of any publishing ambitions on the part of Brother Pierce. (If Brother Pierce had succeeded in getting Davenport’s preaching into print, however, Davenport’s name, not his own, would be on the title page. In terms of both the notetaker and the publisher, there would be some combination of economic and pious motive rather than what we now may think of as personal, authorial ambition.) Davenport desires foremost that Cotton will comment on his explication. Cotton apparently takes up this request immediately and begins to draft his response to Davenport’s scriptural interpretation directly in the white space on Davenport’s letter.8 The letter as artifact becomes a palimpsest of communal interpretive endeavors. This particular shared endeavor implicates Davenport, Cotton, and Pierce in various overlapping roles. Davenport, of course, serves as the primary author or instigator of the text, while Cotton serves as the collegial advisor on matters of scriptural interpretation. Pierce serves primarily as messenger, bearing his own and Davenport’s notes. But Pierce’s own notetaking, his perception, and his transmission of Davenport’s text are all part of the larger context of circulation, comment, and revision. Given an environment in which publishing ministers are so explicitly anxious about publication based solely on auditor notes—and given the fact that Davenport specifically suspects Pierce of having such designs—it is surprising that Davenport should send his notes abroad to Pierce in New Haven. The entire incident suggests the vital importance of manuscript networks in sermon publication, involving, in this case, the publishing minister, the clerical colleague, and the attentive, interested lay auditor. We can easily imagine this peculiar “communications circuit” also including lay readers of circulating manuscripts, printers, and the travelers who conveyed manuscripts to and from their various destinations.
This chapter in part addresses the processes through which the spoken words of sermons come to be printed texts. More significantly, this chapter demonstrates the many ways in which the processes of publication are not simply linear. In practice, there is not a single movement from oral to manuscript to print forms, even though we tend to see a hierarchical relationship between these media (supposing oral texts to be spontaneous, manuscripts to be “authentic” expressions of authorial intent, and printed texts to be fixed) or as inevitable progression (the displacement of “orality” by “literacy,” for example, or the presumed decline of manuscript culture upon the advent of print).9 Davenport’s letter illustrates similar lessons that can be found throughout the entire archival record: the vital interdependence of sermons in print, manuscript, and oral forms, as well as the manifold, often hybrid, ways by which sermons circulated. Not only do manuscript forms—including auditor sermon notes, drafts meant for publication, manuscripts prepared for circulation, and reader annotation—provide links between oral and print manifestations of preaching, but they constitute their own categories of publication.10 Because preached sermons in this period were often prepared for the press from auditor notes, this Puritan genre provides an ideal opportunity to challenge common assumptions about the authorship of texts and the authority of printed books. The complicated hybridity of sermon literature (auditor notes, printed books, circulating manuscript, handmade books of all sorts) reveals yet another aspect of Davenport’s passing phrase “material expressions.” With so many variant versions of the same sermon circulating simultaneously, the site of textual production—and the authority of expression itself—is disseminated throughout the entire community of readers, writers, auditors, and transcribers.11 Ultimately, this disseminated authority that is rendered so visible in the material record demands that we, as modern-day readers, fine-tune our sense of what sermons say, to whom they speak, and how they convey ideas.
The initial—and the most elusive—question may be: What does clerical authorship entail? Since Perry Miller notoriously took “the liberty of treating the whole literature as though it were the product of a single intelligence” and “appropriated illustrations from whichever authors happen to express a point most conveniently,”12 generations of scholars have rushed in to distinguish what makes Cotton “Cotton,” or Shepard “Shepard,” or Hooker “Hooker,” and so on.13
While these scholars have not always agreed with one another, they all have tended—implicitly or explicitly—to explicate the biographical, the theological, and the political to reveal the minister as author. Even so, the minister-author often resists attempts to characterize his pulpit style, since few publish with regularity and because so much publication is polemic rather than pastoral. In most cases, each publishing minister becomes defined by his circumstances and by his reaction to circumstances. (So, for example, the Antinomian Controversy looms large in the authorial production of the first generation of New England Puritan ministers, while subsequent generations seem defined in relation to the English Civil Wars, the Half-Way Covenant, King Philip’s War, and other assorted declension narratives.) In Orthodoxies in Massachusetts, for example, Janice Knight demonstrates how political circumstance, theological leanings, personal experience, and stylistic preferences correlate. In Knight’s application of the terms “Intellectual Fathers” and “Spiritual Bretheren,” English contexts continue to guide New England habits of thought and expression.14 Delineating something akin to a two party-system, this explanation of competing “orthodoxies” still provides convincing, coherent categories of clerical authority. While paying attention to such broad affiliations, Michael J. Colacurcio shifts focus in Godly Letters to the individual authorial profile, patiently working his way through what he deems to be the representative “big books” for each major figure of the first generation. Colacurcio presents us, for example, with two Thomas Shepards—one the autobiographical man disciplining his grief (for lost wives and for sin) and the other the pastor of a potentially unruly flock who, in the wake of the Antinomian Controversy, must have sanctification explained to them over and over again via a years-long explication of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in Matt. 25:1–13.15
Close treatments of clerical authorship, in other words, take for granted the singularity of authorship. Thomas Shepard’s writing is taken to be completely Thomas Shepard’s writing, for example. As themes and emphases reveal themselves over the course of a minister’s publishing career, those themes and emphases come to represent the minister as author. When the distinctive traits of the minister-author are sought solely on the basis of his print publication, the object quickly becomes to identify what is distinctive about him as minister-theologian or minister-polemicist. Accordingly, we expect to hear about Sanctification from Shepard,
