just one example) looks different, however, if we think of him as a single-minded cleric reconciling traumatic personal experience with pastoral duties or if we see him as an engaged cleric who fine-tunes his ongoing preaching and written work to respond to challenges and ideas from colleagues and laity alike. Shepard’s authorial presence in the lay narratives known as the “Cambridge confessions” is easy to identify even by first-time readers. He serves as the transcriber of the oral narratives, for which he has provided spiritual guidance; accordingly, his pastoral (and, arguably, his personal) influence is legible throughout. His role as transcriber, after all, is an extension of his role as spiritual guide.17 Indeed, the authority of his presence in these recorded oral narratives verges on authorship itself. But while scholars recognize this clerical intervention and shaping of lay texts, they do not recognize as easily the ways in which the laity, conversely, come to affect Shepard’s preaching, the emphases of his publication, and the shape of his authorial career overall.
All authors write in context, and Puritan ministers prove no exception. As a class of writers, they often hold a particular authoritative (sometimes authorial) sway over their immediate communities and an expanded, transatlantic readership. The notation “lately of New England” by a minister’s name on the title page of an English publication establishes an authority that is virtually indistinguishable from simple sales promotion. The reputation of a “godly” Puritan preacher in England only increased upon his migration to New England. The tag “lately of New England” might also indicate that the printing is likely unauthorized, based on auditor notes rather than the minister’s own manuscript draft. Indeed, much mid-century printing of the first generation of New England ministers seems simultaneously to take advantage of the celebrity associated with migration and the lack of control over printing that the transatlantic distance created. Yet ministers and their publishers likely overstated the frequency and egregiousness of unauthorized preaching. On the one hand, publishers had economic reasons to promote the difference of new, “authorized,” and “corrected” editions of works; on the other hand, “the myth of the pirated version is fairly common in seventeenth-century letters as a method for distancing the author from a work not quite as elegant or polished as the preacher thinks it should be.”18 It is also important to note the prevalence of claims to “popular demand” in prefatory material—the idea that a congregation responded so strongly to a delivered sermon that they either pressed for its publication or aided its publication by circulation of sermon notes. Akin to similar disclaimers found in other genres of writing (in poetry, for example), clerical demurrals were conventional expressions of the publishing minister’s humility in offering his preaching to a wider public. If publishing secular work is necessarily considered an act of hubris, how much more fraught might clerical publication be, since the minister’s work must compare not only to other productions of this world but to the divinity of Word itself, the pious intent of sermon publication notwithstanding. Unauthorized publication based on auditor notes was clearly a problem for many ministers, but the practice was also a tangible sign of the efficacy and popularity of an individual minister’s pulpit work.
These qualifications to conventions of clerical demurrals do not delegitimize some of the very real problems of unauthorized publication in the period. John Cotton provides a prime example of the precarious conflicts that sometimes existed between manuscript, oral, and print manifestations of a minister’s words. The distance between New England and the publishing hub of London meant that few ministers of the first generations ever published on their home turf. Accordingly, as Jonathan Beecher Field argues, a “lack of authorial control is the rule, rather than the exception” for most publishing ministers, particularly Cotton, a man who found himself buffeted by more than one controversial tempest. Factors such as “unreliable transcription, untimely publication, and unauthorized publication” stymie an accurate representation of Cotton’s thought in extant print sources, and his entry into the infamous pamphlet war with Roger Williams might ultimately be characterized as “involuntary authorship.”19
The friction between Williams and Cotton may represent one kind of worst-case scenario of a minister’s loss of authorial control, but even a well-intentioned auditor might offer just as strong (if more subtle) a challenge to the publishing minister’s authorial prerogative. In many ways, the proliferation of multiple print versions of Thomas Hooker’s preaching—taken almost exclusively from devoted notetakers and put into print by publishers with personal and theological sympathies—raises even more fundamental questions about the means of clerical authorship than do the cases of controversial writings by Cotton. Hooker, who had in print only two sermons (The Poor Doubting Christian and The Soules Preparation) when he emigrated to New England in 1633,20 may not have had any significant amount of his preaching published had it not been for the unauthorized publications of his English preaching based on auditor notes. The year 1637 saw the publication of thirteen sermons or sermon collections by Hooker, all likely unauthorized and based on auditor notes, and those thirteen titles provided the basis for a total of six subsequent editions under the same or similar titles over the next eight years.21 In 1656 (almost a decade after Hooker’s death), the printer Peter Cole published the first two volumes of The Application of Redemption in England, introduced by Hooker’s former colleagues and continued allies in England, Thomas Good-win and Philip Nye, apparently part of a planned three-volume sermon cycle.22 This is Hooker’s magnum opus, and tradition holds that he had preached his way through the entire sequence of the stages of redemption (particularly the preparatory stages) at least three times—once in England and twice in New England, presumably refining and expanding the years-long sequence each time.23 Goodwin and Nye affirm that this posthumous publication is based on Hooker’s own prepared draft, an assertion that has been corroborated by the painstaking stylistic and content analysis of modern scholarship.24 Nevertheless, basic similarities of doctrine, scriptural explication, and even wording suggest that the English preaching—as preserved by the unauthorized early publications—provided the foundation upon which subsequent articulations were based. Hooker’s publication history is extraordinarily complicated. The combined bibliographic efforts of George Huntston Williams, Norman Pettit, Winfried Herget, and Sargent Bush Jr. in their edition of Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633 is no doubt the most comprehensive, conclusive treatment possible for such a tricky authorial career. Thanks to Bush’s painstaking bibliographic endeavors, for example, we can see the complex genealogy of Hooker’s lifelong preoccupation with the stages of redemption.25 (See figure 4.)
In one way, the complicated Hooker canon is a simple bibliographic conundrum—either intriguing or tedious, depending on one’s patience and point of view. But the vagaries of “establishing the Hooker canon”26 do as much to reveal the minister as self-conscious author as they do to unauthorize that authorial coherence. Clearly legible in Hooker’s nearly obsessive preaching and publication patterns is his “activist aesthetic” and what others (from Anne Hutchinson to current-day scholars) have characterized as disproportionate “preparationism” (emphasis on what one might do while awaiting justification through free grace or, arguably, what one might do to seek justification).27 Tellingly, The Application of Redemption is a two-volume, posthumous tome that, at more than a thousand total pages, is yet incomplete. The first eight books of The Application of Redemption were published in one volume in 1656, and the ninth and tenth books in a subsequent volume that same year. Hooker organizes the redemption process via Ramist branching, with each extant book addressing one specific aspect of the whole system: Redemption implies both the Purchase (Book I) and its Application; Application in general (Book II) and in its parts, Preparation and Implantation; Preparation may be considered in general (Book III) and in its particulars; Preparation is both Free (Book IV) and Fit (Book V); Preparation is required because we are Asleep (Book VII) and Unwilling (Book VII) and accordingly require Holy Violence (Book VIII). The second volume of The Application of Redemption includes Book IX (a brief summary of the case for preparation so far) and the disproportionately lengthy Book X on “Contrition.” Although the concluding books of the sequence are advertised by the publishers, they never come out in print as such. Hooker’s Application is final, we suspect,
