woman who has inculcated a sense of religion in her son but who presumably has no direct access to good university preaching herself. Although Borlas now has superior access to preaching and takes upon himself the authority to disseminate that pious message, his gift to his mother is one of pure reciprocity. The mother’s piety, the dedicatory epistle implies, has initiated the son’s spiritual journey. In turn, he contributes materially to her access to “godly preaching.” Like Foster, young Borlas reveals the affections that drive him forward through the tedium of manuscript creation. He apologizes in his dedication for any “unskillfulnes in handlinge” of the sermon notes, explaining that he had to find time for the project and also that he was simultaneously creating a separate copy for his grandmother.45 The need to disseminate godly preaching—a self-conscious preoccupation of laity and clergy alike in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—is manifest in the proliferation of sermon notes, circulating manuscript copies, and print sermons. The desires and rationales for each of these circulating genres implicate themselves into the production of the others. Whether providing direct source material for publication or not, notetaking practices cannot be extricated from the larger context of print sermons in this period.
Although manuscript sermons prepared for circulation and preservation sometimes circulated in a kind of pious gift economy, their interpersonal, spiritual value was tied directly to their practical functionality. The production and circulation of manuscript sermons in Elizabethan England were certainly related to the paucity of well-trained ministers who could produce new scriptural explication on a weekly basis. Though such “godly preaching” became more available in print form throughout the early Stuart period, there were still inconsistencies in access and quality. (Sermons preached at prominent locations, such as Parliament, court, or important London churches, dominate print titles in this early period.)46 The amount of print sermon literature could never approach the frequency of actual oral delivery. Furthermore, the incidence of occasional publication outpaced the printing of “ordinary” preaching, especially in the first part of the century.47 Manuscripts prepared for preservation (that is, those developed and written up from auditor notes) filled a significant gap for the serious connoisseur of sermon literature. The kinds of inscriptions and shelf markings that creators gave their own handmade volumes suggest that the manuscript texts could be interchangeable with print texts. The importance was the preaching that was represented rather than the contingent form through which that preaching was preserved.
Figure 5. Pages from a book of sermon notes on preaching at Oxford, created by Henry Borlas, ca. 1605. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The material appearance of manuscript sermons can give clues to the specific meanings for individual creators and readers. Foster’s single sermon, apparently reconstructed from auditing notes, presents a utilitarian aspect with its solid prose blocks and little marginal space of visual guides indicating sections or movement through the sermon. While acknowledging the imperfections of her transcription efforts, Foster nevertheless strives to (re-)create a text that reads like natural, delivered speech. Borlas, by contrast, offers his mother (and presumably, his grandmother, in some now-lost manuscript) “Certaine sermon notes breifely colleted out of diverse and sundry sermons.”48 Paring ten sermons down to their main component parts, Borlas preserves ample white space on each large (roughly folio proportion) page, indenting and formatting in a manner that engages the eye. Borlas could have used this same space to elaborate each point more fully, but his goal seems, in part, to be elegance of presentation. Both Foster and Borlas make “Blunders” here and there that necessitate cross-outs, but each adheres to a sense of how the finished product should appear—a utilitarian booklet wasting no space, on the one hand, or a carefully crafted presentation copy with white space to spare, on the other. Despite these differences in surface appearance, each manuscript has conveyed its “material” points fully. That is, each conveys the essential elements of the sermon as the transcriber conceives it—as a prose articulation, in the case of Foster, and as an epitome of argument, in the case of Borlas. Furthermore, each transcriber presumes that his or her version of the sermon will be intelligible to the recipient, whether written out more fully in an approximation of the delivery or streamlined into a basic outline of sermon “heads.” The former attempts to re-create the aural experience to some significant extent, while the latter provides ample space for the reader to contemplate the possibilities of the main points of the sermon. The physical gift, in either case, communicates the requisite material expression of the original preaching according to each transcriber.
Especially in New England, the difficulty of acquiring godly books sometimes made it necessary to create manuscript copies of print texts as well as oral texts, so the practice of manuscript circulation of books already published was also relatively common. Edward Taylor, for example, carried over the common practice of Harvard College students making complete copies of textbooks, amassing a significant library of manuscript book copies for his library in remote Westfield. Norman S. Grabo’s description of Taylor borrowing books and “making manuscript copies of them for his own library, stitching, gluing, and binding more than a hundred such volumes with his own hands” highlights the “intellectual isolation” felt by the frontier minister,49 but the leading ministers in Boston also acquired manuscript books and manuscript copies to round out their libraries. Indeed, clerical and even lay notebooks frequently include lists of books or authors that the individual wishes to acquire as well as memoranda of books lent and borrowed.
For modern archivists and scholars, manuscript copies create a bibliographical problem: How do we catalog and search for these volumes that, despite their unique character as artifacts, are created to give wider access to specific texts that, if in print form, might be identified in the English Short Title Catalogue or Evans’s American Bibliography? Whereas a seventeenth-century reader would probably have set a manuscript copy of a print book alongside actual print editions, current practice demands that manuscripts be cataloged and housed separately. Usually bound individually by the owner, imprint and manuscript copies could rest side by side with no particular difference in outward appearance on the shelf. The fact that archival libraries now primarily distinguish between imprint and manuscript volumes is perhaps a historical oddity. The curious bibliographical distinction leads to any number of challenges to modern-day rare-book catalogs as individual librarians balance the consistency of definitive imprint identification against the idiosyncrasies of artifactual description. Manuscript cataloging can be even more inconsistent, as each institution develops its own set of terms and practices that often change over time, according to the evolving principles of preservation and description.
A manuscript copy of a published work might amplify the role of the transcription and ownership in how we understand the meaning of print books. An item at the Folger Shakespeare Library, for example, is titled by its creator/owner, Joseph Hunton, “Certaine collections taken out of Dr. Sibbs his sermons preached by him att Grayes Inne in London and elsewhere,” a description consistent with auditor notes and other manuscript genres. The text of the manuscript, however, appears to be an attempted verbatim transcription of Richard Sibbes’s Divine Meditations and Holy Contemplations. What may have been simply a pragmatic solution to acquiring a desired published text to the original creator/owner has become, for the modern book historian, an intriguing conundrum. The owner and probable creator, Joseph Hunton, dates “his Booke” to 1634, predating Sibbes’s Divine Meditations (first known publication, 1638) by at least four years. A print engraving of Sibbes, probably taken from a copy of the collected Works, has been cut out and pasted in to create a frontispiece to the manuscript volume. In addition to altering the title and adding a frontispiece from another Sibbes collection, Hunton makes alterations to what is likely the print original, omitting the preface “To the Christian Reader” and the original numbering of each of Sibbes’s paragraph-long “contemplations.” Meticulous lettering and prominent initial capitals for each paragraph provide further idiosyncratic flourishes to Hunton’s manuscript volume. The creator of the artifact is not the author of the text. Rather, he authors the textual artifact through
