and ultimately expands the textual implication of Sibbes’s work.50
Those readers attempting to fill out their libraries on particular subjects did not limit acquisitions to print or manuscript copies of print books. Sometimes a book that existed only in manuscript might be the desired object. The creation and ownership of such volumes further complicate our notion of the early modern book. During his trip to London between 1688 and 1691 on colonial business, Increase Mather collected many titles to bring back with him, some of which seem to have been in manuscript form. One notable acquisition from his trip was an eleven-volume sermon series explicating Revelation, beginning with chapter 8. Increase Mather identifies the purchase in the flyleaf of the first volume:
Sermons preached by dr Wilkinson, taken
from him in shorthand by one mr Williams
from whose notes many of mr Burroughs s sermons
were published & printed.
I bought ye 11volums of M.SS. of mr Parkhurst
Bookseller in London: In ye year 1691.
I gave 10 £ for all those ^11 volums.51
Mather’s detailed notation explaining how he acquired the manuscript book suggests how significant the acquisition of this unpublished anti-Catholic work by the English Puritan Henry Wilkinson (1610–75) was to him. Not only was Wilkinson’s preaching of particular interest to Mather, but the fact that the preaching was preserved by the shorthand recording of “mr Williams” seems also important. A skilled recorder could make money with his skill and, apparently, something of a name for himself. (A search for “shorthand” in the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reveals that many educated young men skilled in shorthand offered their recording services, especially early in their careers. A “teenage” Roger Williams, for example, was employed by Sir Edward Coke to take shorthand notes “of sermons and also of speeches in Star Chamber.”)52 This was no anonymous auditor/transcriber but the known source for many printed works by the prominent minister Jeremiah Burroughs (ca. 1601–46), a good friend to first-generation New England migrant ministers. Mather bought this slightly incomplete set from a London bookseller, which further suggests that the volume (which had been preached and, judging from content, also transcribed much earlier in the century) had been owned and possibly circulated within the English market before being purchased and transported to New England in 1691. Mather’s simple note reveals much about the ways in which manuscript sermons might be produced and circulated both in England and New England in the seventeenth century. The practice was not merely a necessary accommodation for Harvard students and frontier ministers; rather, it seems to have been a regular means of publishing spiritual and polemical works outside of the press.
Like transcriptions of lecture notes, manuscript copies of textbooks, and other hand-copied genres, manuscript sermons were often created to resemble printed books. In the current-day archive, the records for manuscript sermons are usually indistinguishable from those of other artifacts (such as auditor or clerical notes). Upon examination, however, a manuscript sermon created for preservation (and possible circulation) reveals common features, such as some kind of title page for the whole volume (rather than headings for each entry), consistent pagination, relatively legible handwriting, and the word “finis” at the end of the transcription (usually with a flourish and often with the date of completion and the creator’s name, providing a kind of manuscript colophon). Additional features include more idiosyncratic markers, such as verse or other personal additions framing the main text. One anonymous recorder of thirteen sermons preached in England by Robert Bragg in 1652 includes pious poetry throughout the volume, including this didactic epilogue to the transcription:
Finis.
Who e’re Thou art, that this dost read;
Make hast to Christ with all good speed;
Least thy poor soul hee one day find
wandring [Among the goates] wandring behind
Let not the world now keep [page torn]
For what is all, if Christ [page torn]
If him thou hast, thou need’st [page torn]
Love him, serve him, & him [page torn]53
Examples of idiosyncratic practices of bookmaking multiply, the longer one looks in the archive. Taken together, these curiosities reveal a range of practices, preferences, and assumptions on the part of early modern owners, readers, and creators regarding the nature of books.
One of the most instructive of these “bookish” features found in sermon manuscripts for preservation is the catchword: a single word appearing at the bottom right-hand corner of a page that corresponds to the first word of the following page. Explanations for catchwords proliferate, but it is generally thought that they are used in early print books to aid in the folding and assembly of sheets into a bound volume (although there is some disagreement over whether this is actually necessary to the bookmaking process). Whatever the origins of the practice, the presence of catchwords on the printed page in early modern England seems to have led to other conventions in reading and writing. Some conjecture, for example, that the catchword became an aid to the reader, especially to the reader who might be reading aloud to a small group. Letter writers sometimes used catchwords to help keep the ordering of pages clear. The use of catchwords in manuscript sermons (and other kinds of bound manuscript volumes) may or may not be necessary for assembling (indeed, some volumes appear to be bound before writing), but the very appearance of the catchword makes the created artifact more book-like. Moreover, whether the individual creator is aware of the fact or not, the use of catchwords in printing was actually adopted from the medieval practice of using catchwords in the creation of manuscript books before the advent of print. Even the features that make the manuscript appear more book-like have a deeper significance for the long-standing permeability between categories of print and manuscript.
Another volume apparently owned by Increase Mather, consisting of four works by Hugh Broughton brought together in one binding, demonstrates almost every possible way that print and manuscript works could overlap. The composite volume—quite likely assembled in England and purchased later by Mather—contains four titles by Broughton: a manuscript copy of Observations Upon the First Ten Fathers; a print copy of A Concent of Scripture, with tinted title page, several missing pages, heavy annotations throughout, multiple pages of manuscript notes interleaved in two locations, and variant foldout inserts; an unmarked print copy of Textes of Scripture, Chayning the Holy Chronicle, missing only the address “To the Christian Reader”; and a manuscript copy of “A Sermon Preached at Otelande Before the Most Noble Henry Prince of Wales,” incomplete and, in several places, altered from the only print edition.54 If, as seems most likely, Increase Mather bought the volume already compiled, edited, and annotated, he bought a work of the (possibly anonymous) creator as much as the words of Hugh Broughton.55 The collection of works by Broughton makes a coherent unit exploring eschatological scholarship, but the arrangement and alterations by the compiler provide both commentary on that scholarship and a distinctive sense of the collator as creator. The compiler is not precisely an author but certainly is a material and textual creator of the idiosyncrasy of the hybrid volume.
The permeable, overlapping categories of print, manuscript, and oral publication are a relatively new realization in contemporary scholarship, providing important adjustments to older paradigms that distinguish strictly between orality and literacy, for example, and manuscript and print with the advent of the printing press. Early modern readers and writers, though they might find such fluidity natural, nevertheless recognized the implications as different
