Jeremiah's Scribes - Meredith Marie Neuman Material Texts

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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, Preparation from Hooker, and uncompromising Calvinism from Cotton.16 Shepard’s career as author (to take 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

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