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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 acts of copying, physical construction, and visual ornamentation 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 y^e 11volums of M.SS. of mr Parkhurst

      Bookseller in London: In y^e 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

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