LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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 modes of material circulation reciprocally affected textuality. Puritan ministers—along with their readers and auditors—contemplated the particular dissemination of the divine Word through the material vagaries of human language, oral and written. A final return to the opening of John Davenport’s 1661 London printing of The Saints Anchor-Hold (discussed in the Preface to this volume) illuminates the complex, overlapping modes of sermon circulation in a transatlantic context. The sermon, originally preached for the gathered saints of New Haven, forges connections between the godly communities on two sides of the ocean. Davenport’s doctrine, based on Lam. 3:24—“The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in him”—offers assurance simultaneously to the local auditor and to the remote reader: God will support His true believers with faith and hope. The Lamentations verse in Davenport’s sermon becomes a mul-tivalent message of perseverance, equally applicable to the inhabitants of old or New England who find themselves anxious about the Restoration of Charles II or who simply seek personal spiritual assurance.

      Citing Broughton’s suggestion that Lamentations is an “Abridgement” of Jeremiah’s sermons, Davenport continues to describe “that Book which God commanded Ieremy to write, and to cause Baruch to read it publikley, upon the day of a Fast, kept in the ninth moneth of the fifth year of Iehoikim, which afterward Iehudi read unto the King, sitting by a fire, in his winter house, who was so far from repenting, that, when he had read three or four leaves of it, he cut it with a penknife, and cast it into the fire, till all was consumed, and rejected the intercession of some of his Princes, that he would not burn it, and he commanded to lay hold upon Ieremy and Baruch; But God hid them. Whereupon the Lord commanded Ieremy to write the Book again, with Additions.”⁵⁶ As

      discussed previously, this passage asserts the continuance of Davenport’s own New England sermon within a tradition of prophecy that is variously spoken, written, and rewritten across time and space. Davenport’s opening of the verse promises that the verbal means of hope (scripture, preaching) will survive current historical uncertainty. The word of God in Davenport’s description is indestructible. The king wields his “penknife” at cross-purposes to the tool’s primary function, destroying the manuscript rather than enabling the pen by keeping it sharp. Ironically, then, the king’s act finally enables Baruch’s pen, even writing the unrepentant king into the prophecy that he has sought to silence.

      The word of God in Davenport’s analysis always touches upon the contingent circumstances of history, and the transatlantic dissemination of the sermon via the technology of the printing press allows him to align Restoration politics with biblical precedence, blending the language of scripture, the scholarship of Broughton, and the explication in New Haven. The respective roles of prophet and scribe, scholar and minister, auditor and reader cannot be easily disimbricated. The words of Lamentations, repeated and amplified first by Baruch and then by Davenport, circulate in written form to be read according to the interpretive agency of Jehudi’s court and later by the transatlantic seventeenth-century community. Davenport’s framing of the perseverance of the prophecy seems to anticipate the circuitous nature of sermon creation in Puritan New England, in which manuscript, print, and oral versions of preaching circulate simultaneously.

      At the heart of this material phenomenon lies a second, more theoretical, consideration: the relationship between divine and human language. The Puritan sermon cannot be understood solely via its occasional iterations in print or as a static manifesto of theological viewpoints by a few elite ministers. Rather, the sermon permeates across print, oral, and manuscript forms, everywhere demonstrating its creation within complex interpretive communities. There is no direct line from the orality of the delivered sermon to an authoritative print edition. The route is circuitous and apt to produce multiple versions of texts. For every sermon that circulates via authorized or unauthorized print publication, many more sermons circulate via manuscript both as notes and as prose worked up from notes. Texts sometimes continue to evolve in manuscript even after they appear in print (through competing printings, manuscript transcriptions,

Скачать книгу