LITMIR.BIZ

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      Even without a background in seventeenth-century prose preferences, a modern-day reader might concur with what difference Herget finds in these two sermonic explorations between “logic and exactness” and a style that is “more direct and livelier.” Whereas the earlier version based on auditor notes begins the passage literally giving voice to anxiety (“Men and Brethren, what shall we doe to be saved?”) and then elaborating in paraphrase (“wee have heard of the fearefull condition. … we confesse whatsoever you have said”), the latter version offers the precision of simple declarative statements (“Men and brethren you have discovered many sins and the dreadful condition of the sinners who are guilty thereof”), substituting the auditor’s imagined confession with “thus and thus we have done.” The repeated imperative of “Crucifie, Crucifie” is likewise converted into statements of narrative precision, that “we are they that have embrewed our hands in his most precious blood: we are they that cryed and desired it, Crucified him, away with him, not him, but Barabbas.” Most strikingly, though, Hooker’s latter version shows preference for a series of simple but powerful verbs (“opposed,” “persued,” “derided,” “rayled upon,” “blasphemed,” “murthered”) where the earlier (presumed) auditor version mentions only “persecuted” and “blasphemed,” apparently preferring the lurid imagery of Passion (“we would have eaten his flesh, and made dice of his bones; we plotted his death and glorified in it”). Where the latter version summarily refers to the fuller revelation of sins against Christ that the Passion implies (“Nay they roundly, readily told al”), the earlier version seems bursting to reveal the ever propagating list of offenses (“these are our sins, and haply a thousand more that they revealed”). Because the 1656 version is presumed to be the work of Hooker’s own pen, it is taken necessarily to be the more accurate, authentic text. Ironically, that authenticity comes at the cost of traces of the powerful orality for which Hooker (a preacher who, proverbially, could “put a king in his pocket”)³⁰ is best known.

      All the essays and scrupulously edited “Documents” in Writings in England and Holland exhibit a similar preoccupation with establishing the authoritative (and authorial) Hooker. Following earlier work on Hooker’s English sermon The Danger of Desertion, for example, George Williams creates a definitive, “composite” text based on two different print versions (one published under a different title) with the aid of a lengthy explanatory introduction, copious notes on variant readings and other textual matters, and parallel passages when the two sources are most divergent.³¹ Williams proves through topical references that the sermon must have been preached by Hooker in April 1631 and argues convincingly that two different sets of auditor notes, both taken at the same delivery, serve as the sources for the two competing print versions. Hooker’s sermon of April 1631, Williams elaborates, “was transcribed and printed twice, Version T and Version F. We shall refer to the imprint of 1641 as the Traditional version (T). There is some evidence that T, transcribed by a somewhat less attentive listener, was a woman. … At least references to wives, women, and children come out more amply in T than in F. The other version of the sermon is entitled ‘The Signes of God’s Forsaking a People.’ It was printed in London as nineteenth among twenty-nine sermons of William Fenner and expressly ascribed to him by the editor, London, 1657. We shall refer to this as version F.”³² For Williams, concerned primarily with establishing an authoritative text of Hooker’s sermon, neither the subjective conjecture regarding the gender of auditor T nor the blatant piracy associated with edition F seems to raise questions about the fundamental nature of the bibliographic endeavor. For our purposes, the “special circumstance” of this bibliographic problem provides a rare opportunity to consider not the competing accuracy of auditor versus minister but the competing experience of auditor versus auditor. Williams cites “lapses in the auditor’s original notation,” the “conscious decision of the auditor or transcriber or printer to let go or summarize,” “divergent deciphering by the printer of manuscript problems,” and “stylistic preferences of the original notator or transcribers” as possible reasons for discrepancies in the record of what two auditors heard at Hooker’s delivery of the sermon in April 1631.³³

      These explanations open up a series of provocative questions, the possible answers to which only seem to pose further occasion for contemplation. We may ask, for example, why one version tends toward summary while the other tends toward elaboration, but first we must consider whether the difference reflects the attention span of the two different auditors or simply the preference of the printer or transcriber. If we think that differences of detail and emphasis are attributable to the individual auditor, how far are we willing to conjecture as to the subject position of those auditors and the presumed inclination to amplify Hooker’s “references to wives, women, and children”? If one version uses the term “beloved” while the other prefers “brethren,”³⁴ should we assume that one or both auditors mishear? Might we instead read in the divergent transcriptions the likelihood that variant readings reflect the aural experience more accurately than they aid in the determination of definitive, authoritative texts? T says, “Though my meat seem sour, yet my mind is the will of God”; but F says, “Though my meat seem bitter, yet it is the mind of God it should be so.”³⁵ We must posit the competing subjectivities of any two auditors of any one speech. Yet we might also marvel that the vagaries of unauthorized publication in the seventeenth century can produce even this much consensus regarding what Thomas Hooker might have said.

      At some point, the knotty problem of establishing “authentic” texts of ministers such as Thomas Hooker becomes instructive. The ambiguities in establishing authenticity grow directly out of the ambiguities involved with producing these texts in the seventeenth century. If we think of authenticity as rooted in written, authorial originals, the task becomes impossible. Sermon literature in the seventeenth century was primarily oral. Written accounts of that orality, whether in print or in manuscript, serve only as approximations—useful because of their portability but inherently limited in their accuracy (our concern) and efficacy (the Puritan concern). The materiality of these records produces further ambiguities. On the one hand, the creation and transmission of these “materiall expressions” inevitably propagate any number of errant readings. Bibliography seeks to discipline these errancies by identifying (or compositing) authoritative texts. On the other hand, for all their limited literal accuracy, the material expressions of preaching (for example, auditor notes, variant print versions, and manuscript copies) might represent the real experience of hearing, recording, reporting, circulating, and reading rather well, producing an alternative form of accuracy with regard to sermon literature. The rest of this chapter explores this alternative accuracy glimpsed via the material expressions of the manuscript record, particularly in the form of manuscript sermons as written by lay auditors. The varied styles of these manuscript books reveal a mode of textual production and dissemination driven by entire communities of auditors and readers. In such a discursive community, idiosyncratic texts claim authoritative status, speaking simultaneously to the fact of delivery and the experience of hearing and reading. In this context, the print sermon—whether authorized or unauthorized—must be understood as just one iteration within the broader frame of creating and consuming sermon literature.

      While Perry Miller depicted New England ministers who “‘sacrificed their health to the production of massive tomes’ and ‘counted that day lost in which they did not spend ten or twelve hours in their studies,’”³⁶ subsequent scholarship has uncovered quite a different reality: “Far from sacrificing their health to write long and scholarly books, a full 66 percent of the practicing clergymen in New England never published anything, an additional 11 percent of them wrote only a single publication, and a mere 5 percent published ten or more tracts during their lives. … Actually, only a few prominent men in each of the five generations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ministers are responsible for the impression that New England pastors were publication-oriented, because an elite group of only twenty-seven pastors (out of a total of 531) wrote 70 percent of all ministerial treatises.”³⁷ With only five out of 122 first-generation ministers in this “elite group,” about three-quarters of first-generation publishing was non-sermonic.³⁸ And because early publication that was sermonic tended to be either sermon cycles (with individual sermons occasionally discernible within the larger structure) or occasional

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