A Little About My Project

This week I began my long-term fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, and yesterday I gave the following short talk to the staff. I don't intend necessarily to post regularly on my sermon project (though I'm sure it will pop up), but this short description gives a good overview, especially of the manuscript aspects of my project. Friends and family still ask for an explanation of "that book you're writing." So here you are...

Dan Shea once referred to early American literature as “notoriously sermon ridden.” I think this characterization is absolutely true, especially in the seventeenth century. In fact, I’ve long taken this characterization as a kind of challenge. My initial question was what caused the incredible popular demand for sermons in seventeenth century New England. Famously, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had to restrict the number of sermons that could be preached on a weekly basis, and one historian of religion has estimated that the average person would have spend 15,000 hours in his or her lifetime listening to sermons.

And yet I also see the scholarship suffering from what I call the “pathologizing” instinct. The question “what drove popular demand for preaching?” quickly becomes “what was wrong with people that they wanted to hear so many sermons?” Or something to that effect.

The problem is that sermons are a literature of disproportion. These are people who distinguished themselves by saying that faith alone is enough for salvation. So why did they spend to much time in the pulpit and pew? Why did they spend months explicating a single verse of scripture? They also thought of the Bible as a perfect book – in a sense the only book that really counted. So why did they make so many more in their own imperfect human language? (I’ve long since relished a New England sermon, part of a larger “sermon cycle,” which fully explicates the word “thus.” Recently, at the Folger Library, I ws delighted to discover a sermon which begins with a close explication of the punctuation of the scripture verse.)

In my work I try to understand the relationship of the individual hearer, reader or writer to sermons through what we might call a grass roots approach. In other words, instead of simply picking apart the fine points of theology or analyzing the weird logical and rhetorical terms the ministers employed – what we might call the intellectual history of the sermon – I look into the prefaces of sermons, to strange metaphors that describe the act of hearing sermons, to letters and to autobiographical writings in which both the ministers and the lay people talk about their personal, idiosyncratic relationships with sermons. How did the hearing of sermons effect their daily lives, and how did their life experiences affect how they wrote and heard and represented sermons?

I begin the book with an discussion not of the print sermon but the notes taken by those listening to the spoken sermon. This is not to reconstruct an exact account of what content was being preached. To some extent I want to know what sermons sounded like, but even more I want to know what each individual heard. My work with sermon notebooks so far has shown that auditors heard in many different ways. One auditor might try to write down every single word the minister says, while the next records only date, place, scripture verse and doctrine. One auditor might carefully recorded every major point, recreating what might have been very close the minister’s own sermon notes, while another would record only the most beautiful and striking phrases, regardless of where they fit in the argument. Clearly the way the individual heard the sermon affected the way in which he or she recorded it, but conversely an individual’s recording style affected how he or she heard the sermon.

Part of my interest in sermon notes extends to the physical aspects of the book itself. Most books are small, leather bound volumes, but some are larger (such as one here at AAS a big vellum bound book more the size of a family Bible) or quite a bit smaller and handmade (such as one at the Houghton Library, just a handful of oblong sheets stitched together at the top with thick twine.) How notetakers organize the material in their books is also illuminating. Some might keep provide indexes for themselves. Or separate out sermons preached by their main minister from those preached by visiting clergy. Or include extraneous material, such as letter drafts and accounting records. The relationship of “part one” and “part two” of books is also illuminating. John Dane of Ipswich recorded sermons in one direction in his book and flipped it over, writing in the opposite direction to record his own spiritual narrative and original poetry, a provocative demonstration of how the studious transcription of seemingly formulaic sermons intertwines with original articulations of subjective, spiritual experience.

Ownership marks are important, too, not only for evidence of who took notes and when and where, but for evidence of what notetakers thought they were doing when they recorded what they heard the minister say. That small notebook of a handful of pages bound on one end by thick twine, for example, has pen testing throughout – “Michael Metcalfe his book,” “Michael Metcalfe, his book.” These kinds of ownership marks are typical, of course, but this notetaker also writes prominently “this is the second volume of this kind I have made.” Through investigation of notetaking practices and organizing principles, it becomes clear that the writers thought of themselves as creating books, and that these books were very material texts created both by the words received from the minister and by the efforts of the auditor who recorded them.

There are examples of sermon notes being recopied for preservation and circulation as well. One volume at the Massachusetts Historical Society is marked on the outside only by its makers name and the date of creation – “John Templestone, his book February 14, 1687.” In the center of this hand made booklet is a manuscript copy of a printed execution sermon by Joshua Moodey. On the pages folded around that center sermon are a copy of notes taken at a sermon by John Cotton, Jr. The Cotton notes literally envelope the Moodey sermon, and both texts are bound up by Templestone’s assertion of ownership and creation, confounding our sense of separable roles of author and book maker, owner, creator and reader.

My interest in the circulation of sermon notes and manuscript copies of sermons extends beyond my intuition that the production of texts in seventeenth-century New England is a distinctly communal effort. The emotional meaning of plain style preaching is also at stake in these handmade, idiosyncratic material texts. Today we look at the outline of a sermon – its bare statements of doctrine, numbered branching systems or reasons, questions, answers and applications – as intellectualized formulae. Like instructions on Puritan shampoo bottle for the soul: open scripture, explicate, apply, repeat. But the effort it took to keep notes, to recopy them, and to circulate them suggests that even the structure of a sermon itself held deep spiritual and personal meaning. We think that sermon notes were discussed within families. We know that memories of sermons long since preached play a pivotal role in conversion experience, affecting the listener or reader years after the original encounter. Auditor notes famously provide the raw material for formal sermon publication, both authorized and unauthorized printings, but handmade volumes also seem to be part of a gift economy. In 1605 in England, Henry Borlas apologizes to his mother for any imperfections his copy of notes he took while listening to ten sermons at Oxford, explaining that he was also producing a volume for his grandmother at the same time. In 1660 in New England, Nathaniel Foster similarly apologizes: “Dear Brother there may Be some Errors & Blunders in the Transcribing of this But I trust you will Be able to Correct’em & Excuse’em for it has been a tedious piece of work to me to pick it out.” Nor is the print sermon the end of the story. Readers continue to annotate their books, and authors continue to mark up print version with corrections and additions.

In “Letter and Spirit” I suggest that there is not a hierarchy of the sermon from the words of the minister to the ears and hearts of the laity. Not a straight line progression from oral performance to printed texts. Rather, the world of sermon literature that I am uncovering is more like an ecosystem in which oral, aural, manuscript and print texts each effect the production of the other. It is a world where clergy and laity alike continue to instruct and learn form each other in larger project of producing sermon literature. These practices of reading and writing sermons influence all genres of Puritan writing of the period, from sermons to autobiography to history to poetry. Ultimately, seventeenth-century New England may be even more “sermon ridden” than we once realized.