Jeremiah's Scribes. Meredith Marie Neuman
according to the principles of “weaned affections”); between divine articulation and limping human language (as discovered in the rather wooden translations of the Bay Psalm Book); between the immediacy of grace and the decaying half-life of its recollection (as when Edward Taylor attempts through writing to recover past moments of spiritual certainty). Human poetic endeavor continually requires justification, especially in a Bible commonwealth. Accordingly, Taylor’s God’s Determinations Touching His Elect functions as casuistry (a work of practical divinity), and Michael Wigglesworth’s notorious Day of Doom and God’s Controversy with New-England both make the familiar arguments associated with the jeremiad. Poetic eulogies—typically offered by male elites for other male elites—fulfill a public, civic function, but the more personal, confessional poems of Bradstreet and Taylor demonstrate the contemplative mode and figurative sensibility that similarly inform clerical expression from Thomas Hooker’s vivid sermon imagery to Thomas Shepard’s agonized autobiographical scrutiny. The domestic poems that make up much of Bradstreet’s posthumously published works and Taylor’s miscellaneous verses—largely favored in undergraduate classrooms for their “relatability”—are not personal indulgences so much as they are consistent with the means of spiritual examination as modeled in sermons.15
Most explicitly, Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations deliberately blurs generic boundaries between poem and sermon. Each of these poems is an explication of a verse also used for a communion (Lord’s Supper) sermon. On the surface, Taylor’s Meditations appears to be anything but plain style; his extensive, decorum-breaching conceits have caused critics to worry the question whether he is simply a “burlap version of Herbert.” His openings of scripture verses, however, are examples of poetic explication that differ from some Puritan sermonic examples perhaps only by style and intended audience. Each poem proposes a doctrinal theory, which Taylor in turn attempts to answer with an intensely personal, figuratively extreme, and often deliberately absurd application. Furthermore, his continued reworking of single verses over the course of several poems recalls the common pulpit practice of sermon continua (the opening of a single verse or passage of scripture over the course of many weeks) and suggests similarities between the explication of scripture via shifting doctrinal and poetic vantage points. In many ways, Taylor’s poetry is somewhat sui generis, but the blurring of genres also reveals the overlap of pastoral and creative methodologies, illuminating not only this one minister’s poetic practices but a broader fluidity in Puritan genres.16
Sermonic habits of interpretation and expression lend coherence to both idiosyncratic and highly conventional Puritan literary production across genres. An understanding of the theory and practice of the sermon is necessary for a complete understanding of non-sermonic Puritan literature, and an understanding of the sermon requires an understanding not only of published works but also of such phenomena as the aural experience of the meetinghouse, the variegated modes of preservation and circulation of texts, and the lived application of doctrine over time. Sermon literature and the sermon culture where it originates should be distinguished. I construe the scope of sermon literature broadly, including not only the records of delivered sermons but closely related genres such as the conversion narrative. These ancillary genres provide insights into the experience of sermon culture, but, more important, they conform to the same ideas of language as do sermons. They are sermon-ridden not because theories for composing and receiving preaching intrude from the outside but because the logic and conventions that inform sermons also inform these other genres. Those genres we now consider to be more belletristic (for example, poetry and autobiography) often function, in the parlance of the seventeenth century, as “handmaidens” to the dominant genre of the sermon. Sermon culture, by contrast, is an entire set of practices that produce not only texts (sermons proper as well as non-sermonic writing, especially history, biography, and anecdote) but also material artifacts (printed sermons, notes, copies, and transcriptions). The production of sermon literature by both clergy and laity is material as much as it is textual.17
The aim of this book is to explore the experience of sermon culture in order to understand the phenomenon of sermon literature more clearly. By detecting traces of the aural experience of the meetinghouse, it is possible to delineate much of the phenomenal event of the sermon and its subsequent dissemination in the lives and texts of the community. The relationship between auditor and sermon was far from passive. The experiential premises of the New England Way required scrupulous, active engagement with the explication and application of scripture. The lived religion of Puritan New England was anchored in a deeply textual sense of spirituality that crossed many generic boundaries and that left many material traces in print and manuscript. The phenomenal event of the sermon had a long and discursive afterlife as the entire community of saints spoke, wrote, listened, and contemplated their way toward spiritual apprehension and (they hoped) faith itself.
The greatest obstacle in understanding seventeenth-century New England sermon literature and culture is simply that we do not have easy access to the oral tradition that was its heart. Stout has gone far in delineating the contours of an oral preaching culture with his study The New England Soul. He transcends the obvious limitations of working with clerical and lay notes with the sheer volume of extant manuscripts that he has analyzed. Stout’s disciplinary foci are history, religious history, and American studies, however, leaving ample room for much needed literary analysis. Recent work by Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing, has provided an indispensable background not only of the history of English Reformation preaching but also of its roots in theological and interpretive arguments.18 Still, our sense of oral sermon culture remains rooted in anecdote and clerical accounts and records of their work. Manuscript sermon notebooks kept by lay auditors, by contrast, invite a synthesis of literary and cultural analysis that coincides with the material culture implications of the physical texts. These manuscript notebooks open up ways of understanding the complex relationship between the oral performances (no longer available to us) and published works (bearing some residue of the oral text in its imperfect reworking of the original).19
In his introduction to The New England Soul, Stout lays out his preference for clerical notes: “Not everyone in New England read sermons, certainly not routinely, but nearly everyone heard them, week in, week out. The most accurate guide we therefore have to what people actually heard are the handwritten sermon notes that ministers carried with them into the pulpit.”20 Lay auditor notes—precisely because they are less consistent and less “accurate”—render a clearer sense of what is necessarily subjective in acts of hearing. This individualized hearing experience might best be called “aurality” rather than “orality.” Furthermore, the material record of notetaking, manuscript circulation, and publication suggests that sermon literature is created not only by individuals but, significantly, by entire communities. The application of sermon hermeneutic strategies and composition methods to lived experience (and vice versa) further illustrates Puritan New England as a site of shared interpretive endeavors and common practice.
While the material-textual record clearly demonstrates practice—how sermon literature is received, recorded, disseminated, and applied—the theoretical premises beneath these practices remain difficult to explain satisfactorily. Understanding how the sermon was received, disseminated, and applied may simply be easier to explain than why sermons were preached in the first place. If redemption comes only through faith (sola fide) and through scripture (sola scriptura), then lengthy, repetitive, human explication might be redundant at best. If human reason is—along with the soul itself—fallen, then human language might produce only impaired explications of the divine Word. And so the knotty questions that lurk uncomfortably beneath every revelation of practice remain: What essentially is a sermon, and what kind of efficacy can its necessarily impaired, contingent language have in contrast to the coherent perfection of scripture?
The material conditions for sermon literature—from frequency and duration of preaching, to delivery conventions, to auditor practices, to the many variations of textual production by laity and clergy alike—are inextricably linked to textual meaning. Thanks in part to the obsessive self-scrutiny characteristic of Puritan piety, sermon literature leaves varied and instructive material traces, especially in the form of auditor notes and other fugitive, idiosyncratic textual records. Ultimately, the curious materiality of sermon literature reveals