David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New EnglandWays of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. David D. Hall. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 248.

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Previous articleNext article FreeDavid D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. David D. Hall. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 248.Phillip H. RoundPhillip H. RoundUniversity of Iowa Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBecause seventeenth-century New England was the epicenter of book production in British America (the first colonial English printing press began operation there in 1639), it is fitting that David D. Hall’s Ways of Writing should turn to book studies to offer a fresh understanding of the importance of scribal publication and printed books to the establishment of a political culture that provisionally “encompassed a space for debate” within the broader British Atlantic world (151). Hall has always practiced a form of historiography that precisely balances intellectual and social history, grounding his appreciation of both in a deep bibliographical understanding of the print and manuscript texts that undergirded New England’s cultural development. His career-long analysis of the New England Way, the name given to the peculiar forms of both church and civil government that dominated seventeenth-century New England, has its roots in bibliography and book studies. From The Antinomian Controversy (1968) forward, Hall has led scholars of early America into ever-deeper considerations of book history’s possibilities as an explanatory model for understanding New England. The title of his most recent work is thus significantly allusive. The “way” of New England writing refers both to the colony’s ideological orientation toward church and civil government and to the material practices that embodied it. Ways of Writing began as the Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 2007, and thus the book has the looser feel of an essay collection while still plotting a clear trajectory from general propositions about writing practices to detailed case studies. Its five chapters move from an informative discussion of the nuts and bolts of scribal and print publication (how fair copies were produced and validated, how manuscript books circulated in familial and political coteries) to fine-grained analyses of individual New England writers and pivotal historical events.The book’s first three chapters seek to “restore to visibility the intermediaries without whom no manuscript would have circulated or book been printed” (2). To that end, Hall develops the category of “social authorship,” a “field of collaborative practices” that included strategic uses of secrecy and anonymity, self-censorship, patronage, and manuscript coteries. Hall conceptualizes New England’s social authorship within the context of recent early modern English book studies criticism, which has (to Hall’s mind) perhaps gone too far in its blanket assertion that texts “remain unfixed and always open to revision” (x). While Hall shares the skepticism of his early modern English colleagues about older bibliographic approaches that sought to produce editions exactly reflecting authorial intention, he cautions that New England was a different textual place from the metropolis. Social authorship in New England was driven much more by the politics of consensus. This consensus was underwritten by a set of material practices Hall has famously termed the “Protestant vernacular.” New Englanders wrote in a distinctive style that emphasized simplicity and published in a manner that insured a text’s accessibility for idealized “Christian readers.” In Ways of Writing, Hall shows that the Protestant vernacular was surprisingly compatible with the emerging print marketplace. Religious tracts, while eschewing the “‘gowty Rhetorick of men,’” were nonetheless “highly vendible,” and the New England magistracy saw no contradiction in plying the book trades to put more godly prose and poetry into the hands of devout readers (11). Yet, in a transatlantic book market dominated by the London trade, New Englanders did not print such texts of their own very often. In fact, printed matter often took a backseat to handwritten texts in the colonies.The book’s opening chapters are thus especially valuable for the way they refresh our view of “canonical” New England writers like John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, and William Bradford as practitioners of manuscript bookmaking. Hall continually reminds us that for these and other authors of the New England Way, writing was first and foremost “practical” and therefore often took the form of handwriting, not print. Arguing that handwritten texts better served a colonial culture that associated writing more closely with the practice of speaking than the printed page, Hall explores their role in producing “scribal communities,” the social groupings that emerged around handwritten manuscripts shared with a select group of readers. Although scribal communities were common across the British Atlantic world, Hall identifies an important New England difference. New England contained no significant “religious or political underground.” Nor did manuscript coteries substantially support “the writing of poetry or other literary genres” (35). Yet, New Englanders nonetheless produced a potent body of texts in a variety of genres—auditor’s handwritten sermon notes, libels, poems, and hand-copied textbooks. This state of affairs reigned until the Restoration, when court patronage and royal oversight impacted the scribal practices of the New England Way.Recognizing these important disparities in scribal practices between the colonies and the mother country leads Hall into a consideration of the shifting meanings of public and private in writing across the Atlantic world. Public and private were not so much separate “spheres” in early modern England (though they were definitely gendered) but, rather, interpenetrating communicative spaces energized by different strategies of production, circulation, and consumption. In New England, Hall points out, “the boundary between private and public was constantly being violated,” as the colony’s civil magistrates “intervened again and again to intercept and publicize handwritten letters or other ‘writings’” (51). Hall’s main case in point is the Antinomian Controversy, a polemical battle over theology fought exclusively in handwritten texts. Not only were handwritten polemics utilitarian in a colony that had yet to establish a press, they were also symptomatic of a culture that prized consensus above all else.If manuscript treatises provided New Englanders with a form of publicity that still validated consensus, then print publication threatened to undermine that hard-won balance. Hall explores just how fragile, fallible, and uncertain print publication was for those who lived across the Atlantic from the publishing houses of the metropolis. The great physical distance between writers and printers meant that colonial authors had even less control than their metropolitan counterparts over the paratextual elements of their books. New England writers also struggled with the London trades’ “underlying culture of expediency” (111). Though fair copies of New England ministers’ sermons were often based on faulty manuscript notes taken by well-meaning but often inaccurate listeners in the congregation, London booksellers published them anyway, sometimes to fan the flames of sectarian controversy.The concluding two chapters ground these observations about the differences between Old and New England in careful case studies of famous New England poets Michael Wigglesworth and Anne Bradstreet and ministers John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Cotton Mather. Arguing that all five were “social authors,” but not “in simple and uniform ways” (116), Hall applies his earlier observations about the vagaries of expediency and strategy to each of these writers’ entry into print. Each engaged the strategic mobilization of handwritten texts or printed texts, the politics of anonymity, and the vagaries of fair copy texts in the London trades with varying degrees of success. For Hall, Cotton Mather is a transitional figure in these case studies because his career straddled the great divide between the dominance of local scribal communities and print practices and the post-Restoration rise of an imperially centralized print network and other colonial presses. Rather than focus on Mather’s innovations, however, Hall emphasizes “the continuities” that linked Mather’s bookmaking techniques with those of Thomas Hooker and John Cotton a generation before (146).This search for continuities in writing practices and consensus in political debate proves ultimately to encapsulate both the strengths and weaknesses of this book. Arguing that “the uncertainties of a text did not stand in the way of its doing the cultural or religious work the writer had intended” (148), Hall’s final chapters extend his own quiet controversy with the Foucauldian wing of English Renaissance literary theory and social history–based readings of early New England cultural formation. Hall especially focuses his critique on modern historians who have assumed “that all roads to dissent in Massachusetts had been closed off in favor of a newly consolidated ‘orthodoxy’” (150). Three crucial tests of colonial political leadership—the Antinomian Controversy (1638), the Half-Way Covenant debates (1662), and the Glorious Revolution (1688)—serve as pivotal events for validating the book’s underlying assertion that a consensus-based space of dissent emerged in New England to challenge the political extremes represented by authoritarianism and antinomianism across the Atlantic world. But because Ways of Writing never lets this tension spill over into either magisterial authoritarianism nor popular uprising, it offers a perhaps too-tidy picture of the “gritty” debates Hall has chosen as his examples. Even when describing the writing practices that were unleashed in 1689, when New Englanders forcibly removed Royal Governor William Andros, Hall insists that colonial writing texts never “legitimize[d] dissent” but only served to “reshape the middle ground on which dissent had persistently been voiced” (188). Perhaps because the book ends without a formal conclusion, it leaves the reader with the (no doubt unintended) impression that the “ways” of writing described in its earlier pages really boiled down to one “way”—a model of social order centralized in the hands of a worthy few. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 1August 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666601 Views: 194Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact j[email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.