Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England. Meredith Marie Neuman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. vi+265.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewJeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England. Meredith Marie Neuman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. vi+265.Matt CohenMatt CohenUniversity of Texas at Austin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis engagingly written book reintroduces its readers to the scene of seventeenth-century Congregationalist Puritan sermon making in New England. That scene has been central to American literary studies for generations, seeming to be the cradle of Weberian protestant ethics as they manifested in the United States or the instantiation of a theocratic public sphere whose ministerial acts of jeremiadic consent-generation would be the template for American politics to the present day. Successive waves of scholarship have complicated this picture, revealing the continuities between old and new world nonconformities; the persistence of magical thinking in everyday Puritanism; the dynamic relationship between indigenous cultures and settler English ones; and the interpenetration of oral, manuscript, and print modes of communicating at the heart of what has been imagined to be a bookish cosmic imaginary. Meredith Marie Neuman, extending this last line of inquiry, asks us to consider those who listened to and wrote down the sermons that have been the evidentiary soul of New England’s appeal to literary scholarship. Settler congregants obtained notebooks or cobbled together scrap paper, wrote in their pews or from memory, used symbols and sometimes shorthand, misheard, lost track, double-checked, became overwhelmed, gathered, and passed down through generations hundreds of pages of sermonic notes and outlines as both memory aids and reminders of past soul struggles. Pulling on what at first seems a slender thread—the fact that many published sermons were based on such auditors’ notes, not ministerial authorship—Neuman exposes an extraordinary range of material practices of sermon creation that linked lay listeners, religious leaders, and knotty rhetorical and theological contests in ways that shaped all genres of the literary word in colonial New England.Over five chapters, Jeremiah’s Scribes makes arguments to three main audiences: scholars of Puritanism, early Americanists, and American literary scholars in general. Those of the first description will perhaps not be surprised that, “authorized in part by the premise of depravity and impaired linguistic capacity, New England Puritans cultivated a degree of hermeneutic skepticism regarding the prospects of vernacular translation that, in turn, allowed for a surprising amount of expressive creativity in sermon composition” (152). Americanists teaching this literature, however, will find that point and its pursuit enabling, as it helps explain why the vagaries of aural translation and transcription—Puritans’ “confident indifference that contingent manifestations of the letter of the words will conform to the Logos of scripture” (148)—do not entail our dismissing sermon notes as shaky evidence, especially in light of the seeming paradox of Puritan literalism. In particular, the book’s definition of “sermon culture” is flexible, demanding, and productive: this culture consists of “not only the minister’s pulpit endeavors but the aural experience and its afterlife in speech, manuscript, and print, as well as its proliferation across genres” (172). What emerges across the chapters of Jeremiah’s Scribes is a picture of an apparatus—partly material (spoken, written, and printed), partly formal (generic, rhetorical, and theological)—that Congregationalists used to navigate sermon literature. Indeed, here American Puritan literature more broadly emerges as the set of texts and interpretive habits linked by that apparatus. “In all modes of sermon literature,” Neuman insists, “the centrifugal energy of plain-style explication is held in balance by the predictability of the structural formula, on the one hand, and by the improvisational, subjective experience of the reader, speaker, and auditor, on the other” (138).Neuman finds diverse characters among note takers. For her their habits fall roughly into the analytical categories of aural, content, and structural auditing, emphasizing respectively the rhetorical power, doctrinal essentials, or elaborate Ramist architecture offered by their preachers. Notes were circulated, read aloud, discussed, and sometimes published; these listening experiences then fed back into ministerial constructions of sermons, both with respect to argumentation and the introduction of “strategic imperfections in structure and style” that “conveyed oral spontaneity and aural subjectivity” (31). At the same time, these recording practices and the intellectual operations of the sermons they attempted to capture shaped and were shaped by other kinds of writing. Key concepts from the navigation of sermons—collation, application, opening, witness, means—become fundamental to how we must read Puritan confessions, histories, journals, autobiographies, and even poetry like Edward Taylor’s. These methods, devised for managing the irreducibly unstable relationship between words and things and their implications for the unknowability of God’s mind by man, helped configure the information worlds of pulpit, pew, and private chamber. They pervaded Congregationalist modes of utterance, proving capable (as Neuman shows in an elegant reading of Roger Clap’s autobiography, and as we know from Anne Hutchinson’s fate) of exceeding the bounds of ministerial approval or orthodoxy. Discursive regimes, too, are significant, but not determining, in Neuman’s model. In Clap’s case, for example, hearing a John Cotton sermon on John is only the first step in a process of remediation that yields Clap’s idiosyncratic theological conclusion about pursuing assurance of grace in the face of deceptive human confidence. “Neither the Revelation verse nor Cotton’s specific sermon answers the question,” Neuman observes, “but rather Clap’s recollection and reconstruction of that aural event” (201). The spirit unites not through the letter but through its interdependent multimedia manifestations, as each utterance must prove the others by mutual witness in different, never sufficient, representational modalities.This method gives meat to the Americanist hungry for ways to read and teach seventeenth-century texts in the light of new materialist approaches to the field, and it is one of the most important contributions of the book. At moments, though, glimpses of a world beyond the notebooks and meetinghouses of the American godly appear, suggesting influences from outside the Puritan linguistic corral. The note taker Henry Wolcott’s comments on a 1640 humiliation day sermon, presumably in the wake of home turmoil over Scotland (135), and his more general predilection for notes that distill ministerial stances and disagreements hint that political discourses may have factored in sermon auditing. One auditor’s striking mention that the “onely way to Kill Indians is at home” to “Kill Sin and yo[u] Kill ye. Enemy,” which appears in an otherwise hermetically theological stream of notes, reminds Neuman’s reader that all of this listening, preaching, and publishing took place in the immediate presence of a language world perceived as radically different and of inscriptive practices that English settlers found dangerous yet mesmerizing (96). Put otherwise, if “spiritual narrative offers back into the system of sermon culture its own text woven out of the intimate collations of biography and scripture” (182), what then were the boundaries of biography in a world of strangers, Native Americans, and competing European settlers? Finally, methodologically, what other daily or literary acts of inscription or sound recording—one thinks of Roger Williams’s Key into the Language of America (1643), or perhaps recipes, sewing, or metalwork—might factor in the interpretive dynamics and metaphorics of early American literature?Jeremiah’s Scribes will not only help others open those questions but will, with its sympathetic, patient description of Congregationalist doctrine and delightful moments of good humor, serve as an illuminating guide into the New England way. This book enlivens an archive too little studied, weaving it into a picture of the sermon’s quotidian gravitational power and a methodological framework with lasting force. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 1August 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/681153 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.