The distinguished scholar was absolutely correct when he quipped, “Indeed, ours has been a notably sermon-ridden literature from the beginning.”¹ The Puritan sermon has long been the elephant in the room for many teachers and scholars of early American literature. We know that we have to deal with it, but we are often not sure how to do so. Historical- and cultural-studies approaches often explicate—and accordingly reaffirm—the dominance of sermon culture as a manifestation of theological, intellectual, or sociological idiosyncrasies. Literary approaches, by contrast, have particular difficulty gaining traction on the slippery slopes of shifting aesthetic judgment (we...

In a letter written to his old friend and colleague John Cotton in 1650, John Davenport requests advice regarding a sermon he is preparing for the press. Some time ago, Davenport had lent his own copy of notes on a sermon on “the knowledge of Christ” to “Brother Pierce,” a lay auditor who took notes at the delivery of the sermon.¹ Davenport comments: “The Forenamed brother dilligently wrote, as his manner was, but finding that his head and pen could not carry away some materiall expressions, he earnestly desired me to lett him have my notes, to perfect his owne...

When Robert Keayne migrated to Boston in 1635 with his wife and son, he brought with him “two or 3000 lb in good estate of my owne.”¹ Among those belongings, apparently, were notebooks in which he had recorded sermons in London. One of these early notebooks survives in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, with the following inscription on the front paste down, made, at the very least, eight years after Keayne began taking his notes:

Robert Keayne of Boston New Engl:

his Booke Ann 1627. Price 4^s

There is many a pretious old Engl

Sermon in it²

The...

Sermon culture was predominantly oral. Notetaking offered one way for individuals to attempt to preserve that ephemeral experience, but print sermons provided a means for the dissemination of godly preaching beyond the meetinghouse and local community. How, then, could the orality of delivery be suggested in print form? How might the conventions of the printed page provoke the lived experience of aurality? The same branching structures that constitute both practical guide and expressive form for some listeners can become a technology enabling an unwieldy prose elaboration. The formula of sermon structure serves as a base from which the explication and...

While studying at Harvard College, Thomas Weld III kept a small commonplace book in which he recorded pious, secular, academic, and administrative miscellany. At the beginning of the volume, Weld transcribes multiple pages of jokes and humorous anecdotes. Much of the humor turns on verbal play and punning, as in one joke about a minister who “had a great mind to cite the originall” Greek text in his explication of an epistle wherein Paul “speakes perticularly to one man συ γαρ.” The Greek phrase might translate roughly as “indeed you” (with the coordinating particle γάρ intensifying the second-person pronoun συ)...

During one particularly tense moment in her trial, after repeated requests from her examiners that she offer a scriptural text to support her claims, Anne Hutchinson responds with the scornful retort “Must I shew my name written therein?”¹ Her ad absurdum rejoinder cuts through the obvious frustrations felt on all sides of the theological impasse—Hutchinson’s insistent critique of the emergent New England Way, John Cotton’s increasingly elaborate qualifications of his own position, and the broader Puritan commitment to visible sanctity. In a single moment, Hutchinson’s heated comment reveals the untenable premises of the entire system—from the “active passivity”...