The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England 9780812292053

Citation preview

The Pilgrim and the Bee

M AT E R I A L T E X T S Series Editors Roger Chartier Joan DeJean Joseph Farrell

Anthony Grafton Janice Radway Peter Stallybrass

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher

The Pilgrim and the Bee Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England M A T T H E W P. B R O W N

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

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Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Librar y of Congress ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4015-3 ISBN-10: 0-8122-4015-4

For Wilson M. Brown, Jr., Elisabeth Shanklin Brown, and Jesse Dana Hausknecht-Brown

Contents

Preface: A Phenomenology of the Book

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Introduction: Toward a Reader-Based Literary History 1. The Presence of the Text

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2. Devotional Steady Sellers and the Conduct of Reading 3. Ritual Fasting

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4. Ritual Mourning

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5. Race, Literacy, and the Eliot Mission Notes

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Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

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Preface

A Phenomenology of the Book

You have in your hand a book, which you are starting to read. Or had you already begun? Y ou most likely encountered the title, on the spine or jacket, wondering per haps about the inapposite figures and bearing patiently with the specialized, didactic, impacted—it’ s a monograph after all—subtitle. Y ou per haps met these words again, with less patience, on the title page. But wait, you first may have read more of the book’s exterior, discovering a publishing house, an author’ s name, a visual image per haps relevant to the book’ s themes, a summar y of the book, and, maybe, blurbs. Did the summar y say anything about bees? Good. You also felt—and feel—the book, its heft and creak, the stubble on a librar y binding, or the laminate sheen of a paperback. And then you opened it. Yet you were not here yet. You flipped through the blank endpapers, glanced at the copyright page and detected the work’ s date, its Librar y of Congress subject headings, its edition number , ran back across the title page and arrived . . . Well, no, not here yet, because it is possible you skipped to the bibliography and index, looked to see if books or persons of concern appear in the main text. In the index, you may have come across the word “phenomenology .” I’m sorr y. Still, no matter, you have found other books and ideas that were unexpected and which will, you hope, engage you. A turn to the table of contents: a chapter on fasting, you hate your diet, you don’t go there. Better to return to the back, reading the endnotes, scouring their tiny font for references to debates in literary history or for leads for your own, more interesting research. At some point you came to this paragraph. A writer should be so lucky as to have a reader as attentive as the one I have just imagined. Y our reading experience is per haps nothing like the preceding paragraph, which is partly my point. Acts of reading are unique, and the activity of reading changes from context to context, historical moment to historical moment. But that my opening scenario might describe a set of shared practices used on this or other books— practices amounting themselves to a kind of reading—is, I hope, a reasonable claim. Unlike the individual reading act, these shared practices, while here depicted as a set of academic customs, are part of a larger so-

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ciology of literacy generated by the handiness of the book format. And where does the social act of reading begin? Think of where you are and how you got this book. The shiny marketplace of a bookstore or exhibit, with its relative notion of choice? Or the shadowy space of the librar y stacks, where compulsion and leisure, labor and happenstance—the life of the mind—led you to it? Or was it passed on to you, in the odd psychodynamics of a gift economy, where obligation rather than choice informs the reading experience? And did references precede your encounter with the physical object: listings from a bookseller’ s website, subject headings from a library database, derisive comments in the hallway, or a recommendation from a gentle yet shrewd intellect, kind and discriminating, intent but not pushy, generous but without any of the casual lassitude that would mention a title offhandedly , a figure worthy of respect, indeed emulation, but never vain, a model of un-self-conscious integrity busy with the joys and sorrows of a life both examined and engaged? Or was the book a discard at the annual librar y sale? How do these environments shape your reception of the book? That these literacy procedures are both radically different from and strangely akin to the reading habits of devout Protestants in early New England is, for now, my chief point. We are surrounded by books that we read indexically and discontinuously—cookbooks, travel guides, phone directories, affirmation titles, sacred texts—dipping into them for discrete fragments of information. And whatever we construe as the “main text” of a work, this content’ s meaning is always constrained and enabled by the institutions of, say, classroom, reading club, or McBooks superstore, through which the “main text” is encountered. Furthermore, the book format—a vessel for art and information, a container for the content—is itself endowed with meaning. Defined simply as a sequence of leaves of roughly the same size bound on one side, the codex is a specific vehicle of communication, a medium with storage capacity , a presence on shelves, in totes, and by bedsides, and a format distinct from flyers and letters, billboards and homepages. These general premises about indexical reading, textual environments, and the book format are starting points for analysis of communication in the seventeenth-century colonies. Before a historicist commissar accuses me of presentism, I hurr y to note the radical differences of early New England: a world of book goods defined by scarcity , not plenty; a hierarchical mode of access to books, rather than the relative democracy of consumer choice; a trade dependent on the European metropole; a very modest apparatus—ministerial reference, title page, frontispiece—for the “packaging” of books, with a knowledge that covers were mostly mute, and, when books were bought in sheets, nonexistent. I will detail such differences in the follow-

Preface xi ing pages. But how might these general premises, operative in the present and the past, apply to a specific historical context? What do discontinuous reading, textual environments, and the book format mean in early New England? And how might these habits and meanings relate to literary experience, to the sensory, imaginative, and affective knowledge prompted by book art? This interaction of the reading subject with the book object is what I intend by the term “phenomenology ,” a soft use of a term borrowed from hard science and harder philosophy . Etymologically rooted in the Greek for “things that appear,” phenomenology grants autonomy to objects in the world—“things”—while acknowledging the act of perception that apprehends such autonomous facts, making them “apparent.” I hope to balance a study of reading’ s subjective life with an account of the book format’ s obser vable facts. Lending itself to such analysis, the core reading matter of early New England—scripture and almanacs— was complemented by a set of conduct books imported from England which were widely read, but which have been neglected by literary historians due to biases regarding authorship, genre, and countr y of origin. These steady-selling manuals of piety are the pivot for my inquir y. This book’s goals are threefold. First, I attempt to revise conceptions of early American literar y histor y, through an effort to reconstruct the devotional reading habits of colonial New Englanders, with attention to the ignored but vital canon of steady sellers. Second, I rethink modes of culturalist readership histor y, which—defining itself against both quantitative literacy research and essentialist treatments of textuality—often neglects the specific properties of a work’s physical format. While maintaining a critique of the quantitative and the essentialist, I also explain the written record’s qualitative differences—its spatial, visual, and tactile properties—and their impact, within the myriad forms of communication in the early modern period. Third, I use the insights of book history to do this revisionist work, and—while suggesting new directions for the field—I thus advocate for book studies scholarship as an especially valuable method for pursuing a social histor y of culture. As a result of this method, I also tell a stor y about how the early American archive has been constructed. This historiographic narrative about the shifting meanings of literar y culture in early New England accompanies a stor y that is, in the main, one of continuity rather than change. After an introduction detailing these goals, Chapter 1 presents a context for understanding the steady-selling devotional literature. The chapter frames the analysis by describing the market and gift economies in which books circulated, by explaining the role of the book in modes of ritual worship, and by advancing the notion of the book as a vehicle for both textual aesthetics and information storage. The chapter sub-

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stantiates these ideas by tracing an exemplary communications relay for the pious, organized by psalm texts, a staple of the steady-seller trade. With special attention to Psalm 119 and its mediation through scripture, psalters, psalmbooks, and conduct manuals, I argue that the transit of sacred text helps inculcate practices of sacred reading. In turn, these reading practices are documented through reference to the ordinar y devout’s private writings, where the literacy rituals of Psalm 119 find their analogue in the scripture “Evidences” of Elizabeth Moore, the almanac-diary of Thomas Paine, the commonplace book of Thomas Weld, and the spiritual account of Joseph T ompson. These pious readers see books both as storehouses of discrete items and as unfolding, linear narratives. Chapter 2 surveys the popular literature of the period, examining protocols for reading from scripture and from the steady sellers. Understanding literacy as a kind of per formance, I explain that the linear and nonlinear styles of reading at work in the personal miscellanies are part of a larger program of readership shaping conduct and nurturing piety. To comprehend the sensor y, per formance-based reading practices of early New England, I develop the concepts of “hand piety” and “eye piety” to complement the conventional focus on puritan “heart piety .” The reading program described in Chapters 1 and 2 is defined through two central tropes: on one hand, the pilgrimage, wherein readers treat texts as continuous narratives and follow a redemptive journey , a progressive telos or “growth in grace”; and, on the other , the alvearial, wherein readers, like bees, extract and deposit information discontinuously, treating texts as spatial objects, as flowers or hives which keep readers active but anchored. In this program, the visual, aural, and tactile qualities of texts prompt devotional motions that are alternately linear, cyclical, and static, deepening the spiritual plight of uncertain, worldly readers. If Chapters 1 and 2 reconstruct this literar y culture and its modes of practical piety , Chapters 3 and 4 turn to the genres and imprints of colonial-born writers that effaced the steady sellers to become key works of an “American Puritan” literar y tradition. Along with providential histories and captivity narratives, fast-day sermons and elegies became, for critics interested in a national literar y culture based on authorship, a central source: fast-day sermons for their jeremiad rhetoric and its putative Americanness, elegies for their status as the period’ s dominant lyrical mode, associated especially with Anne Bradstreet. By contextualizing the sermons and the elegies in light of how steady sellers guide the conduct of fasting and mourning, I root this literary experience in the lived customs of the devout, rather than in genre-based abstractions about the jeremiad’s transhistorical force or in author -based treatments that ne-

Preface xiii glect the many writers and readers of elegiac verse. For both fast-day sermons and elegies, these lived customs are organized around the look, sound, and feel of texts—in, say , the note-taking habits of sermon auditors and the broadside and manuscript versions of elegiac poetr y—and the look, sound, and feel of bodies—in, say , the behavior at public worship and the grieving for sin, mortality, and loved ones. How was a literar y history made up of colonial-born writers and local imprints constructed, other than by the rather obvious point that scholars from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made selections? From what did they choose? Chapter 5 addresses the role of John Eliot’ s mission to convert Native Americans in southern New England. Literacy was central to the conversion effort—Eliot famously translated a Massachusett oral language into a system of writing, and then produced a series of titles for “praying Indians” consistent with the steady-selling canon. Thus, conduct literature was essential to the mission, and the mission reports rely on a portrait of liminal piety among Amerindians, analogous to the spiritual plight of the devout English subject. A consequence of this drive to produce missionar y literature, however, is a printing press that secures the publishing of fast-day sermons and broadside elegies for second-generation white audiences—and for latter -day literar y historians. Attending to what colonial readers preferred enriches our sense of the period’s literary culture; and observing that a canon of sermons and elegies is itself dependent on indigenous peoples helps rethink the casting of American literar y histor y. For the bias toward colonial authors and colonial printing is per haps nowhere more pronounced in early American literary historiography than in treatments of the second-generation archive. In such historiography, the post-1660 elegies provide, for example, a background whereby the uniqueness of Bradstreet or Edward T aylor’s contributions can be appreciated. Or the lugubrious poems are the prehistory to Benjamin Franklin’s 1722 New England Courant satire “A Receipt to Make a New-England Funeral Elegy ,” which signals the exhaustion of the genre and thus the supposed shift to a secular literar y era. This from-to narrative of American literary history—ignoring the abiding role of religious literar y experience in the eighteenth centur y and beyond—is complemented by narratives of permanence, wherein jeremiad sermons about backsliding generations come to characterize American discourse as a whole. In our current moment—when we variously live under the media-driven shadow of the baby boom or the “Greatest Generation”—there is no doubt an attraction to such characterizations, and compelling scholarship has certainly been produced by this paradigm. But if we take seriously the steady sellers as the literar y culture of the period, then this paradigm is revealed as a product both of misconstrued

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source material and of scholarship beholden to the paradigm’ s most influential proponent, Perr y Miller, and the paradigm’ s most provocative commentator, Sacvan Bercovitch. And if we take seriously the mission’ s role in the production of texts upon which Miller draws, then we see that his archive and its formative role in American literary and intellectual history has as its pretext Native American bodies. Importantly, this is a point misrecognized as much by postcolonial critics antipathetic to Miller’ s scholarship as by followers of Miller and Bercovitch. My argument aims, then, for a practical fathoming of W alter Benjamin’s pointed, breathless hyperbole, “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. —Romans 12.2 Metamorphoses began to take hold all around me. I was breathing life into the book through my hand, and the book was breathing back out through me into the world. And what was a book but leather? And what was leather but animal skin? And what was paper but a tree, and vellum but lamb? And what was I but an idea? —Wesley Stace, Misfortune

Introduction

Toward a Reader-Based Literary History

In 1626, a fish is brought to market in Cambridge, England, and preserved in its belly are three Protestant treatises on daily Christian living; by “a special Providence”—so the story goes in a steady-selling “wonder” book—their survival allows them a “useful . . . reprint[ing].” One side of a divided community in what is now Dover, New Hampshire, contests differences over church membership by marching with a Bible strapped to a pole. A young man experiences a crisis of faith about emigration, which leads him—like Augustine practicing sortes with Romans 13—to open the Bible arbitrarily, having wherever his finger lay settle the question. Drawn from the lore and life of seventeenth-centur y settlers, these stories indicate the presence of the text in colonial puritanism. The book object socialized reading subjects in early New England. T ales of book-fish, book-banners, and bibliomancy speak furthermore to the specific properties of the codex, its spatial heft, relative durability , and leaf sequencing. Although the region’s settlers are understood to be one of the most highly literate populations among early modern societies, there is no shortage of stories from New England’ s devotional culture avowing the written record’ s material impact, independent of the messages its words conveyed. 1 But a more common way to measure the book object’ s influence on notions of selfhood in the early modern period has been through the literature of cross-cultural contact. The written record is perceived as a distinctive European technology and Native American personhood is comprehended by way of the Indian’ s response to a text’ s materiality.2 Thomas Harriot’ s manners-and-customs report about the Chesapeake describes Algonkian awe before a Bible, when natives were “glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kiss it, to hold it to their breasts and heads, and to stroke all over their body with it.” Closer to home, first-generation New England minister Thomas Shepard recounts a Ninnimissinuok’ s dream, when “a man all in black, with a thing in his hand” prophesied genocide, the thing being “an English mans book.” Such reports are suspect as ethnographic fact of course: they tell us more about the needs and desires of English colonists to see Native Americans as, respectively,

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Introduction

naïve and illiterate bodies or as superstitious and resigned subalterns. This ethnographic lore denigrates oral, gestural, and pictographic forms of American Indian communication, while implicitly commending the conventional literacy of Western Europeans. The reports are better understood as a form of projection, wherein English fascination with the book object is displaced onto indigenous peoples of the Americas. I will return to Shepard’s tale in the final chapter, but note that in Harriot, for example, there is the whiff of Anglican nostalgia, a desire for the traditional church’ s ceremony imaginatively imposed onto Indians at Roanoke. And as with the stories of serendipitous reading and standardbearing from the culture of piety, these tales from the contact zone likewise call on the tactile and theatrical qualities of the codex format. But in the name of a learnedness ser ving to cast Native Americans as preliterate, the contact tales mystify the communicative practices of the English no less than the Indians. 3

Figure 1. Discrete readings: the anecdote of the Spanish master and the Indian servant, as it appears in Thomas Fuller’ s Good Thoughts in Bad Times (London: Printed by W. B. for J. Williams, 1652).

Introduction 3 An anecdote from Thomas Fuller’ s Good Thoughts in Bad Times conjoins the disavowal typical of contact literature with a book phenomenology specific to early modern devotional cultures; it locates us materially in New England’s steady-selling literary world while symbolically registering the meanings of the codex within English Protestantism. Fuller’s text is an emblematic steady seller. It was a popular meditation and affirmation title of the seventeenth centur y, going through eleven editions by 1680 in the small twelvemo format; it collected discrete observations and contemplations for purposes of spiritual renewal, in a form comparable to a title such as Chicken Soup for the Soul; it thus promoted discontinuous, indexical reading, as readers would navigate its running heads (“Personal Meditations,” “Scripture Obser vations,” or “Historical Applications”) and generous section breaks to find discrete, page-length tales of solace and exhortation (Figure 1). Fuller’ s text appears in a reader’ s record from New England; Har vard divinity student Thomas Paine, whom we will meet in Chapter 1, transcribes the title page information of Good Thoughts in Bad Times’s 1649 edition in a 1717 almanac-diar y, which reminds us as well of the longdurée of devotional anthologies such as Fuller’s. More famous for nationalist endeavors of intellectual labor— he wrote a church histor y of England and an eleven-volume biographical dictionary of English divines—the moderate Fuller produced pious, affordable handbooks that were, in their circulation among ordinar y readers, arguably of greater influence. These materialist determinants of format, organization, and ideology—national pride animating a portable manual designed for random access—create a home for a revealing allegor y. Fuller tells the story of a Spanish master and an American Indian ser vant, the symbolism of which exposes an English book culture driven by magic and wonder . The Spanish master sends the Indian ser vant to a peer with a basket of figs and a letter reporting the gift. The messenger, however, eats the figs on the way; the letter reveals his misdeed and he is “soundly punished.” “Being sent a second time on the like Message,” writes Fuller , “he first took the Letter (which he conceived had Eyes as well as a T ongue) and hid it in the Ground, sitting himself on the place where he put it; and then securely fell to feed on his Figs, presuming that that Paper , which saw nothing, could tell nothing. Then taking it again out of the Ground, he delivered it to his Masters Friend, whereby his Fault was perceiv’d, and he worse beaten than before.” Fuller’ s tale conforms to the representational strategy of the contact literature: the illiterate Indian servant perceives the written record as animate, his naïveté and punishment to play as mild comedy . Implicitly introducing a third actor in the drama, Fuller invites the English reader to “smile at the simplicity of [the] Native American.” Furthermore, while the handwritten message seems to

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move us away from a focus on the book format, the stor y in fact calls on allied traits of the epistle and the codex. Rather than a facile contrast of manuscript and print—then, as now, books existed in both media—or a more interesting distinction between a single sheet and multiple, bound sheets, the stor y features written genres defined by the sheet fold, the format difference that also connotes secrecy. In converting the tale into a devotional lesson, Fuller makes the format difference and its thematic purchase explicit; his condescension towards the Native American becomes an occasion for English readers to meditate on human sin: “Men conceive they can manage their sins with secrecy; but they carr y about them a Letter , or Book rather , written by Gods Finger, their Conscience bearing witness to all their actions. But sinners being detected and accused, hereby grow war y at last, and to prevent this speaking-paper for telling any T ales, do Smother , Stifle, and Suppress it, when they go about the Committing of any Wickedness. Y et Conscience, (though buried for a time in Silence) hath afterwards a Resurrection, and discovers all to their greater Shame, and heavier Punishment.” In one of many key tropes for the written record obser ved by pious readers, the “book of conscience” transforms the tale of Amerindian “simplicity” into a reproach for sins managed in secret. T o be sure, this imaginary book has been internalized, yet its analogous status with providential book-fish and totemic book-banners, with Augustine’s magical reading and Fuller’ s mobile manual, illuminates the material and symbolic functions of the book prop. The “speakingpaper”—composed by “God’ s finger” and “carried about”—retains its sound, look, and heft, an objective form haunting the subjective life of the pious. Fuller’ s handling of the trope stresses the portable and the performative, and, in the tale’s devaluing of conventional literacy, it is as if we are obser ving Protestant book culture’ s unconscious. Fuller twice dramatizes the return of the repressed—the letter “hid . . . in the Ground,” the book “Smother[ed]” and “Stifle[d]”—thus resurrecting the book object for punitive effect. The zealous wing of the Reformed tradition feared the idolatr y of icons, books no less than other material goods. Within a long histor y of protestant iconophobia, the Fuller allegory betrays the Reformed tradition’ s passions. The tale is itself confessional: it bears witness to the animating force of the written record to structure the life of piety.4 The Fuller allegor y sounds three themes whereby we can sketch a reader-based literary history for early New England, themes I will pursue in the following paragraphs. First, the tale clarifies how we might narrate the histor y of verbal arts in the colonial period in terms of devotional readership. The allegor y questions a literar y history divorced from the multicultural setting of early America; but while it reminds us of the

Introduction 5 many nations determining the trajectories of American expression, it also specifies the English devout’ s self-perception in such contexts. In this tale, English readers are defined against the Amerindian’ s superstitious naïveté. They are also flattered by the portrait of Spanish master y, which emphasizes hierarchical domination and thus offers a muted version of the Black Legend, those stories of papist Spain’s New World cruelty, stories that buttressed English Protestantism’ s identity . While transnational in scope, the allegor y is thus framed by the reading practices of English piety. Second, the tale describes the multimedia interaction between reader subjects and book objects. It grants to the written record an independent existence, a power to speak and see that is mocked, only to be resurrected authentically as the book of conscience, witnessing to the individual’ s sin. The tale acknowledges that written records are platforms for word, image, and sound: books are vehicles for performance in a theater of literacy, belying the conventional portrait of reading as a silent, solitar y, and private act. Third, the allegor y’s home broaches a larger concern with the book format’ s cultural work in the devotional context, and thus alludes indirectly to the virtues of book studies as a method for comprehending the histor y of communication and for exploring the past and its impact on the present. As an exemplary steady seller, the title belongs to a genre of devotional work that, from a book trades perspective, defined the literar y culture of England and New England in the seventeenth centur y. As an anthology of discrete fragments bound and covered, this manual of piety exploits the codex’s potential for random access, while also conjuring the format’ s dimensional, inaccessible interiority . By announcing these concerns— all the while keeping in view the interaction of English colonists and indigenous Amerindians—the Fuller tale will help guide our inquir y into a phenomenology of the book in early New England. What is “American” literature in the postcontact, prenational period? Literary scholars traditionally answered this question by attending to territories that would only later become the United States; to authors born in or identified with such protonational territories; to narratives that sought continuity from colonial authors to later figures—from Taylor to Emerson, from Bradstreet to Dickinson; to imprints produced exclusively in such places or by such authors; or to some combined shuffle of these cards. Dealing them out revealed the winner to be—surprise— New England, in what has come to be known as the “exceptionalist” thesis of American culture: colonial literature anticipates or embodies a singularly national culture, originating in the puritan experience. While scholars such as Leo Lemay had warned us of this stacked deck—geographically, chronologically, quantitatively—it has been the stimulating

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Introduction

new historicist and postcolonial work of the last twenty years that has redefined the field. Inspired by multiculturalist critique, archival legwork, and the searching analysis of William Spengemann, early Americanists have focused on a hemispheric view of the Americas and a transatlantic relationship to Europe, neither bound to protonational narratives. Fuller’s tale, for instance, furthers this hemispheric and transatlantic contextualism. It exposes how the English devout linked literacy and conversion to define themselves against the Spanish; unlike New England’s missionaries, Spain’ s evangelical efforts did not prioritize reading and writing as a precondition for converting Amerindians such as the fig-eating ser vant. By situating colonial New Englanders within the devotional world of the early modern West and by delineating their missionary contact with Amerindians, my argument participates in this revised version of early American literar y studies. Yet recent historicist work is still troubled by questions of authorship and audience. Aphra Behn’ s Oroonoko (1688) reimagines the global economy of slavery and New World products, and William Byrd’ s secret diary reveals a rakish imperialism, its imaginar y structured by the traffic in women; but neither sustained a readership in the colonial or hemispheric Americas before 1800. The meager circulation of Anne Bradstreet and the almost nonexistent audience of Edward Taylor—discovered and published in 1937—signal more serious flaws. If a text is “about” the Americas, or if it is written by an author living in or making contact with colonies that would become the United States, or if it is construed to have a putative connection to, say, Hawthorne, is it then “American” literature? Spengemann rigorously questions these premises and proposes a research agenda organized around the following question: how did contact with the New W orld “Americanize” European languages, altering the form and content of each linguistic system and thus directing the evolution of its literature? In a critique parallel to Spengemann’ s, Hugh Amory questions the categories of geography, period, and authorship and instead favors a model of cultural histor y based in part on audience: “the ‘colonial book’ was what the colonists bought and read, as well as what they printed and reprinted, and no special importance was attached to its place of manufacture.” 5 The work of Amory and fellow book historians interested in consumption provides a path other than that of an errant American literar y history, even that of Spengemann’s canny linguistic emphasis. Book trades and probate research has recovered, along with catechisms, primers, and schoolbooks, a set of devotional works such as Fuller’s—manuals of piety, guides to conversion, psalmbooks, and sermons—that, with scripture and almanacs, were the popular literature of early New England. Indeed, these devotional works and their pedagogic kin reorient our sense

Introduction 7 of literary culture in the period away from colonial-born ministers, private diarists, or unpublished poets. 6 Inexpensively formatted, this prescriptive literature makes up the era’ s steady sellers, titles ordered and reordered from London by Boston booksellers and reprinted at the local presses, “steady” in the sense of regular , dependable sales that could cover, as David D. Hall notes, centuries. With magistrates and ministers controlling the press and the distribution of books, innovation was limited; as product, the steady seller helped define the literar y market. Moreover, elite control implied a coextensive gift economy whose transactions similarly restricted readerly choice. In any case, the market relied on London imprints. Ministerial correspondence notes this transatlantic trade, and the sur viving booksellers’ import records, while more diverse than one might initially presume, are nonetheless overwhelmingly religious in orientation. 7 The most reprinted devotional titles include Lewis Bayly’s The Practise of Pietie (1612), Samuel Smith’s The Great Assize (1617), Henr y Scudder’s The Christian’s Daily Walke (1627), and Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601). Unlike the secularized conduct books of gentility , the devotional works guided behavior through a kind of Renaissance soul-fashioning, wherein the pious life was nurtured. Steady sellers are best understood through numbers of editions, and these numbers far outweigh editions of poetry or drama published in the period. On mandate from the Stationers’ Company , London print runs in the seventeenth centur y roughly averaged between 1,250 and 2,000 copies per edition; although higher runs occurred when enterprising printers evaded official policy and when control weakened during mid-centur y tumult, runs were oftentimes much lower. Works thus published in one edition would not have the enduring impact of Bayly, Dent, and Smith, which each went through over thirty editions up to 1700. At the same time, the number of copies per steady seller edition could be much higher, because they were produced in smaller formats; one 1673 impression of Joseph Alleine’s An Alarme to Unconverted Sinners is said to have run to thirty-thousand copies. These small encyclopedic manuals—formatted in twelvemo and sixteenmo, often between four hundred and six hundred pages long—have been called “short, tubby bricks” by historian of religion Stephen Foster . Hall suggests that this body of literature—steady selling well into the eighteenth century—reflected “the rhythms of popular consumption.” 8 The literar y culture Hall and Foster describe is documented in the wills, testimonies, and life-writings of English and Anglo-American readers. John Bunyan famously received the Bayly and Dent titles in his wife’s dowry and avowed their transformative effects. Y et ordinar y New Englanders likewise testified to the power of these books. Richard Eccles, a confessor in Thomas Shepard’s congregation, noted that “in Practice of

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Introduction

Piety I read torments of hell which affected my heart with my estate by Adam’s fall.” Shepard congregant John Trumbull read Dent’s The Plaine Man’s Path-way and A Sermon on Repentance at sea—a travel experience central to first-generation immigrants, though this pilgrimage was just to London—and sensed that the former ser ved as “a witness against” its readers, while through the latter he, as he put it, “saw my misery.” Reading and transformative journeying are likewise underscored by William Andrews, who explains that “at sea I got books,” and searched his heart through Daniel Dyke’ s Mystery of Self-Deceiving and Richard Rogers’ s Seven Treatises.9 Probate documents tend to lump librar y items together in phrases such as “in bookes, 30 li.” or “two bibles & some other old bookes, 13s. 4d.”; and the sur viving sources cannot be understood as representative of the entire population. Y et in the instances when such documents name titles, we learn of especially valued reading matter . The Essex county records show that Robert Muzzey willed his copy of Bayly’s manual, and Christopher Y ongs left Dyke’s work, calling it by its subtitle “the Deceitfulness of man’s Heart”; while for Sarah Dillingham’s goods, an inventory was made that itemized Richard Sibbes’s The Bruised Reed among other godly works. These first-generation steady sellers were complemented by favorite works of later Nonconformist authors such as Richard Baxter, Richard and Joseph Alleine, and John Flavel. Inventor y takers in Essex county listed “Mr Smith’ s booke of ye great assiz” and “Mr. Baxter’s Call to ye u[n]co[nverted]” among the goods of William Casely, who died at sea in 1672. Commonplace books provide another index of value—shortly we will look in detail at minister Thomas Weld’s—where the steady sellers feature. Typical is third-generation settler John Sparhawk’s entry from Flavel, under the heading “Providences Judiciall”: “A woman scoffing at another for purity and Holy walking, had her tongue stricken immediately wth ye Palsye, & dyed yroff wthin 2 dayes. Flav. divine Conduct. p. 24.” The testimony , the will and inventory, and the commonplace book provide evidence of a qualitative measure, balancing quantitative numbers with examples of actual readers indicating the value they ascribed to the steady-selling canon. 10 To call this canon of steady sellers a literary culture is to be fair to the facts of publishing in the early modern period: religious literature dominated the market. Books of devotion, saints’ lives, catechisms, occasionnels, and sermon collections were the popular reading matter of western Europe and its peripher y. For instance, from 1600 to 1650, religious books rose from 30 percent to 50 percent of total print-house production in Paris, with higher numbers in Spain and Italy. Booksellers’ inventories from France reflect that over half the stock in warehouses were of religious titles; and pressruns of a work such as Imitation of Christ were sometimes between five thousand and ten thousand copies. 11 The devo-

Introduction 9 tional elements of this literar y culture were only intensified in the spiritualizing Protestantism of seventeenth-centur y New England, where ministers controlled the local presses, where governors called for home inspections to see if families held Bibles, and where the circulation of secularized popular genres such as ballads, romances, and penny merriments was proscribed. 12 This may seem a long way around to arrive at truths already known, were it not that the steady sellers have been overlooked by cultural critics and wholly neglected by literar y scholars. Recent cultural criticism interested in early New England’ s book histor y has focused on civic and secular matters, while Adrian Johns’ s groundbreaking work on the nature of the book in early modern England slights religious publishing in favor of scientific treatises.13 In his portrait of sixteenth- and seventeenth-centur y interest in Shakespeare’ s printed texts, book and literary historian David Scott Kastan conscientiously but fleetingly admits, in a footnote, of Bayly’ s overwhelming popularity.14 Current work on the histor y of reading in early modern England is equally rich, but likewise scants attention to devotional literar y culture. Case studies of learned readers such as John Dee and Sir William Drake build from their individual examples remarkable portraits of early modern consciousness, with Dee both “magus” and “intelligencer” and Drake a transformed gentleman politician. Equally meticulous, Heidi Brayman Hackel tacks differently, integrating spatial study of the experienced word, varied response to prose romances, and unique research into female readership. Per haps the converse of my historical subjects, early modern pamphlet consumers and midcentur y revolutionary readers likewise add immeasurably to our sense of literacy and action. Joad Raymond takes up the welter of pamphleteering in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, arguing, in part, that reader response could be “irrational, impractical, and unprofitable,” prompting passionate modes of antipathy and identification in reaction to news and argument. Sharon Achinstein posits that Milton’ s search for a “fit audience” was generated by a pamphlet discourse inclusive of politicized readers and mediated through contestation and propaganda. Their stress on religious controversy and political topicality , however, obscures devotional modalities of reading, ones permitting the vertiginous passions of Raymond’s pamphleteering, though distinct from the public-sphere dynamics of Achinstein’ s. All of these contributions either draw on canons of Renaissance scientific knowledge, political theor y, and belles lettres, or valuably construct, via the pamphlet, a r hetorical and indeed aesthetic form—but such canons and forms are certainly different modes of literary culture than those of the humble devout. 15 Only historians of religion have begun to comprehend the devotional manuals as literature. Both Ian Green and Stephen Foster usefully un-

10

Introduction

derstand the steady sellers as comprising a devotionalliterary culture, but their discussions are, respectively , either descriptive and summative or speculative and restrained. Foster brilliantly compares the publication numbers of the steady sellers to the relatively meager numbers of Renaissance dramatists, and even to the numbers of reprint “immortals” (Aesop and the Faust tale), and shows that the devotional works outpace all; further, he posits a connoisseur of the religious titles. Usefully commenting on “the r hythms of popular consumption” in New England, Hall contrasts the steady-selling publications of Bayly and his ilk with “the rhythms of literary fashion.” By considering bibliographic form and verbal content, I will discuss more precisely the notion of “the literar y,” which, in the scholarship on the steady seller , usually denotes discriminating connoisseurship or fashionable novelty.16 Discussion of literariness returns us to the theoretical challenges posed by early American literary historiography, challenges taken up explicitly by Spengemann, implicitly by David Shields, and indirectly by Ann Kibbey, Jill Lepore, and Mar y Beth Norton. For Spengemann, the object of study for the literary historian is language, and his case is both synchronic and diachronic, contextual and durational. Recall that he dismisses extralinguistic categories such as nationality, geography, or (ex post facto) chronology for colonial literatures. Instead, Spengemann argues that literary history should be sensitive to context by analyzing how New World encounter “Americanizes” European languages and that literary history should be sensitive to continuity by examining how the “literariness” of a linguistic event is what makes it survive. In an appreciative and implicit counter to Spengemann’ s thesis, David Shields has unearthed a manuscript culture of belles lettres in colonial urban centers along the eastern seaboard, one in dialogue with eighteenth-centur y British coterie models. In a richly synchronic study, Shields works closely with archival materials that went unpublished—deliberately so, because these coteries often wished to avoid the stigma of print—and makes no durational claims for literariness; this textual scene had vanished due to scholarly preoccupations with American exceptionalism. A third position emerges from the scholarship of Kibbey, Lepore, and Norton: their research discusses the intimate relationship between major events of seventeenth-century colonial history and the English-Indian contact dynamic that caused their eruption and shaped their historiography . These historians have narrated the interdependence of, respectively, the antinomian controversy, King Philip’s War, and the witchcraft crisis with the English reaction to Native American presence. 17 My treatment of the steady sellers and the second-generation colonial imprints that effaced them learns from all three positions. It stands with Spengemann in arguing that contact with New World populations struc-

Introduction 11 tures our sense of colonial literar y histor y and that the durational impact of literary expression matters; the printing press of John Eliot’s missionary movement makes possible a canon of texts that have become enduring monuments of “American Puritanism.” But it also stands with Shields by rooting these questions in the publication histories, circulation routes, and reading practices that assign value to texts, recognizing that human agents enable works to sur vive or to perish. It finally stands with Kibbey, Lepore, and Norton in suggesting that cross-cultural contact and conflict is inescapable when writing a literar y histor y of early American expression. Instead of examining the literariness in linguistic events which, according to Spengemann, retain “an impression of presentness that seems to deny [their] age,” book phenomenology makes, as its resource for literar y historiography, the material histor y of recorded language produced from cultural struggle. 18 A reader-based literary history might effectively describe the textual culture of a society through reference to the book trades and New W orld contact, but it may also run aground on its readerly phenomenology . That is, it may recall the abstract and ahistorical models of reader -response criticism. Literary critics such as Alvin Kernan and Sven Birkerts who are more historically minded still employ phenomenology in suspect ways. Both account for the impact of physical media on reading practice, but Kernan asserts that literar y reading of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nurtured subjectivity , liberating readers to interpret freely and enrich individual consciousness through an immersion in language. Glancing at the histor y of reading, Birkerts similarly lauds the book’s ability to enhance the private self, while elegantly deriding the contemporary media of electronic communication. Both arguments derive from Walter Ong’s more nuanced theor y of orality and the written word, and, more indirectly, from Jack Goody’s anthropological study of orality and literacy, which claimed greater degrees of historical awareness in conventionally literate cultures. In these cases, the phenomenological tendency attributes to the book essential qualities that result in value-laden, ideologically weighted claims about the development of individualism, cognition, and the mind. 19 The social-constructionist response to the Ong school is invaluable, but its turn to cultural determinants can lose sight of the role played by books-as-objects in a study of, say , devotional literar y cultures. The antiessentialist critique of the Ong school made foremost by Brian Street and Michael Warner is salutary and urgently necessary. Warner explains that there is no “logic” to writing or print that causes social change or hardwires individual capabilities; human agents and cultural norms will always enable and regulate the meanings of a technology . Street illus-

12

Introduction

trates the ways communication in oral cultures features historical selfconsciousness, critical reason, and individual skepticism—the hallmark values that result exclusively from the technology of writing, according to the Ong school. Y et while we need not accept the essentialist values imputed to oral and literate cultures, we can still recognize that the physical properties of writing and speech differ. The written word’s qualitative differences of, say, tactility and visibility deser ve our attention, by way of—and this is the social-constructionist contribution—the cultural framing that endows them with meaning. But social constructionism can also be faulted for its culturalist bias: such a perspective often begins with ideas drawn from the culture, subsuming material evidence to a larger discursive framework. For example, and as I will spell out below , communication in early New England is assumed to efface its physical medium through a transparent or “plain” style that moved directly to the heart of the willing devout. Y et might not the godly , tubby bricks work through their own physical, tactile existence to cultivate piety? The artifacts themselves tell us something of the society in which they played a role.20 A pilgrim can progress through the travails of literary essentialism and social constructionism by attending to conceptual models from book history. Referring to “traditional cultures” of orality and gesture and to “cultures of writing,” Roger Chartier , for example, describes “the situation that existed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centur y when media and multiple practices still overlapped” in terms that neither essentialize nor preselect: Some of these overlaps associate the spoken word and writing: either a spoken word fixes itself in writing or, conversely, a text returns in oral form through the mediation of reading out loud. Other overlaps connect writings and gestures. . . . Manuals on how to prepare for death, books on religious exercises, guides to good manners, and handbooks are among many examples of genres that attempt to internalize necessary or appropriate gestures. Furthermore, writing is installed at the ver y heart of the most central forms of traditional culture; festivals or entries, for instance, are surrounded by written notices of all kinds and commented on in programs that explain their meaning, and ecclesiastical rituals often require written objects to be placed at the center of the ceremony.21

Systems of writing and modes of orality coexisted within early modern cultures—that is, within the societies of, say , rural France, colonial Boston, or urban Tenochtitlan. Chartier does not privilege the oral, the gestural, or the written but merely locates them in the era under study . By extension, the read word is a multimedia phenomenon, a rock-paperscissors game of writing trumping speech trumping gesture trumping writing. Fuller’s Native American servant and pious English reader illustrate this per formative literacy , where sound, image, and placement

Introduction 13 measure power and alter behavior. The read word is intensely social and physical, and not solely a private mode that cultivates the inner life of consciousness. Instead, the read word is a realm of action and feeling, of conduct practical, moral, and emotional, a speaking-paper that admonishes and punishes, heartens and consoles. Crucially for this book’s purposes, the devotional steady sellers belong to the genre of conduct literature Chartier itemizes: their soul-fashioning ser ves to connect gesture and the written word. 22 Further, Chartier’s model presents the written artifact as a prop circulating in society, with ceremonial presence—tactility, visibility, heft—that recognizes its ontological difference from speech: in this view , book objects socialize reader subjects, a phenomenological relationship that recognizes the independence of both poles of the object-subject dynamic. Such a phenomenology of the book might be put as follows. If the Husserlian tradition reflects on the experiential relationship of the subjective mind to objects in the world, concerning itself with how space and time are organized by these acts of consciousness, a textual studies based on phenomenology would concentrate on how the book object organizes time and space for its readers and how the subjective life of readers is conditioned by this interaction with book format. 23 Again, Fuller’s allegory presents this duality: the book, as conscience, absorbed into the subjective life of the reader; and the book, as animate force and physical prop, outside the reader in a theater of literacy . The following chapters will suggest that Chartier’s general portrait of the early modern W est is no less germane to the supposedly iconoclastic and anti-ceremonial devout who established New England. As is clear from my efforts at revising notions of both reception studies and early American literary studies, I advocate for book history as an especially rich analytical tool for humanities scholarship. T o nonspecialists, the case is usually made with reference to, say , William Blake or Emily Dickinson, whose creative use of format and willed relationship to publication invite book studies examination. But here is my wager: if I can convince you that the physical properties of texts—their visual appearance, tactile feel, and oral per formance—were central to a society conventionally understood as iconophobic and ascetic, where communication is in the “plain style” and where expressive aesthetics are feared, then the case for book history’s significance will be all the stronger when we turn to individuals and societies where such conditions do not prevail. For specialists, the following chapters aim to enrich three central concepts guiding book histor y research: the notion of “intensive reading,” the problematic of “print culture,” and the practice of “appropriation.”

14

Introduction

“Intensive reading” or “traditional literacy” has been used to describe literacy habits in the early modern era. The limited runs of hand-press technology meant that readers owned fewer copies of books and read them deeply, linearly, and repeatedly; in this vision, a “reading revolution” occurred around 1800, which saw a shift with automated technology to “extensive reading,” the consumption of a wide range of texts read cursorily . Though intensive and extensive readers exist in both epochs and while the technological determinism of the narrative has been rightly abandoned, the concepts still have heuristic value. There is an inclination, however, to see the elites or the learned as reading extensively in the early modern period, due to their larger libraries or intellectual labor. What the steady sellers and their readers suggest is that the cross-referencing and nonlinear habits assumed to be a learned mode are in fact standard for ordinar y readers, such that we might better understand reading habits in terms of continuous and discontinuous styles. For example, Fuller’ s text is internally extensive, if you will: a fragmented set of affirmations, dipped into like a reference work or read serendipitously. To this end, I also argue that book history in the early modern period is better ser ved by concentrating on format, rather than on “print culture.” The latter term abstracts from the varied kinds of communication at work, while a discussion of the codex—as it differs from the broadside or the blank form, as it features both script and print, and as it achieves effects through its physical arrangement—brings into focus an object of research for the book historian other than print, the printing press, or “print culture”: namely, the book. This is not to corral the range of inquiry associated with book histor y, but rather to specify the function of communicative media within the social formations of early New England. Fuller’s tale and its devotional container invoke the book format, a multileaved, randomly accessed figure for conscience, bound to itemize sins but open to redemption. In addition, devotional literary culture alerts us to the inadequacies of “appropriation” as the main term of readership studies. Readership history rightly suggests that readers in the past can be posited as neither fully dominated by the culture of a ruling elite nor fully free to make a text mean anything they want it to mean. A conceptual solution to this problem has been to cast reading as an act of appropriation. Readers are hemmed in by genres and traditions, and within such controlled contexts—even in a pious culture of humility and rote repetition—they actively appropriate textual matter. Yet the critical and creative resonances of the term “appropriation” do not apply to New England’s reverent but by no means passive readers. Consider Fuller’s English reader, humbled by the book-of-conscience trope, but also exhorted to action: to confess

Introduction 15 sin, rather than to bury it. The emphasis on cognitive “appropriation” in methods for readership histor y—on the conscious processes that capture texts and make them meaningful—under values the somatic and sensory experience of reading. The moods of anguish and glor y explored and enacted in pious reading present a model that we might call “affective appropriation,” a notion explored throughout but raised explicitly at the close of Chapter 3. I aim finally to advance what might be called aninterpretive bibliography, a mode of book studies that matches the quantitative and descriptive aspects of the discipline with a qualitative and hermeneutic appreciation of the written record and its implications. T raditional book studies has been subdivided into a number of fields—descriptive bibliography, analytical bibliography , historical bibliography , compilative bibliography , and so forth—to which my approach is indebted and upon which I hope to build. But the positivist cast of book-studies work, whether derived from traditional bibliography or from other disciplines, can also be its undoing. Whether it is in W. W. Greg’s “pure bibliography,” which treats words and images in the textual record as “arbitrar y marks,” or in a social histor y that comprehends texts as commodities no different from other objects of trade, or in a pedagogy that stresses craft and techne, a book studies that is overly descriptive runs the risk of missing its wider relevance to the humanities. In discussing the reconstruction of reading habits from a reader’ s records, one scholar put it this way: such “documents are texts themselves, which require interpretation.” That’s Robert Darnton, not Wolfgang Iser, Roland Barthes, or Cathy Davidson, and his observation is both a caution and an invitation for the historian of reading to consider this hermeneutic challenge. 24 One interpretive implication of the written record for this study is its material function within the spiritual life of the converted and the unsure. Partly in reaction to Perr y Miller’s emphasis on the uses of reason in seventeenth-centur y New England, a wave of Americanist puritan studies has focused on modes of experiential piety , a practical divinity sought for in Fuller’s lesson.25 While I am reluctant to use the term “puritanism,” if it has any purchase at all, it is in describing a particularly zealous style of piety , a spiritualizing impulse felt at the level of subjective experience and social expectation. Peter Lake pursues such a definition, indicating a set of attributes for this style of piety: “aggressively word centered, dominated by the division between the godly and the ungodly, a division underwritten by the doctrines of predestination, perseverance and election and given practical expression in the forms of Puritan voluntary religion; centered on the three scriptural ordinances of the word preached, the sacraments, and the sabbath; prepared to accept the rest of the liturgy, observances, and government of the church

16

Introduction

at best only as things inherently indifferent and required by human authority; and obsessed by the threat of antichristian poper y.” Further, he suggests that such a style—word centered, voluntarist, experientially practiced—became more rather than less distinctive in England and New England as the centur y progressed. 26 My focus will be on puritanism as a devotional style, as distinct from theological, doctrinal, or sociopolitical investigations of the concept. What structured this mode of experiential piety was a legacy from the Reformation that held special power in colonial New England: a mythic and actual valuing of literacy within both vernacular and learned traditions. Literacy was at once emancipator y, in that it delivered the devout from “popish tyranny,” and regulator y, in that it maintained the hierarchical control of divinity-trained ministers. Recall Fuller’ s Spanish master, who denies literacy to his Native American ser vant, and Fuller’ s implied reader, who has access to both the good book and the book of conscience. At the level of the individual subject, this mixture of emancipation and control might best be understood through the concept of discipline, ritual behavior that is at once empowering and restrictive. Reading was considered an unofficial means of grace within the disciplines of piety , an action similar to public worship rituals and private meditation and prayer , holy means that would allow , though neither propel nor merit, the spirit into the life of the devout. 27 As a devotional discipline within the larger ideology of Protestantism, reading was transformative, rather than enlightening or diverting. While reading for entertainment or information can prompt behavior , devotional conduct literature assumes as its raison d’être the need for its readers either to convert or to actively maintain their “conversation,” a seventeenthcentury term for the godly life. In conceptualizing readership, I do not thus discriminate between the regenerate and the unregenerate, particularly given the anguish that many converts continued to feel after testifying to the experience of grace. Scholars of experiential piety have indeed stressed this liminal state, in lieu of the plotted conversion sequence assumed to be the norm. 28 And while I will note different responses of the learned and the ordinary to reading matter, I understand the life of piety to be a shared one among the lay devout and the clerics. With puritanism construed as a style of piety predicated on access to texts within regulatory protocols, my more specific claim is that book artifacts participate in this discipline, that their status as objects helped shape human subjectivity.29 To be sure, the differential nature of reading was articulated through gender norms in the period. Yet the differences were not felt according to a segmented marketing of devotional titles, as would characterize shifts in the eighteenth-centur y trade when male and female readers

Introduction 17 were targeted. Nor were the differences exclusively defined by access, and, in fact, recent scholarship has suggested the relative empowerment of women as readers in early New England. So too, it is less productive to think of these differences in terms of dispositions that are putatively gendered, dispositions that contrast, say , sentiment and reason, affect and detachment, body and mind. The remarkable work of recover y launched by Cathy Davidson and Jane Tompkins for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has pressed critics and scholars to revalue the writing of men and women in early America. 30 Turning to the seventeenth century, we see that discourses of sentiment and feeling can be tracked back to religious reading taken up by both men and women, and that the great fear of post-Enlightenment male moralists—transformative action pursued by women in response to literar y art—was a prerequisite for proper literacy among Protestant men and women in the vernacular tradition. Gendered tensions are perhaps best measured in terms of the fissures within male identity caused by pious subjectivity . Whether male or female, the devout reader was to be the “bride of Christ,” passively waiting for the inception of grace, and regenerate through this submissive marriage. This posture of powerlessness is conventionally feminine, yet was expected of men. The learned and literate man became a helpless vessel for divine action, a humbling that militated against his privileges of intellectual labor and reduced him to affective body . We need think only of Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations, Cotton Mather’s groveling in the dust, or Fuller’ s punished Amerindian and Englishman to see how this role in part constituted male identity . The dissonances sounded by the role were often handled by learned men through gendered tactics of disavowal, as ministers strain to distance themselves from the affective reader. Comparable to the European contact literature in its mystifications, male writers projected onto the skilled reasoning of Anne Hutchinson and other female dissenters discourses of the bodily, the addled, and the oral to buttress a learned psychology under siege. In this male tradition, Hutchinson was remembered through the imager y of monstrous birth, Anne Hopkins was understood as insane due to her writing ambitions, and the antinomians more generally were discounted, by minister Nicholas Noyes, as “ Light-within-Enthusiasts, who let fly / Against our Pen and Ink Divinity.” The disavowal and projection within this tradition is both compensatory for puritan masculinity and generative as an ideology of male power. At the same time, men produced the godly literature of feeling discussed in the following pages. As with many characterizations of puritan life, we might question the way we in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries have retained a stereotype of early New England masculinity as purely dominative and devoid of affect. 31

18

Introduction

Interest in the lived piety of devotional readers concerns itself with the routine and the habitual and thus tends away from topicality as a historian’s subject matter and from a “from-to” narrative about historical change. While the 1720s did see shifts in available meanings for the written record, my argument is essentially thematic: in suggesting a corrective for perceptions of early American literar y history and in advocating for the book artifact’ s illuminating function, I explain a set of reading habits that remained relatively constant for three generations of English settlement, and no doubt they endure past the early eighteenth century.32 The revivals of the 1730s and 1740s shed light on these matters of topicality, continuity, and change: the evangelist literacy of the Great Awakening saw the permanence of devotional reading practices, while also auguring forth the civic reading practices associated with new genres of public discourse. Still an unofficial means of grace, disciplinar y reading retained its conversionist potential. In fact, the “enthusiasms” of the revival drew on a deep structure of pre-eighteenth-centur y affective piety. The consumption of pious manuals benefited from a surge of colonial publication in the 1730s and 1740s reprinting the classic devotional steady sellers. At the same time such manuals could regulate enthusiasm and thus serve the disciplinary needs of anxious ministers, New Light and Old Light alike. 33 What was relatively new in the A wakening’s evangelist literacy was the print publicity surrounding Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, and Gilbert Tennent. Newspaper reports, magazine issues, and pamphlet literature broadcast the A wakening, and were unofficial in the extreme from the perspective of disciplinar y religion. So too, these genres aired disputes about the A wakening, displacing attention from conversion and toward controversy . But within evangelist literacy, such publicity, as in the case of Thomas Prince’s periodical The Christian History, became a means of grace as well, reinforcing the sense of a shared revival felt among and encouraged by individual communities.34 Seventeenth-century New England did not witness this intercolonial public sphere and by and large nipped the civic reading disciplines that would blossom there; but the first three generations of puritan settlement nurtured the pious reading disciplines that also took place within and through the publicity of eighteenth-centur y print culture. Though there is an over whelming urge in puritan studies—and humanities monographs—to tell a “from-to” stor y, time consciousness within seventeenth-century New England’s devotional life can be cast a number of ways. From the perspective of intellectual histor y, the linear, temporal axes of American puritan studies are featured famously in the jeremiad tradition, whether through Perr y Miller’s thesis on declension or Sacvan Bercovitch’ s claims for a propulsive triumphalism. Dwight

Introduction 19 Bozeman supplies an excellent correction to this momentum in “To Live Ancient Lives.” Time consciousness can inflect the study of personal writing by devout settlers; journals, diaries, and autobiographies lend themselves to the analysis of chronos—time as a measured succession of equal units—and kairos—“time as the irregular ebb and flow of charged moments against a neutral background.”35 Time consciousness affects treatments of biography , as when Bercovitch illuminates, in The Puritan Origins of the American Self, typology’s implications for temporality and selfhood. He explains that the interpretive bridge between Hebrew and Christian testaments became, for the Reformers, not a mode of foreshadowing but a set of perspectives on sacred histor y that were prospective, recapitulative, and apogean, with Christ at this histor y’s center and with a scriptural pattern available to be imposed upon the self. If these learned discourses complicate a linear view of time, so too the humble steady sellers theorize time beyond simple chronology. John Fox calls on Ecclesiastes 3.11—which follows the “For ever ything there is a season” verses—to distinguish between the “space of time,” by which is meant its chronological duration, and the “opportunity of time,” meaning the chance to take advantage of chronological units such as seasons: “The beauty of time is the opportunity of time.” A Garden of Spirituall Flowers builds from Psalm 90.31 (“Lord teach us to number our dayes”) to quantify a human life, aggregating and compartmentalizing time. The manual averages the years lived (seventy) and the years spent sleeping (thirty-five), the years spent in childhood (“the time of our vanity ,” or fifteen), and in “eating, recreating, idle talke, journeys” (ten), and concludes that “Then there will bee found but 10. yeeres remaining well spent, whereof, Lord, how little is spent in thy ser vice.” Commonplaces, too, provide proverbial wisdom that calibrates time according to Christian duty: “Repent to day,” writes Thomas Weld in his miscellany, “for if it be missed, thou hast one more day to repent of, and one less to repent in.”36 The range of thought on time here reminds us that the r hythms of spiritual experience often operate on a different temporal plane, a sacred time zone that is both cyclically repetitive and linearly dramatic. An alternative time consciousness is itself nurtured by the genre of written record with which I am especially concerned: the hand-operated codex. The technology of the book promotes the nonlinear temporalities so deeply structured in the puritan style of piety. The larger scripts of devotional life in early New England benefit from the codex’ s discontinuity. One conception of typology sees it as a linear movement from the Hebrew Bible to Christian scriptures, and from these texts to worldly history. Y et typology in the main is about the temporal movement, and profoundly discontinuous: backward and for ward, referential and

20

Introduction

prophetic, primitive and contemporary. The same might be said about a psychology fixated on both original sin and the afterlife; and about the plots of spiritual life-writing, which are as cyclical as they are teleological. An alternative time consciousness is felt as well in a devotional psychology defined by redemptive journeying and meditative stasis—by , in two of the period’ s favored tropes, pilgrimage and rumination. In motion around a static object, the bee is the trope, also from the period, syncretizing these psychic dispositions. The codex format encourages the disjunctive temporalities of pilgrimage and rumination, and we would do well to reckon how devotional literacy and psychological movement were constituted through the indexical manipulation of books. For this study’s purposes, the time is at hand. So, book histor y helps correct a conventional portrait of early New England’s literary culture. As with other early modern societies, the interaction of orality, gesture, and writing is essential to any description of the reading habits that structure a literar y culture. But this sociology of literacy—which understands reading beyond its typical formulation as silent and solitar y—was an especially vexed issue for the Protestant vernacular tradition, with its empowerment of lay readers, its critique of worship spectacle, its oratorical zeal, and its attempts at ministerial control of these varied media. By attending to book circulation, we see the transatlantic nature of the society’s canon; and with an emphasis on the steady sellers, a reader -based, rather than author -based, description of literary history emerges. Replacing a search for the first “American” author or the first “American” imprint is an investigation of the materiality of texts as a central component of lived religion and an exploration, via English-Indian contact dynamics, of the publication histor y and reception history that has obscured this focus on materiality . The format of codices, broadsides, and private manuscripts; the visual image of an illustration, or of the page itself; the tactile heft of a duodecimo or folio; the presence of a written record within the scene of reading—all of these factors participate in the imaginative life of spiritual readers. In treating written records as artifacts, I argue that material objects shape religious subjects, that the paradox of puritan piety—its cyclical and teleological modes of anguish and fulfillment—is nurtured by the codex format. Aiming for neither “ the nature” nor “ the history” of the book, my argument attempts “ a phenomenology,” and it suggests that a textual studies based on format helps illuminate both the objective facts and the subjective experience of early New England’s literary culture.

Chapter 1

The Presence of the Text

Increase Mather’s 1670 title The Life and Death of that Reverend Man of God Mr. Richard Mather is celebrated among early American works for its textual history. Increase’s biography of his father was his first New England imprint. Moreover, one extant copy carries with it, as a tipped-in frontispiece, the famous picture of Richard Mather that was reprinted into the eighteenth century and which also figures as the earliest known English colonial woodcut. Such nationalist “firsts” are a species of what John Carter calls the “chronological obsession” of book collectors. Indeed, interest in authorship status, original editions, and protonational bibliography has obscured the histor y of another title, a histor y embedded in the preface to the Richard Mather biography itself. In addressing the reader, Increase refers to A Farewel Exhortation to the Church and People of Dorchester, a 1657 Cambridge imprint written by his father: “Remember his Farewel Exhortation, which is now in many of your Houses, and Oh that it were in all your Hearts.” 1 A phenomenology of the book in early New England would do well to attend to this aside however; the reference to A Farewel Exhortation reveals much about the sociology and activity of reading among pious settlers. First, the passage describes the traditional mode of Protestant literacy: the devout reader should internalize the text in his or her “heart,” and then live its message. But equally intriguing is the passage’s concern with the physical presence of the book itself, the literal and figurative placement of A Farewel Exhortation in, respectively, the “houses” and “hearts” of readers. Increase Mather could be fairly certain of its place in settler homes. The town of Dorchester sponsored publication of the sermon; and this patronage was reciprocated by Richard Mather when he dispensed free copies through his deacons to all households in his Dorchester congregation. A gift economy thus bestows to A Farewel Exhortation meanings of obligation and deference, meanings upon which Increase admonishingly lit. The significance of a book’ s physical status is further illustrated by the location of the remark: it sur faces in the preface and it interacts with the woodcut, both items ancillary to the main text, yet crucially thresholds of interpretation, or paratexts, for

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that main text. 2 Indeed, a paratext such as a preface, frontispiece, or index is a distinctive feature of the randomly accessed codex format, suggesting that the physique of a book generates meaning through the interaction of its fragmented parts. Finally, the passage engages eye and ear, through both the illustration and the acoustic qualities of Increase’s rhetoric: A Farewel Exhortation appears in a remark that voices a conventional ministerial lament about backsliding colonists—“ Oh that it were” read—and sounds its counsel through the alliterative parallelism of “Houses” and “Hearts.” And while not strictly a steady seller , A Farewel Exhortation belongs to the kind of conduct literature that defined literary taste in early New England. The range of meaning expressed in Mather’ s caution and lament is important, for scholarship on the era’s book culture has focused primarily on the former valence, the relationship between puritan discourse and heart piety. Among other proof texts, it is premised on 2 Corinthians 3.2–3—Paul’s letters are “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not in tables of stone, but in the fleshy tables of the heart.”3 This position argues that reading is principally a process of “sacred internalization,” wherein a text’ s message impresses itself on the minds or in the hearts of readers, such that the W ord is lived and the medium becomes immaterial. 4 Similarly, literar y historians ascribe to New Englanders a “plain style” of unmediated transparency , wherein rhetoric was homely and common, visual artifice anathema, and bodily performance shunned. 5 More broadly still, we conventionally understand the book as a vessel for words, words that are read cover to cover , a transaction that demotes the visual and aural, and promotes a silent, private immersion in language, the hallmark of “true” literacy. Yet books were and are gifts and commodities, icons and totems; they were and are leafed through and gazed at, handled and heard. As Eric Jager observes, the etymology of “record” is telling here, for it derives from the Latincor, the heart understood in classical antiquity and patristic learning as the storehouse for thought, memory, and emotion, the book thus a material extension of the heart. 6 As items of exchange through markets and beneficence, as devotional conduits for affliction and grace, as embodied artifacts experienced through the senses, books—independent of their verbal message—cultivated piety in early New England. They influenced the subjective experience of spirituality without effacing their status as objects. This chapter will study book objects as they socialize reader subjects by first tracing a set of contexts that foreground the materiality of written records. The argument aims to unstiffen our sense of what a book is, treating it as a good within economies of buying, selling, giving, and receiving; as an object of reverence and medium of per formance; and as

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a physical platform and organizational system for word, sound, and image. Yet lest such an account mistake the book as an object of exchange no different than a widget, I lay stress on the book as a formatted entity, rich with signs that touch on subjectivity, fraught with psychic and social consequences. 7 The sensory and linguistic design of a book; the mental disciplines it promotes; the spirit it partakes of as a gift—all are generated by physical features of a text, but all harmonize with the affective life of readers. Invoked throughout my account, these economic, ritual, and aesthetic frameworks will be presented at the chapter’ s start; they will then be applied to key texts within a typical communications vector for the period: the movement from sacred text in the form of Psalm 119’ s English translations, to Edmund Calamy’ s steady-selling work The Godly Man’s Ark, which is devoted to explicating the psalm, to a set of readers who deploy techniques implicit in Psalm 119 and the Calamy sermon for their personal miscellanies. Whether in Elizabeth Moore’ s “Evidences,” Thomas Paine’s almanac-diar y, Thomas W eld’s commonplace book, or Joseph Tompson’s spiritual account, readers understand books as repositories for disjunct items, rather than exclusively as linear, uninterrupted narratives. Textual fragments are gathered, collated, and juxtaposed: a reader finds meaning through the fragments’ disposition in space as well as their continuity over time. Tompson’s miscellany in particular indicates ways this readerly activity ser ved devotional purposes. In the staple literature of scripture and steady seller , readers sat still with a text and moved through it: they were both ruminator and pilgrim. T exts were present to early New Englanders; they were spatial objects, to be “h[u]ng upon,” in Calamy’s language, “as a Bee doth upon a flower”; and they were temporal sequences, read in the progressive arc—again from Calamy—of “Gods Calender.”8

Good Books and Books as Goods In the tribal hierarchy of seventeenth-centur y New England’ s book world, neither the press nor the market would be characterized as “free.” Printing at Cambridge and Boston in the period was controlled first by the General Court and later by governors, and active printers preferred such arrangements as it maintained their monopoly on the trade. Enabled in part by the missionar y movement to convert Amerindians—a point to which I will return in Chapter 5—competition began when a second press was licensed for Boston in 1674, and the commercial culture of this site produced a more varied product than Cambridge. Yet while Benjamin Harris courted controversy in his brief stay, much more typical were the Richard Pierces and Samuel Green,

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Jrs., of the time, who secured work with, respectively , Edmund Andros and the Mathers. The Green family dynasty best illustrates this monopolism, as they ser ved colonial governments in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Plymouth, and New Hampshire. Print production was also privately sponsored, by individuals or groups, with the patrons not seeking retail profits. While more diverse, booksellers were no more adventurous; indeed, book sales were just one component of their general retailing activity . Booksellers proper marketed stationer y, medicines, measuring devices, and, according to Isaiah Thomas, “whalebone, live goosefeathers, pickled sturgeon, chocolate, Spanish snuff, &c”; general merchants carried Bibles, psalters, and almanacs among their goods. Importing and selling on average 3,500 to 4,000 volumes in a good year (compared to an average of 2,200 copies of native imprints sold), Boston retailers depended on the London book trade. Our evidence is hardly comprehensive, but seller Michael Perr y’s inventor y of 1700 and invoices from the 1670s and 1680s indicate a transatlantic exchange consisting of the instrumentalist literature of devotion: schoolbooks, Bibles, and manuals of practical divinity . Ever cautious, these booksellers did not select London titles as a means to evade local censors; moreover , ministers were often ordering books through them. Book merchants “[put] most of their capital into steady sellers[,] . . . on an imported parcel of 20 to 50 copies [rather] than on a colonial reprint of 500.” 9 There are at least three implications for book culture in such a market. First, books were perceived on a par with other commodities peddled, without the aura of a book fair , much less an independent store. Second, the strict regulation of this economy tamped down on innovation. Not bustling, the market would provide safe titles: “steadiness” from the merchant’ s perspective meant predictable sales. Any notion that books acquaint readers with a range of ideas and opinions and thus promote critical thinking would be especially qualified in the print marketplace of early New England. But third, when booksellers took risks, it was to order “20 Smiths Great Assize” or “30 W arr with the Deuill”: that is, more, though different, devotional steady sellers. However thin and homogenous this literary culture was, we need not conclude it was “monotonous.” Variety existed exactly among the titles upon which we are focused, and a connoisseur is certainly imaginable for the devotional steady sellers. Perhaps “[t]he Bible was print enough,” but the range of art and information available to the reader through scripture was complemented and amplified by the devotional manuals. Moreover, readers experienced, as David D. Hall argues, an “ideology of print” within the religious and civil control of New England’ s economy: print symbolized both sacred Word, immaterially conveying the divinity, and worldly commodity, materially jostling in the marketplace of goods. 10 If the average

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library consisted of a Bible, an almanac, and a few practical manuals, these latter reside liminally between the necessities of sacred text and ordinary calendar. The conservatism of the market should not blind us to the complexity of book culture for early New Englanders. Further, this market economy coexisted with a gift economy that equally defined textual experience for English colonists. Exchange within a gift economy entails different dynamics of affect and conduct, and, for early New England, participated in the larger cultural meaning of Christian grace. Throughout the first three generations of settlement, ministers distributed books to laity: schoolbooks, psalters, catechisms, spiritual guides. As Cotton Mather put it, “an incredible deal of good may be done by distributing little books of piety,” and he claimed to give out six hundred such texts a year . Power ful figures in civil society such as Samuel Sewall likewise distributed godly books to peers and as charity. Privately sponsored publications were circulated through a gift economy, usually intended not for sale but for donation. Books also circulated as inheritances, with probate records paying attention mainly to a family Bible’ s legacy. There were texts exchanged among peers of course, commonly evidenced in user marginalia such as that found on the endpapers of a 1643 exposition of Daniel, shared sixty-five years later: on the recto, “Tho: James / perigrine Stanbrough / his book / Mr. White / his book”; and “Ebeneezer White / His Book / Januar y8 1707/8 / Given him by his friend Mr . Peregrine Stanbrough” on the verso. Structuring these practices was a larger sensibility understanding Christ’s sacrifice as God’ s ultimate gift to humankind, with scripture a textual homology for this benefaction. As Edmund Calamy’ s steady seller explains: “There are two great Gifts that God hath given to his people. The Word Christ, and the Word of Christ: Both are unspeakably great; but the first will do us no good without the second.” John Foxe famously coordinated the advent of press technology with God’ s providence and the Reformation; while a liberator y literacy has been much fabled in Protestant mythography, Foxe pointedly considers why “the Lord hath given this gift of printing to the earth.” Countless devotional titles frame their contents as gifts. 11 If New England’s book market is organized by an ideology of print— a paradox of spiritual and secular meaning—similar tensions animate the gift economy of texts. Like market relations and legal arrangements, gift culture is premised on reciprocity; but the special force of gift economies is that they do not function through calculable values or named constraints. What sales and contracts assume—volition and obligation—become the palpable charge of gift economies. The spirit of the gift—the sense in which the gift collapses person and thing, an intimacy less present within legal and market codes—intensifies these social dy-

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namics. Degrees of reciprocity of course mark different gift registers, and the vectors of exchange can be vertical (say , the liberality of the noble) or horizontal (the circulating food gifts among peers). Gifting communicates openness and trust, a desire to rethink possessions as shared goods; it cements social bonds and it seeks ideally an indirect reciprocity, wherein generosity would be taken up by the recipient for others. Yet gifting is also experienced as interested, as displaying the power of the giver over the beneficiar y, as obliging the recipient in named or unnamed ways and potentially intended by the giver to precipitate certain actions. For the early modern Protestantism of New England, the vectors were vertical, not exclusively through the social hierarchy of ministerial authority but more importantly through the divine gifts of an omnipotent power. Gifts prompt questions of motivation and response, obligation and action, and book gifts associated with the sacred underscore these behavioral tensions. In correspondence with Stephan Sewall, Cotton Mather describes these dynamics: “The Obligations under which you lay me are many and lasting. And these Books, with which you last favoured me, have heaped Pelion upon Ossa. . . . For so many fatt Birds, I now return you a Feather; and I pray you to Accept one of the Enclosed, and convey the other .” Cataloguing a proverb under his miscellany’s “P” heading, Thomas W eld puts more acutely these behavioral tensions: “Would any one have the good of the promise, he must do the works of the precept.” The Word was identified with religious authority, and a book’s dispensation was both freely given and obligatorily felt. A minister or judge distributing books ser ves in God’s interest, yet dramatizes his largesse and power; and the generous, ordinar y mortal risks comparison to the divine giver who dwar fs his or her human efforts. 12 Devotional readers in seventeenth-centur y New England felt these tensions acutely. Early modern Protestants defined themselves against the traditional church in many ways, but especially vigorous was the critique of what was perceived as a market-oriented reciprocation within “Romish” theories of salvation. For these zealous critics, works in this world do not “buy” eternal life; instead, grace is freely given and it asks that, in return, the mortal merely believe. “Covenant” was the language Reformers used to explain this relationship, and while it connotes legalism, the term in fact has a philological histor y from scripture signifying both legal contract and inherited testament. 13 Debates over conversion theology among pious New Englanders specified these attitudes to the divine gift of grace. Christ’s intercession abrogated a Covenant of Works, wherein actions in the world respond to God’s laws and are understood to merit salvation, and his presence instituted a Covenant of Grace, wherein eternal life and the power to believe is freely given to the recipient open to belief. In the Covenant of Grace, the free gift is the bind-

The Presence of the Text

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ing requirement, as it were; the conditions of the agreement are constituted by one’s entering the covenant through the exercise of faith. The endless quarrel over grace and works, then and now, should not obscure ways these behavioral systems coexisted to shape devotional consciousness, with the covenants understood as, respectively , “parent’s present” and “worker’s wage.” 14 The pressing question for the pious was reciprocation: what is the countergift to Christ’ s sacrifice? Belief. But as a survey of ritual piety suggests, there are obligations seemingly beyond belief.

The Life of Piety Book objects socialized their reader subjects not only within the communal economies of sale and gift, but also within the settings and practices of religious worship. T extual artifacts ser ved ritually in early New England. They were part of the material symbols and behavioral protocols that defined the practice of both popular and organized religion, and they were part of the habitual, customar y exercises that provided continuity and enabled change in one’ s personal and communal life. In the world of popular religion, where signs in nature and society were endowed with meaning to help observers cope with danger and find safety, texts figured symbolically . They figured in situations of grief, when a poet-minister imagined the voice of a mourning widower’ s dead wife, constructed an anagram from her name, and sent the elegy to the husband as he preached in Virginia. They figured in moments of public punishment, when a woman convicted of slander is required to “wear upon her forehead the words ‘A SLANDERER OF MR. ZEROBABELL ENDICOTT.’” They figured in instances of providence, when a minister’s sermon warned that if critics of the New England W ay returning to England carry a written petition against the colony with them on board, they will wind up “as Jona[h] in the ship”; after a storm struck the boat, fearful travelers asked if any had such a petition, and when it appeared and was thrown overboard, the storm died down. Whether through individual rites of passage, collective forms of social boundary-marking, or regular, customar y consultation, a text’ s materiality participated in the ritual life of English colonists. 15 While these examples cut across the realms of providential wonder , personal loss, and worldly punishment, book artifacts more specifically were ritualized elements in organized ceremonies, in the godly and civil rituals instituted for spiritual purposes. For Reformation culture, the book icon distinguished the Protestant godly from “Romish” idolators: the engraved title page to Foxe’s Actes and Monuments contrasted the true devout dog-earing a Bible with Catholics fingering a rosary (Figure 2).16

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Figure 2. Detail from the title page to John Foxe’ s The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contayning the Actes and Monuments (London: John Daye, 1570), contrasting Protestant and Catholic worship. The title page’ s lower left-hand corner shows the devout with book in hand, while others supplicate before the Tetragrammaton. The lower right-hand corner features a hand piety organized around rosar y beads and what the zealous Protestant would see as the papist’ s wandering attention.

The vernacular Bible was expected to be present at worship services, and the minister could totemically display , even with small-format editions, biblical texts to congregants. As the following chapters will demonstrate, book objects featured in formal and informal worship ceremonies. Private worship was pursued in part through devotional reading in the Bible and in steady sellers. Public worship practices in congregations were structured by verbal ordinances, communications of sermon, psalm singing, and prayer that deployed expressive media and orbited scriptural text. 17 Funerals in early New England were technically civil ceremonies, but their customar y use of elegies represented another means by which the written record negotiated ritual moments and defined sacred boundaries. Similarly, the missionary movement mixed civil and sacred motivations in its attempt to convert Native Americans, and exposed the ritual uses of material texts as the Word crossed cultures. To be sure, written records feature in all manner of Christian and nonChristian worship, and devout New Englanders spent much time defining themselves against the “formality” of, say , the Book of Common Prayer. But it is exactly this fixation among Protestant iconoclasts that is telling: it is a version of the book culture’ s unconscious discussed in the Introduction as part of the contact literature, here manifest in tension with puritanism’s spiritualizing impulse. 18 The readerly subject—the saved and the unregenerate, in the church, the horse-shed, and the tavern—was disciplined by such organized cere-

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monies, the book object a mechanism that enabled and regulated spiritual development. Whether formal or informal, book ceremonies were infused by the religious psychology of Reformation Protestantism, the rituals part of a spiritual economy defined by the word-centered and voluntarist demands of practical divinity . In the opening chapter of The New England Mind, Miller captures the moods of anguish and glor y that propel this psychology . The zealous, godly Protestant, both old world and new , lived a form of consciousness that Ivy Schweitzer calls “redeemed subjectivity ,” a constant state of anxiety that shaped reading practice. As Charles Cohen puts it, the fundamental question for puritan identity is not “‘Who am I?’ but ‘What must I do to be saved?’” 19 Or as this investigation asks: what is the countergift to Christ’ s sacrifice? Piety was in part dictated by the Pauline doctrine of election, which led believers to intense self-scrutiny about their saintly potential; conversion was just one step along a road of reconversions and self-abasement. The Covenant of Grace, what the figure of Christ holds out for the repentant convert to rectify Adam’s fall (which broke the Covenant of Works), governs this devotional experience. In accepting the saving faith of grace, converts were correspondingly enjoined to search themselves for signs of assurance and to acknowledge still the depravity of their worldly existence.20 “Redeemed subjectivity” was a shared mentality with varying levels of commitment that overlapped with broader forms of popular piety enabled by public rites and private customs. From the notion of “redeemed subjectivity” emerges a view of New England selfhood that is continually in flux, wavering between doubt and assurance, no matter how righteous or uncertain. Indeed, ritual settings complicate a plotted, schematic view of puritan subjectivity based on the Pauline doctrine; as Cotton Mather said of one important seventeenth-century New England ritual, “whenever a Fast recurs, we should go the whole Work of Conversion over again!” 21 Lived spirituality can be measured through ritual— given the way ritualized acts of devotion mediate the human and the divine—and textual ceremonies are a crucial resource for such study . The rituals of redeemed subjectivity had two specific implications for readers in early New England, one conceptual, the other practical. Holy ordinances and private exercises orbiting the W ord were understood as “means of grace,” ritual acts that allowed divinity into the life of the devout and deepened one’s relationship to God. Within Reformation doctrine, human agency did not cause God to come to the soul of the practitioner; but participation in the forms of worship enabled the Spirit’s visitation, because, if God were to come, it would be through these means of grace. Ministers debated whether private reading and writing by the laity were official means, but the Protestant vernacular tradition witnessed many moments of literacy’s turning, and the regulated

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reading of church and family was certainly authorized. The practical action common to these rituals—whether it was family Bible-reading, public church worship, or communal mourning—was preparator y humiliation. Readers were to abase themselves before the text, in humbling supplication that emptied them of worldly needs and desires. This discipline involved self-examination and condemnation of sin, an internalized affliction to remind pious subjects of the fall. While purgative abjection defined the public fast—or “day of humiliation”—it was expected of any devotional act that, for the converted, prepared for glorification or, for the unconverted, enabled original grace. Importantly , then, redeemed subjectivity was not exclusively about subjection: the resulting fulfillment articulated delight, pleasure a precipitant of affliction. Preparator y humiliation preceded a range of transformative events: weekly Sabbath worship, the Lord’ s Supper, death, and, as we shall see evidenced in its prescriptions and activities, the relatively mundane disciplines of reading. 22 Alert to the means, scholars of New England’s experiential piety have abandoned the agonized, wormlike portrait of the devotional subject, plotted into a twelve-step morphology of conversion, righteously or nervously defined by a single moment of grace. Instead, devotional experience was cyclical as well as teleological, joyously fulfilling as well as recursively abject, a lifelong process that was a linear growth in grace and a static meditation on sin. Charles Hambrick-Stowe foregrounds a cyclical model by showing the two-stage movement of purgation and fulfillment that recurs throughout the pious life. But along with his argument’s larger investment in a growth in grace, Hambrick-Stowe’ s description of the cycle is progressive: a functionalist movement from emptiness to assurance. Consolation answers to affliction, mercy replaces punishment, the means lead to spiritual satisfaction.23 Central to the devotional literar y culture, metaphors of journey and pilgrimage elaborate this vision of linear progress. But another common trope of the period complements the pilgrim figure: that of the ruminator , the figure who “chews the cud” of experience, meditating on past, present, and future sins, reading the Bible, the self, and the world for signs of grace: introspective, retrospective, prospective, still. The “pietist turn” substantiated by Dwight Bozeman as the disciplinar y program energizing puritan spirituality usefully captures an affective life ofmore piety and more doubt. By understanding the devout as pilgrim, ruminator, and—in the syncretic figure of progress and stasis—bee, we can best comprehend how lived spirituality for New Englanders meant simultaneous emotions of anguish and joy amid covalent discourses of mercy and punishment. The anxious heart of puritan piety was voiced by Richard Sibbes when he says that “None are fitter for comfort than those that

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think themselves furthest off”—a paradox echoed in the commonplace book of Thomas Weld: “When we are highest in condition, we should be lowest in disposition.” As I will show , devotional literature and reading practices dramatize this lived spirituality , where feelings of humiliation and glorification are inseparably condensed. 24

The Thick Style While the book signifies as commodity , gift, totem, and icon, a book’ s content matters as well, of course, operating as it does in the register of the senses and the imagination. These more subjective elements of early New England’s book culture can be gauged also, however , through the material features, physical arrangements, and discursive layers of a text. Indeed, the literar y qualities of the devotional steady sellers emerge through study of a book’ s look and shape—its objecthood, if you will— along with study of its verbal design. The period’s aesthetic is usually reduced to a rhetoric of transparent didacticism known as the “plain style.” Specialists have illuminated the complexity of this style and have alerted scholars to popular mediating traditions of devotion such as emblem books, “composition of place,” eschatological gravestones, and the double-bind r hetoric of ministers. 25 But a nagging suspicion remains that most see the era’ s devout settlers either as colonial Malvolios, selfinterestedly torturing text, or as dr y literalists, blandly naming dogs “Moreover,” as one story has it, because a version of the Lazarus passage from Luke reads “Moreover the dog came and licked his sores” (Luke 16.21). With attention to bibliographical theor y and information history, we can see how a rich textual aesthetics based on book format characterizes this devotional literary culture. Within the field of book histor y, editorial theorists are usually the most adventurous when defending literary value, none more so perhaps than Jerome McGann in The Textual Condition.26 With pedagogical clarity, his book presents scholarly vocabular y for textual analysis, protocols for classroom assignments, practical case studies, and a conser vative selection of canonical texts. But this institutional function masks a more radical claim for literary value. McGann argues for a distinction between historical writing and art-writing. For McGann, historical records are intended to transmit information and their concrete documentar y manifestations do not have a relevant aesthetic dimension. On the other hand, literary writing is characterized by different and multiple levels of intentionality (including authorial and nonauthorial agents) and by different and multiple documentar y forms. Literar y works are conveyed through a network of both linguistic codes and bibliographic (or documentary) codes; they are polyvocal and mediated, refusing transparency

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via both the rich imagination of the author and the mediating agents of editors, institutions, and the artifacts themselves; they are a place where “metaphor and metonymy thrive”; and they are subject to multiple editions and wide dispersal. McGann calls this phenomenon the thickening of literary discourse. The elevation of art-writing here—derived perhaps from the narrow range of authors and texts that comprise McGann’ s canon—limits the reach of the theor y. Indeed, rather than separating artistic creations from historical documents, we might better use this vocabulary to understand the aesthetic effects of writing and reading practices within certain social formations. 27 To wit, the social context of writing, publication, and reading in the early modern period differs significantly from the post-1700 W est; it is, most obviously, a profoundly religious era, such that art-writing of the kind practiced by the Romantic and post-Romantic authors McGann prefers is a less germane category.28 Thus even if we accept a division between the literar y and the historical, a sociology of the text in the pre1700 West—with its massive publication of religious titles and its modes of ritualized, intensive reading for ordinar y book owners with small libraries—asks us to weigh another categor y of discourse: the sacred. Sacred text is both informational and aesthetic, intended, on the one hand, to communicate ideas didactically and deliver literal truths, and, on the other, to exist in multiple forms and voices thick with linguistic and bibliographic codes that mediate and reimagine its information. For New England no less than the pious enclaves of early modern Europe, Judeo-Christian scripture is the discursive mode that is especially thick: multiply voiced through preachers and dissenters; widely dispersed as the Bible and as quoted text in all of the religious genres; appearing in multiple forms through not only different biblical editions but via sermons and devotional manuals; revealed through a variety of bibliographic codes including the graphic, the printed, and the scribal (such as commonplace books and auditor notebooks); and subject to ambiguous intentions. Aesthetics in early New England might be usefully measured by retaining McGann’ s language—his interest in “multiple artistic intentionalities” and the “aesthetic dimension of documentary materials”—and applying it to textual experience within the colonists’ devotional culture. 29 Thickness also refers more prosaically to the bricklike quality of these six-hundred-page reference works. Consideration of a book’ s format and its role as an informational system illuminates its aesthetic implications. What is a book? Most generally, we understand a codex as a set of leaves of roughly the same size, sequenced in series, and clasped or bound on one side. A codex also consists of a main text and a set of “paratexts,” the ancillar y items that surround the main text: title page,

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frontispiece, preface, dedication, table of contents, index, illustration, and advertisement; but also physical elements such as boards, binding, furniture, clasps, and ties. These features distinguished the codex from the ubiquitous forms of print and speech in early modern culture; that is, the cultural work of the codex for, say, the early Americanist must be differentiated from broadsides, blank forms, and proclamations. Further, such paratexts are themselves expressive, achieving their aesthesis through the engagement of eye, ear, and hand. A long view of the codex—compared to the scroll format preceding it—underscores the utility and aesthetics of the thick style. As a reference system, the book is akin to the library; and, in this view, Alexandria replaces Mainz as an origin for the histor y of books as a field of study . James O’Donnell argues that the Egyptian librar y of the third centur y B.C.E. began “a larger cultural project: to make knowledge available to nonlinear access in as many ways as possible.” The Alexandrian librar y was a home for readers; it did not, however , house codices. The limitations of the scroll in terms of size and durability were compounded by its lack of navigability . Regarding the dissemination of information in the W est, the development of the codex format and its adoption between the second and fifth centuries C.E. was crucial. Relative to the scroll, more and varied materials could be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled in a single, codex unit. Moreover, nonlinear access was now not just a function of a librar y’s rows and rows of pigeonholes (the Alexandrian shelving system) but was built into the book itself. A codex’s navigational aids—both internal (canon tables, alphabetized indices, running heads, rubrics, page numbers) and external (concordances, indices, catalogues) permitted cross-referencing, multiplying ways of accessing information.30 The bee figure indicates how a book was used as a storehouse of art and information. A trope for reading that extends backward to Plutarch and for ward to eighteenth-centur y Philadelphia, the bee reader works with the codex to extract and deposit information discontinuously .31 Reference works from the period drew on this figure: an early modern dictionary was known as an “alvear y.” Other metaphors from the period—the florilegium tradition, the garrison, or the wooded forest, as in Ben Jonson’s commonplace book “Timber”—ser ve similarly. Paul Griffiths importantly explains the anthology and the commonplace book as genres of religious reading, with special emphasis on the floral trope’ s etymological sources and readerly effects. 32 But the bee metaphor has a particular power for devout settlers. It integrates the other common tropes for reading in early New England: the bee suggests the directional motion of the pilgrim, while it evokes the hovering stasis of the ruminator. The codex, its paratext–main text dynamics, and the steady but

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active bee become means to measure the consciousness and materiality of book culture in early New England. Book-based research has been slow to locate the codex format in different historical contexts, assessing how navigational aids were exploited, how discontinuous reading was practiced, how random access was nurtured or thwarted. 33 So too, book histor y has been fairly mute with respect to aesthetics, preferring instead to explore the contingencies of value that have defined the literary. The seventeenth-century’s steady sellers provide opportunities for study on both fronts, permitting investigation into the thickening, in an aesthetic sense, of religious discourse, and into the thickening, in codexical terms, of textual formats. Devotional steady sellers share the traits McGann associates with art-writing: dispersed widely through multiple editions; mediated through oral performance, title-page illustration, and visible language; imagined in rich figures and varied voices; expressive in both their verbal content and documentary form. The typical steady seller is, also, an encyclopedic handbook to practical divinity , a volume that is short and tubby , as thick as a brick. The most popular titles of New England’s first generation—Bayly’s The Practise of Pietie, Scudder’s The Christian’s Daily Walke, and Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven—are reference works that rely on an index and a table of contents to guide readers to passages. One read these works the way one reads a cookbook, using the index to locate information; but rather than a recipe, one would find “Nine manifest tokens of damnation,” or “the fear full effects of whoredom” or an apt prayer or meditation. In a world where the most popular print forms—almanacs and scripture—were read daily in a discontinuous fashion, it is surprising that Ian Green, the foremost authority on the steady sellers, hesitates on this point: of Bayly’ s work, he says “Per haps it was not meant to be read from cover to cover, but dipped into at need.” But this might also betray our understandable disposition to see books as linear narratives. The thick style of the devotional steady sellers clarifies the role books play as informational systems, all the while revaluing the aesthetic experience of pious writers and readers in early New England. 34

The Biblical Epitome Psalm 119, David’ s reverential treatment of God’ s Word, is per haps the model for pious reading in Reformation culture. The psalmist represents David turning to and obeying divine law as a means of current and eternal comfort during his time of affliction under Saul, a situation analogous to all worldly readers of the holy W ord properly humbled. Along with primers and catechisms, psalms ser ved as entr y texts into literacy for New Englanders. Steady-seller Edmund Calamy explains Psalm 119’s

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centrality: “As the book of Psalms is stiled by Luther; An Epitome of the Bible, or a little Bible: So may this Psalm fitly be called An Epitome of the Book of Psalms.” Devotional steady sellers repeatedly invoke Psalm 119 as the ideal scene of reading. The application in Henr y Stubbes’ sermon on conscience advises readers to emulate David’s piety from verses 6 and 9. Thomas Doolittle’s A Call to Delaying Sinners is structured by verse 60 (“I made haste and delayed not to keep thy Commandments”), and exclaims as it moves from T ext to Doctrine “here is a Copy for you all to write after!” Instructions for reading from Thomas Vincent’ s preface to Words of Advice to Young Men and from William Dyer’s Uses in the “Cabinet of Jewels” sermon from Christ’s Famous Titles cite Psalm 119. For Joseph Alleine’s Alarme to the Unconverted, it is the paradigm for establishing a personal covenant with God.35 Such alternate uses convey the wide dispersal and multiple agencies of meaning associated with sacred text.36 The steady sellers call on the Book of Psalms’s longest work because it catalogues the behavioral mores of the redeemed subject within puritanism’s devotional style. One of the formal conceits that immediately strikes the reader (in the original Hebrew or in translation) is that each of the 176 lines features a synonym for the T orah: namely , “law ,” “statutes,” “precepts,” “ordinances,” “testimonies,” “judgments,” “commandments,” “word,” and “name.” Each shows David lyrically speaking to the Lord in a relationship grateful to God for the presence of the text: “At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee: because of thy righteous judgments” (v. 62); “Quicken me after thy loving kindness: so shall I keep the testimony of thy mouth” (v . 88); “T rouble and anguish have taken hold on me: yet thy commandments are my delights” (v. 143). The almost obsessive repetition is stitched into an appreciation equally obsessed with conduct: the word is designed for instruction and per formance. The psalm ser ves Paul’ s “fleshy tablets” image from 2 Corinthians to figure heart piety—“Thy word have I hid in mine heart: that I might not sin against thee” (v. 11)—while reporting the heart’s affective drive in verses such as “I have inclined mine heart to perform thy Statutes, always, even unto the end” (112). David conceives of himself as pilgrim, witnessed in the psalm’ s first verse (“Blessed are the undefiled in the way: who walke in the Law of the LORD”); as a ruminator , statically contemplating the holy word (“O how love I thy Law! It is my meditation all the day ,” v. 97); and, in the power ful conflation of verse 54, both: an anchored traveler (“Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage”). Finally , David models preparator y humiliation, citing the virtues of disciplinary affliction (“It is good for me that I have been afflicted: that I might learne thy statutes” [v. 71]) and the sensory, alvearial pleasures of the text (“How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter then honey to my mouth!” [v . 103]).37

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The other striking formal feature that clarifies Psalm 119’s thick, compendious function is its status as an abecedar y: like a handful of the psalms and the Lamentations poetry, the original is an alphabetic acrostic, its twenty-two eight-line strophes following the sequence of the Hebrew alphabet, each of the eight lines within a stanza beginning with the letter to which the strophe is dedicated. 38 With a notable exception, English versions did not translate the form exactly, but did reproduce or transliterate the Hebrew letters and explain the procedure. 39 Coupled with the more distinctive constraint of the repeated Torah synonyms, the abecedary’s regulation produces a nonlinear collect of moods, addresses, and dispositions. In this sense, Psalm 119 is an information system, a storehouse of proverbs with a topic (David as exemplum in his relationship to the W ord) but without narrative coherence or progression. Modern scholars divide the psalm into discrete songs, petitions, and appeals, but contemporar y commentators likewise saw the text as a reference system. Annotating it as a “Dictionarie,” Calvin observed in his headnote paraphrase the difficulty of capturing the psalm: “it is hard to shew in a breefe summme what it conteyneth.” “The Psalm is without title, and for the matter of it, drives no particular subject,” wrote George Abbot, “but partly by the Psalmists own example, and partly by rule is represented what is requisite to enter a man into, and carrie him through a holy life, specially in an afflicted state; which are promiscuously scattered throughout the Psalm, promises, precepts, documents, prayers being variously intermingled, and to be taken notice of accordingly by the Reader as they happen in his way.”40 “Scattered” fragments, to be taken up as the reader “happens” upon them: Abbot assumes random-access reading prompted by the alphabetic procedure’ s arbitrariness.41 At the same time, the alphabet, as a system, connotes completeness, a full catalogue of possibilities upon which ever y letter touches. The alphabet’ s Hebrew sequence faintly echoes The New England Primer, another introductor y text for the literate and one whose narrative arc permits folklore and worldliness but is ultimately contained by the Christian associations of its final ten letters. 42 Within the sacred reading matter of early New England, the comprehensiveness of the alphabet aligns with, as a self-sufficient text, the Psalm 119 epitome itself and the Judeo-Christian diptych of the Bible. Consulting versions of Psalm 119 circulating in seventeenth-centur y New England likewise illustrates the thickening of sacred language in the early modern period. Early New Englanders encountered David’s rumination not only in the famous (or infamous) Bay Psalm Book, but in the Geneva and King James Bibles; in psalters by Henr y Ainsworth; in the Bay Psalm Book’ s successor, the New England Psalm Book; in the Sternhold-Hopkins psalms appended to the Book of Common Prayer and bound into Bibles used in the colonies; and, by centur y’s end, the

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Figure 3. A copy of the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, with an upside-down sheet of waste paper covering the inside board. The waste paper is from the double-column Sternhold-Hopkins psalmbook. The Whole Booke of Psalmes (Combridge, Mass.: Stephen Day, 1640), Reserve 1640. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Tate and Brady version. This variety is witnessed in the physique of the American Antiquarian Society’s Bay Psalm Book, which features as an interior pastedown a sheet from the double-column SternholdHopkins psalmbook (Figure 3).43 The Bay Psalm Book is heralded as the “first” American book—that is, the first printed at Harvard’s Cambridge press in 1640—and as the ground upon which the “plain style” is understood: John Cotton’s preface explained that “God’s Altar needs not our pollishings.” Literary historiography finds it both iconic and anti-iconic, a curious dialectic sounded, in a different key , in the seventeenthcentury motivations for its production. It stood as an icon of nonseparating Congregationalism, produced by the first-generation learned of

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Massachusetts Bay to distinguish this community from those implicit in the Church of England’ s Sternhold-Hopkins edition and in the Plymouth separatists’ use of Ainsworth. By the same token, Cotton’ s oftquoted defense of the plain style served not only to critique ornamented rhetoric, but to advocate for the Bay Psalm Book’s literalism, its proximity to the Hebrew original in a purified translation. Be these intentions as they may, the New England translations existed within a constellation of psalms available to readers. Contextualizing the New England translations of Psalm 119 among the multiple versions in circulation reveals variants that suggest the complex literar y culture of the period. 44 While normative in Massachusetts Bay and, by the 1690s, most other New England colonies, the locally authored psalmbooks were significantly transatlantic and followed the classic r hythms of the steady seller trade: ubiquitous, exported from the metropole, sold next to whalebone and snuff. But further, the Bay Psalm Book and its successor feature variants in Psalm 119 that, while not protonationally exceptionalist, do explain the materialist aesthetics of puritanism as a devotional style. 45 Variants in sound and sense mark substantive differences between versions of Psalm 119 available to English settlers. Comparison of verses 25–28—the first half of a song of supplication that embodies the devotional act of preparator y humiliation—ser ves as an illuminating example. The King James Bible reads: 25. My soule cleaueth vnto the dust: quicken thou mee according to thy word. 26. I haue declared my wayes, and thou heardest me: teach me thy Statutes. 27. Make me to vnderstand the way of thy precepts: so shall I talke of thy wonderous workes. 28. My soule melteth for heauines: strengthen thou me according vnto thy word.

“Cleave”’s antithetical meanings—to attach and to sever—capture the paradox of puritan piety, the dominant tenor of humiliation and mortality qualified by an implicit separation from such dust, a quickening petitioned for in the verse’ s second colon. The chiasmic content of verses 26–27, with David’ s declarations and “talke” bracketing a desire for divine learning, is itself sandwiched between a repetition of sentiments, with verse 28 echoing 25 in form and content, the speaker again abased, again with assonantal emphasis (“unto the dust” becomes “melteth for heaviness”), and now requesting strength. The Geneva version is similar in most respects, but it omits the assonance of 25 (“unto” is “to”) and the consonance of 28 (the “th” of “melteth” appears only twice, with “strengthen thou me” reading as “raise me up”). What the King James gains in poetry need not distract us from a key variant in the Geneva that influenced the popular psalmbooks: in 27, “so shal I talke of” reads as “and I wil meditate in.” Ainsworth, Sternhold-Hopkins, and the Massa-

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chusetts Bay psalmbooks opt for the ruminative meanings of the Geneva rather than the social conversation of the King James. Within the rhetorical variety, a sensibility stressing cyclical repetition and meditative stasis recurs. Both Geneva and King James Bibles circulated in early New England, and a speculative digression on the intersections between format, readership, and theology might fruitfully broaden the close study of “talke” and “meditate” in the verse 27 variants found in Psalm 119. Title-page engravings allude to a similar dichotomy. As David Daniell observes, the 1560 Geneva text features an inset picture of the Red Sea parting, a limitless horizon that invites readers in; scriptural citations frame the inset, all referring to God’s sovereignty. Contrast this ruminative image of vernacular access and personal submission to the King James’ s “ordered massivity”: typically architectural, the populated engraving builds a wall, as it were, above which Saints Peter and Paul stare outward at the reader, in elevated station. Social authority is reinforced in the language of the page, which refers to “his Majesties special Commandment” and to “Robert Barker , Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie”—and which, while common enough as layout, reverses the Geneva format by framing the inset words with visual imager y. Social exchange is highlighted as well, however, because the Bible is, we learn from the inset, “to be read in Churches.” Harry Stout discerns a comparable tension in the spiritualizing thrust of the Geneva, with marginal commentar y in the Old T estament organized around the promise of Christ, and the covenant doctrine enabled by the King James, which omitted marginal exegesis and rendered the Hebrew books a model of social order for Bay Colony orthodoxy. Delivered through the apparatus, the 1560 version stressed, for Stout, a Covenant of Grace, a personal and introspective relation emptied of the national or federal notions of covenant that would energize leaders of the Great Migration as they deployed the 1611 text. Leaders would “talke of” God’ s wondrous works, to establish governance, rather than “meditate in” them, to prepare for individual salvation. The use of explanatory annotation cinched these dispositions, with the individual reader anchored in the Geneva format’ s mise-en-page. While it does not ser ve critics to align the 1560 translation with dissent and individualism—the bossy glosses tend to control interpretation— the Geneva seems especially conducive to the repetition and stasis of meditative reading.46 To return to Psalm 119, the psalmbook translations were designed for singing and supply pattern through clear meters and r hyme schemes; but they too draw on a thick style of sonic echoes and figurative range to present a recursive, ruminative sensibility. That the lengthiest work from the psalter was sung we know from Sewall, who reverted to its melody by

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accident once: “July , 5 [1713] . . . I tried to set Low-Dutch T une and 47 fail’d. T ry’d again and fell into the tune of the 119th Psalm.” Ainsworth’s pentameter couplets dwell in alliteration for verse 27 (“ that in thy marvels, meditate I may”) and—contra Calvin’s commentary—figure the soul in weeping stasis for verse 27 (“ My soul it droppeth tears for heavy payn”). The neat closure of the couplets achieve a “thee/mee” rhyme in 26, without the power ful, compressed apposition of “thou me” in the King James. The metaphor of the soul cleaving to the dust becomes a vitiated simile in William Whittingham’ s translation for SternholdHopkins (“I am, alas, as brought to grave”). The latter’s common meter renders the four verses as sixteen lines, with 27 providing a distinctive Torah synonym and weighted rhyme: Teach me once thoroughly for to know thy precepts and thy lore: Thy works then will I meditate, and lay them up in store. The Lord’ s “lore” laid up in “store”: in Sternhold-Hopkins, the crux around “talke”/“meditate” in 27 precipitates a sense of the storage potential of scriptural text, an emphasis furthered by internal r hymes across the two eight-line stanzas (“Restore therefore” [v. 25]; “sore”; “according”; “therefore”; “Lord” [v . 28]). The regulated poetics of verse translations suggest temporal development—note the causality of Whittingham’s “Teach me . . . then will I”—and closure; yet they are also spatial structures within which contemplative meanings derived from sound and image bloom. 48 The colonially based psalmbooks translated first by Richard Mather , John Eliot, and Thomas Weld among others, and revised by Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon feature variants at the level of diction and appearance—what McGann calls the linguistic and bibliographic codes—that sharpen our notion of a thickened aesthetics for early New England (Figure 4). In terms of verbal art, the “literalism” of the Bay Psalm Book has been for readers ever since its virtue and its fault: the translators advocated for its closeness to the Hebrew, while critics have decried such a need for correspondence, because it fails to harmonize with Englishlanguage metrics. But independent of these subjective measures of aesthetic value, the literalism resulted in the only English-language version widely circulated that reproduced the abecedar y, in a modified form: the New England translations begin each eight-line strophe with the appropriate letter in sequence from the English alphabet (dropping “I,” “U,” “X,” and “Z” to arrive at twenty-two letters). By dictating the opening words for each strophe, such a procedure removes the translation

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not only from its English-language kin, but also from its Hebrew original, since the constraint of the English alphabet differs semantically from the constraint of the Hebrew alphabet. “Literalism” is a bogey in considering Psalm 119; its alphabetic procedure necessarily creates expressive variants, such as the fourth section we have been examining, the “Daleth” or “D” unit that begins with verse 25: d (4) Daleth Downe to the dust my soule cleav’ s fast: o quicken mee after thy word. I show’d my wayes & thou mee heardst: thy statutes learning mee afford. Thy precepts way make mee to know: so I’le muse on thy wondrous wayes. My soule doth melt for heaviness: according to thy word mee rayse. Oriented to the alphabetic sequence, the Hebrew letterform, its transliteration “Daleth,” and—in later editions—the raised initial “D” locate the reader visually in the space of the page, not in the flow of the verbal discourse. The alliterative freight of “Downe to the dust,” with the line’s inverted syntax, likewise gives priority to the setting, not the psalmist, to abject placement, not speakerly spirituality . Whatever one might say about the clumsy tetrameter , the translators address 27’ s crux innovatively, abandoning the sociality of the King James version and substituting “muse” for the Geneva’ s “meditate.” Then as now , early modern English’s “muse” denoted pondering and reflection; but it lacked the strict interiority of “meditation” and, with its etymological traces in the gestures of the face, connoted the activity of gazing. Such sensor y meditation could take as its spectacle the bibliographic code of this psalm translation, its sequential presentation of the English alphabet, an ocular cue in the form of a modified acrostic. Almost all commentators mention that the abecedar y is a memor y aid; but, importantly , the aid functions only through visible language (rather than, say, the sound patterns of rhyme or the mental images of the “art of memory”).49 The 1640 Bay Psalm Book is certainly plain relative to Ainsworth’s double columns of prose, verse, and music, and it botches the typography of the raised initial when presenting the strophe’ s “D.” But twenty of the twenty-two strophes in the 1640 edition feature the oversized initial letter, all twenty raised except the cleaner drop initial “A” and all thus sharing space visually with Hebrew character and word. Hence the psalm’ s formatting, however flawed, is visually expressive of the systems of sacred memor y subtending devotional culture. The New England Psalm Book of 1651,

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which replaced the 1640 edition, thickens the psalm by presenting two versions of the lengthy text, one slightly changed from the 1640 translation, the other wholly revised in common meter . In the latter , verse 27 presents yet another alternate: “Learn me thy Precepts why, and so / thy wonders I’le record.” A tidy solution, the verb “record” signified meditation, narration, and inscription in the early modern period; it conjoined the rumination of the Geneva and the conversation of the King James, while alluding to the act of documentation. But the movement from “talke” to “muse” to “record” glimpses a larger difference with the New England translations. Alluding to the gift register of sacred textuality for the devout, verse 111 is another compelling example, as it features variants that capture the centrality of the noun “record” to the Bay and New England versions (Figure 4). The Geneva reads “Thy testimonies haue I taken as an heritage for euer: for they are the ioye of mine heart”: David claims scripture as a parent’ s present. All the central early modern English translations in scripture, psalters, or psalmbooks present verse 111’ s T orah synonym as “testimonies,” “testaments,” or “law.” But the Bay Psalm Book reads “Thy recods [sic] are mine heritage / for aye: for my hearts joy they bee” while the 1651 New England Psalm Book corrects the misprint to read “Thy Records I inherit do / For ay for my hearts joy they bee” and “Thy Records ever I possess / For glad my heart they do.” The only aspect of the Bay Psalm Book scholars love to malign more than its literalism is its crude printing, but might we, indeed, recode this error to acknowledge the variant’s presence in the text? The New England versifiers consistently translate the Hebrew ‘e-do- t as “Records,” the T orah synonym a noun appearing in place of “T estimonies” up to sixteen times in the common meter version of the revised 1651 version. 50 In both New England translations it is first used in the second verse (“Blest such as doe his records keepe: / with their whole heart him seek also), and, in the tetrameter, it carries for ward to verse 168 (“I keep thy rules & thy records: / for all my waies before thee bee”). With its allusion to memory, preservation, and inscription and its ancestry in the language of the heart, “record,” as diction, witnesses the material aesthetics of ritual piety among the New England devout. Finally, Psalm 119 takes pride of place in indices to the psalms featured in the later New England translations. Beginning with the 1695 edition, the index arranges the first lines of individual psalms alphabetically, keying the line to the psalm number , presented in arabic numerals in a separate column. For Psalm 119, however , the first line of each alphabetic strophe is also included in the index, such that the psalm has twenty-two separate entries (Figure 5). The psalm is denoted “cxix” in the psalm number column for each of the twenty-two entries. Using the

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Figure 4. The page showing verses 101–14 of Psalm 119 in the Bay Psalm Book, and detail from the “O” strophe (verse 111). The Whole Booke of Psalmes (Cambridge, Mass.: Stephen Day, 1640).

roman numerals to conser ve the arabic font’ s “1” and “9,” the index’ s “cxix” is nevertheless visually distinct from the rest of the column. Somewhat erratically, the alphabetic letter is also entered as part of a separate column between the first line and numeral column; thus the letterforms are repeated as both heading and column. In his sermons on Psalm 119,

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Figure 5. The beginning of the alphabetically arranged first-line index to the psalms in the New England Psalm Book ( The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old and New Testament [Boston, 1695]). Notice that the first line of each of Psalm 119’s strophes is given a separate entry, such that the fourth, for example, is included as “Down to the dust” and listed as “cxix” in the right column. Psalm 119 would be flagged (erratically) as well. The strophe’s letter would sit between the first-line column and the psalm number in the right column: see the “A,” “B,” “C,” and “E” entries in this example, but not the “D,” “F ,” and “G.”

Calvin imaginatively plays on this indexical meaning. Distinguishing between knowledge of Latin and of the vernacular , Calvin stresses that God’s doctrine is “common as well to the learned as to the unlearned. . . Let us then reckon and tell upon our fingers, as we have learned our A. B. C. Let us then joyne eight verses together, and so eight by eight, & go through the whole crosserow, and we shall have the whole Psalme at our fingers endes.”51 The culture of indexical literacy is manifest both in the content of Psalm 119 and in the physical apparatus that choreographs readerly use of this privileged text. While the abecedar y, the use of “record,” and the index distinguish the colonial version of Psalm 119, the New England psalmbooks were

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themselves part of the steady sellers’ transatlantic and gift-intensive literary culture. Though four editions were printed locally in 1640, 1651, 1695, and 1698, London and Amsterdam print-houses published seven more editions between 1640 and 1700, finding a Nonconformist English audience and an export market in the colonies. Settlers depended on the metropole, even for their “first” book, locally authored and, on occasion, colonially printed. John Usher’ s invoices list “50 New England Psalms” imported in 1683, fifty in 1684, and twenty in 1685, while the Michael Perr y inventor y of 1700 suggests an imported edition of the same, since they are conjoined in the entr y to Bibles, which were not printed in the colonies: “13 Bibles in 12o gilt, N: E: Psalms.” The Usher list also indicates that in 1683 at least fifty copies were ordered for Thomas Shepard II, whose purchase was then entered into a gift economy of congregational supply or ministerial largesse. 52 In verse 111 of Psalm 119, the scriptural record is the Lord’s gift to humankind, and actions such as Shepard’ s emulate this hierarchical benevolence through the social strata of early New England. As information system, creative resource, and obligating gift, Psalm 119 comprehends texts as spatial objects, foregrounding their ritual function among pious New Englanders.

“The A. B. C. of Godliness” Nonconformist martyr Edmund Calamy (1600–1666) never visited New England, but his steady seller The Godly Man’s Ark settled there. Calamy was in the thick of midcentury London’s religious politics. Appointed at St. Mary Aldermanbury, Calamy voiced a moderate Presbyterianism that alienated radicals and Laudians, a position that Calamy published in one-off print exchanges. More famously, he is the “EC” in the jointly authored “Smectymnuus”’s An Answer to a Book Entitled “An Humble Remonstrance,” the critique of episcopacy which prompted John Milton’ s inflammatory apology. Opposing the regicide and favoring the restoration of Charles II, Calamy kept his appointment after 1660 but could not abide the 1662 Act of Uniformity and was ejected from his seat. Still attending the church in 1663, he took to the pulpit when the priest was absent, a defiance that landed him in Newgate. He died shortly after the 1666 fire. This is memorable drama, but historians of devotion would listen to a different rhythm, based on the less topical but equally enduring body of Calamy’s meditative literature. Opening the text of Psalm 119’ s verse 92—“Unless thy Law had been my delights, I should then have perished in mine afflictions”—The Godly Man’s Ark went through seventeen editions by 1693, appearing on the Robert Boulter list and repeatedly on the Usher invoices. This steady seller is a composite: its first section is a funeral sermon for Elizabeth Moore, the publisher John Hancock’ s sis-

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ter; it then features a sermon series that emerged from the first, its sequence building to a thirteen-step program for conduct, a set of applications or “uses” in the fifth and final sermon that mirrors the genre movement of text-doctrine-use in the individual puritan sermon; it concludes with “Elizabeth Moore’s Evidences,” an appendix of private writing “composed and collected by her in the time of her health, for her comfort in the time of sickness.” 53 The composite form and collective function are apt to the work’s rhetorical strategy: Calamy imagines scripture, Psalm 119, and readerly subjectivity as a storehouse, a site to collect God’s commands, delights, and promises. Calamy targeted a reader caught in the potential despair of preparatory humiliation—the “Afflicted” and “wounded Conscience” that typifies devotional subjectivity—so that she or he might apply the promises appropriately and thus be consoled, comforted, and heartened. His preface explains that, “ to help a doubting Christian to perform this great work, there are thirteen plain Rules and Directions laid down in the following Treatise.” The treatise implicitly proposes two ideal readers, under external afflictions analogous to the situation of the actual audience. First, Calamy rendered Elizabeth Moore exemplar y, his brief “T o present you with the Pattern of a Woman whom God did pick out to make an example of great affliction, and great patience, that when you come into great troubles, you may bee comforted with those comforts, with which shee was comforted” and “To acquaint you with the pains shee took, and with her diligence in time of health to make her salvation sure; That so you may bee provoked to lay up suitable, seasonable, and sufficient provision against an evil day, and not have your Evidences for Heaven to get in the hour of adversity.” Second, he referred to David himself, who “found in the Law of God” while under Saul’ s banishment “great benefit and comfort”; indeed, Calamy cites authorities to argue that David had a copy of the Torah with him, helping him to avoid the heathenish impurities of the Philistines. The treatise also illustrates the readerly dispositions of pilgrimage and rumination that characterized the life of piety . The devout’s salvific progress is modeled in images of readerly movement—“remember Cranmer and Ridley, the former learnt the New Testament by heart in his journey to Rome, the latter in Pembroke-Hall Walks in Cambridge”—and it is imagined in a sacred temporality: “Let us make it appear that we are Saints in deed, and in truth, not onely Saints in Mans, but in Gods Calender, by following the example of holy David.” Equally though, the devout’ s anchored meditation is modeled by Thomas à Kempis, who follows Cranmer and Ridley in Calamy’s series as a reader of the Gospels, but as one who “found rest no where, nisi in angulo, cum libello; but in a corner with this Book in his hand.” So too, Calamy advised readers of the means of textual consolation: “the great

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reason why the people of God walk uncomfortably in their afflictions, is, because they do not chew the Promises; they are rare Cordials, but as a man cannot taste the sweetness of a Cordial, unless hee chew it, no more can wee receive any spiritual refreshment from the Promises, unless wee meditate on them.” These modes and ideals of reading were to be emulated by the doubting Christian reader that is Calamy’s intended audience. 54 Such readerly attitudes were to ser ve the broader program of emotional uplift and cognitive dissonance patterned by disciplinar y piety. “Afflictions teach us to know God Experimentally and affectionatively,” writes Calamy, “not cerebraliter (as Calvin saith) but cordialiter, so to know him, as to love and fear him, and to flye unto him as our rock and hidingplace in the day of our distress.” Feeling enables knowing, and the devotional subject’ s affective life is a source of delight and joy . W orldly pleasures are compared to the Word, and found wanting—“whilst others take pleasure in Hunting, Hawking, Carding, Dicing, Eating, and Drinking, the Saints of God can say with Austin, Sacrae Scripturae tuae sunt sanct ae deliciam meae, Thy Holy Scriptures are my holy delights”—and the Word is valued intrinsically, for its sweetness and lovability . For the despairing Christian, “The Promises are the kisses of Iesus Christ, they discover his dear love, and when hee discovers to us our interest in them, then hee kisses us with the kisses of his mouth, and fills us with joy unspeakable and glorious.” Further, Calamy encourages meditation on the resurrected body, when “our vile bodies [will be] like unto the glorious Body of Christ.” These means of comfort were augmented by the classic paradox of devotion promulgated by ministers: “The more sensible thou art of thine own unworthiness to lay hold upon the Promises, the more thou art fitted and qualified to lay hold upon them.” This “unworthiness” culminates, however, in a portrait of the devout that is not fully a growth in grace. Calamy defies the complacency that might come with assurance, for “Hee that saith hee hath grace enough, hath grace little enough. Hee that stints himselfe in his endeavours after grace, never had true grace. Wee must labour to bee perfect, as God is perfect.” The treatise maintains the protocols of both consolator y progress and cyclical abjection that structured devotional life.55 The Godly Man’s Ark calls on the gift register of early New England textuality to communicate these paradoxes of piety . In sermon 4, Calamy promotes attention to the promising W ord by delineating two kinds of failed readers, the “presumptuous sinner”—his antireader—and the “poor, distressed, humble Christian,” his targeted audience: “A wicked man studieth his Corruptions too little. A distressed Christian too much. If hee did study the Promises, as much as he doth his corruptions; hee would not walk so uncomfortably .” T o study the promises, however , heartens because of the free gift of God’s grace, which provides despair-

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ing readers with consolation and, in theor y, relieves them of reciprocal effort: “But hee never studies, nor ponders the promising W ord, for if hee did, hee would quickly know . . . for his everlasting comfort . . . That there is nothing required by God in his Word as our duty, but God hath either promised to bestow it upon us as his gift, or the Saints have prayed to God for it as his gift.” God’s affection is seemingly unconditional. “Y ou must meditate upon the freenesse of the Promises,” writes Calamy, for “The Promises are the outward discoveries of Gods eternal love to his people.” This eternal love nevertheless is framed in contractual terms. “By promising [God] makes himself a debtor” to his people. “The sense of Gods love to us, will kindle a love in us to God,” continues Calamy; indeed, “The love of God constrains us, as saith Paul, 2 Cor. 5. 14. There is a compulsive and constraining power in love.” Covenant logic expects such a counter-gift, of course, and Calamy addresses the arrangement’ s economy explicitly in the final sermon. “Christ is promised” upon “condition,” and, to the interjected question “Doth not the mentioning of a condition take away the freeness of the tender of Christ?” Calamy answers: “By no means. The reason is, because this very condition is the free gift of God. The Apostle saith, Rom. 4. 16. Therefore it is of Faith, that it might bee by grace. The condition of Faith doth not make the offer of Christ, not to bee of grace, but therefore it is of faith, that it might bee of grace, for asChrist, so also faith is the gift of God.” The power to believe is equally the gift, the condition that is the precondition of grace. Calamy more patly names requirements, and they overlap with the practices of preparator y humiliation. The next question, “But what is the condition upon which Christ is promised?,” is answered with, again, the obligation of faith; but equally “the disposing, preparing, and fitting us for an interest in Christ” is conditioned on “the sight of our sins, the sense of them, and a real willingness to part with them.” Calamy repeatedly cast his readers as heirs to a legacy, recipients of God’s gifts; but this impossible economy, with its generosity and obligations, amounts to a double-bind communication, the thickened r hetoric of ambiguity useful to ministerial efforts at conversion and reconversion.56 More generally, The Godly Man’s Ark is exemplary in its thickness, both aesthetically and informationally. The steady seller’s thick style is flagged by the title itself: “ark” signifies multiply, drawing on its Judeo-Christian associations with both the storage device for the T orah and the site of mobile refuge for those in distress. In terms of its verbal aesthetics, Calamy is liberal, not literal. He stretches “Law” in the psalm verse to mean not just the Torah but rather the entirety of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles: “By Law in this place is meant, all those books of the Scripture which were written when this Psalm was penned. But I shall handle it in a larger sense, as it comprehends all the Books both of the Old and

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New T estament.” The treatise’ s multiple voices are heard through Calamy’s preaching, his preface and apologies—sermons 3 and 4 are interrupted by an “advertisement” explaining the digressions from the oral ministry that will appear in the subsequent sections of the treatise— Elizabeth Moore’s appeals, and bookseller lists. The texture of the sermons is itself polyvocal, full of cited authorities, plain directions, and occasional anecdotes. But this polyvocality is felt most palpably in Calamy’s balance of a learned Latin and an ordinar y vernacular. As the quoted examples have shown, Calamy presents Latin and then translates it, invoking his ministerial authority while also rendering his knowledge accessible. Yet he also insistently develops multiple images to present creatively his tract’s exhortation to ruminate on the promises. “As a Bee dwells (as it were) upon the flower,” so a meditating reader hovers above scripture. As “ Nepotianus, a young Gentleman of Rome” memorizes the holy Word through meditation, so he “made his breast the Librar y of Christ.”57 Indeed, “ark” is but one figure that Calamy deploys to redescribe the holy Word as a storage container and reference system. In terms of information theory, then, scripture is fashioned as an “Alabaster box,” an “Apothecaries shop,” “a spiritual Armory,” and—in the etymological echo of a later textual format—a “ Magazine,” out of which readers may “fetch” cordials, cures, and weapons. 58 The theme is established as Calamy opens the text of Psalm 119.92: “It is penu doctrina publicum unicuique apta & convenienta distribuens, a publick store-house of heavenly doctrines, distributing fit and convenient instructions to all the people of God . . . [it is] fitly called, A holy Alphabet for Sions Scholars; the A.B.C of godliness. Sixtus Senensis calls it, An Alphabetical Poem. The Jews are said to teach it their little Children the first thing they learn, and therein they take a very right course, both in regard of the heavenly matter, and plaine stile fitted for all capacities.” As David “fetched [comfort] out of the word,” so contemporary readers are to understand scripture as scattered fragments that become retrievable information: a “garden” where we should “pick out these flowers” of consolation and a “mine” in which we must “digge.” Calamy avows fragmentar y reading, arguing that “A man may read a Chapter, and hear a Sermon, and taste no sweetness in them at one time, and at another time taste much sweetness in them, as God is pleased to co-operate with the reading of the one, and hearing of the other”; and he presents discrete passages from the Bible for readers to contemplate. “The Scripture is bespangled with Promises,” writes Calamy, “as the Heavens are with stars.” The subjects of these spatial metaphors of disjunct singularity—flowers in gardens, stars in a dark sky—were to be collected, however, and Calamy enjoins readers to list their evidences, gathering the scattered sacred texts for comfort. The preface’s final direction instructs

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the reader to “ make Catalogue” of the promises; the application at the end of first sermon counsels that “we must prepare and provide a stock of Scripture-Promises, which be as so many reviving Cordials, to chear us, and as so many Spiritual Anchors, to uphold us from perishing the day of our tribulation”; the uses at the end of the second implore the reader to catalogue sacred text—“when you read the Bible, and meet with a suitable promise, with which God is pleased to affect your hearts, take the pains to write it down”—and Calamy provides a model for collections in the work of Edward Leigh; and the appendix of Elizabeth Moore’ s evidences were similarly to be emulated. These recontextualized fragments were to be sources of solace, and Calamy, in Rule 13 of the final sermon, concludes the applications with the practice of a “Mrs. Diggons,” Moore’s neighbor, who kept such a journal and which she and Calamy read together at her deathbed. While such collections, as we shall see, served many purposes, Mrs. Diggons’s illustrates the psychic and textual implications of the codex format for the pious in New England. 59

Alphabets, Almanacs, and Evidences Personal miscellanies record reading practices that match Calamy’s thesis: from the learned’s alphabetic commonplace book to the almanac-diary to the pious reader’s “evidences,” the devout gathered fragments of text and stored them in a format—the codex—that permitted both discontinuous consultation and linear progress. Harold Love and David D. Hall arrive at the useful categor y “personal miscellany” to describe the many forms of early modern private writing found in repositories that are not strictly, say, journal or diary.60 But at one level, even the label “miscellany” misleads: as the term describes the random contents, it obscures the physical format. The writings of Thomas W eld, Thomas Paine, and Elizabeth Moore are also and equally books. It is a label that seems too vague but in fact specifies the collecting function of the codex: it stores passages of personal writing and devotional literature that can be navigated for perusal and meditation, in what amounts to a mental scrapbook. Consideration of the allied genres of commonplace book, almanac-diar y, and evidences will help illuminate the singular power of Joseph T ompson’s personal miscellany, study of which will close this chapter. Commonplace books are the most familiar genre of early modern personal writing that served as a navigable storage system, with the alphabet organizing favorite passages of reading or listing references to titles and page numbers of such passages. Associated with the rise of Renaissance humanism, commonplacing revived Greek and Roman educational theories and found early modern models in Erasmus’ s De Copia (London, 1569) and Locke’s New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (1706). Lit-

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erary treatments of the genre privilege its modes of genteel self-fashioning and its presentation of belles lettres, emphases that are distant from devotional concerns; but the genre’s educational function reminds us that commonplacing was consistent with the learned culture of Protestant ministers. William Perkins offered instructions in The Arte of Prophecying, framing his guide to “the framing of Common-place bookes” with verse 18 from Psalm 119. “Have in readiness common-place heads of ever y point of divinitie,” writes Perkins, distinguishing the expressive purposes of the genre for ministers. Perkins directed the formatting of the manuscript book: each page should be titled with a head and divided into columns; a verso should be left blank so that “fresh paper may be put to”; and an “alphabeticall table” of authors and titles should be appended to the commonplace book in order to cross-reference entries and their sources. Perkins unstiffens the codex, suggesting how users manipulated the space and heft of a book to store, recall, and meditate upon textual fragments. 61 Thomas Weld (1653–1702) was the second son of Thomas W eld of Roxbury, and the grandson of the reverend Thomas W eld, the antinomian controversialist, psalmbook translator , and aid to John Eliot. He graduated from Har vard in 1671, held a position as a schoolmaster in Roxbury in 1674 and began to preach in Dunstable in 1679. He was ordained there in 1681, but it was a community that suffered during King William’s War, with two-thirds of the English colonists moving away and with little resources to support the ministry. By the late 1690s there were only 125 inhabitants, and Weld himself died in 1702. His commonplace book’s origins date from a happier time, begun in 1669 when he was at Harvard. Insofar as its first fifteen pages begin with a set of anecdotes and appended to it are poems, epigrams, and journal entries, the document is a miscellany . But its heart is a commonplace book, askew from Perkins’s directions, for it features an alphabetical sequence with corresponding entries, and then features a second alphabetical sequence, the first cross-referenced with page numbers to this latter unit. Indexed under the title “Stories upon hearsay somewhat notable,” the opening anecdotes present a collegian’s irreverence; typical is one that also captures Weld’s sense of textual play: “A waiter upon the fellows being ver y Sharp fit insomuch that he could not tarr y till they had don wt the pie, cuts it open and eats out all the meat, and instead ther of puts in grass and puts on the lid wt this Superscription on it, all flesh is grass.” Other entries supply secularized information, such as a histor y of England under the “E” heading or a text cited for headaches under “H.” One of Weld’s anecdotes, however, points us to the architecture of memory that undergirds both mental disciplines of recall and the spatial disposition of a book: “A man preached a Sermon in commendation of the Saints,

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he began thus, I will begin with St Cr ysistome, his excellence is such, yt I will place him in the first seat of the church. and he was ver y tedious to his auditors . . . he was long in his discourse. at length he come to St Bernard, then saith he, oh blessed St Bernard and where shall I place him, upstarts a man and saith, Sr place in my seat if you please, and so went away and left room for him.” Although the tale mocks boring oratory, its subtext explains how spatial topoi organize knowledge, whether in sermonic per formance, scholarly memor y, or—in the feat that is the codex—the thickened reference work. The impertinent anecdote becomes a mise en abyme for the very commonplace book it heralds. 62 Weld’s document also hews to the mores expected of a learned Protestant being trained in divinity, mores that value pithiness, piety, and deft rhetoric. Entries reveal the impulses of popular religion, such as a variety of ordinary proverbs ministers might use in their face-to-face pastoral care, proverbs comparable to the cheap print classic Old Mr. Dod’s Sayings. Under the “D” heading, he records that “Dancing is a motion of ye flesh”; under “E,” “Our Endowments should be proportionable to our / imployments.” More precise mention of ritualized devotion sur faces as well—under “F,” “On fast dayes everyone should mend somthing”—and Weld conjures a discontinuous literacy that is creatively admonitor y: under “S,” “Sin is the decalogue read backwards in mens lives and conversations.” The tensions of a devotional gift economy for the pious are felt as well. As mentioned above, Weld writes under “P,” that “Would any one have the good of the promise, he must do the works of the precept,”a proverb announcing the reciprocity expected and abjured within Protestant conversion rhetoric. And learned, extractive reading is itself qualified in a commonplace under “K”: “Men yt seek knowledge without grace are bondslaves that dig in the mines of knowledge and others get the gold.” 63 Moreover, many ministerial works that are cross-referenced concern the life of piety; Weld was as interested in the subjective state of devotion as he was in theological debates. In a list of citations adjacent to entries under the head “Affections,” W eld makes general reference to Edward Reynolds’s A Treatise of the Passions (London, 1640) and specific reference to passages on the affections from Edward Leigh’ s massive A Systeme or Body of Divinity, thirty-two pages from a one-thousand-page tome. Other readings from learned writers discuss the per formance of worship, such as W eld’s reminder , under “F ,” to consult Thomas Hall “Against formalitie see Hall on 2 Tim.4.5.” Although W eld’s librar y inventory of 169 titles lists many learned works, it also documents titles such as Hall’s sermon, along with the steady sellers Alarme to the Unconverted, The Practise of Pietie, The Second Spira, the Bay Psalm Book, John Flavel’s treatise on fear , and The Godly Man’s Ark.64 The commonplace

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book follows this mode of practical divinity; the letter “H,” for instance, features proverbs on heaven and hell, dictates on hating sin, and precepts for humbling the self. An anecdote about another wayward sermonizer condenses W eld’s sensibility, his attention to piety’ s conditions and his preoccupation with ministerial per formance: “A man preaching on yt text wtsoever is not of faith is Sin, before a learned Auditory, was often preter textum. a while after one asking him why he did so run from his text and spoke such things as were not contained in it, he gave him this reply, yt it was contained in the first word of his text, viz. whatsoever.” The text of Romans 14.23 expresses a foundational norm for the devout, faith the gift that enables the gift of grace. Yet clearly the tale signals W eld’s understanding of interpretive license, of the thick style’s capacity for multiple meaning. Whatsoever we think of this unflappably neutral anecdote, it suggests the creative resources available to ministers and the imaginative reach expected of audiences. 65 Widely used but unevenly extant, almanac-diaries of the seventeenth century comprised another genre of personal miscellany that gathered fragments of text. Almanacs themselves collected a heterogeneous set of voices, images, and knowledges: astrological lore and the “man of signs,” aphoristic couplets, New Science discourses, pious maxims, calendaric data, and local information about roads and commerce. Austere in the first generation of New England colonization—when they were produced by Har vard divinity students out of the Cambridge print-house—almanacs by 1678 featured this variety, due to competition from the Boston press and almanac-compiler John Tully. This content differentiates them from the steady-selling devotional literature. But, like the steady sellers, almanacs were structured by temporalities both cyclical (the seasonal rhythms of agriculture) and telelological (the dating of an annual within the calendar of God). 66 Like the steady sellers, they comported themselves as conduct literature, allowing the user to read the self through devices like the “man of signs,” an illustration that showed the relationship of body parts to the twelve zones of the zodiac. And, in their attitude to weather, they shared with scripture a sense of predictability, the idea that, existentially, a text might provide security in a random world. Furthermore, booksellers and users interleaved printed almanacs with blank pages, so that they could record daily activities correspondent to the monthly calendar on the facing page. There is per haps no plainer prose than what is conventionally featured in the almanac-diar y—a minimal recording of the day’s events, usually defined by the worldly calling of the writer. Still, the union of predictive almanac and retrospective diar y, of habitual consultation and varied formatting, make for a thickened, interactive genre best understood through its readers. 67 The almanac-diaries of Thomas Paine (1694–1757)—Har vard class of

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1717, Cambridge almanac-maker, marginally dissatisfied minister , and erratically successful merchant—help us comprehend how time was felt and how texts were valued by readers in early New England.68 By examining the annotated almanacs from early in his career, we see Paine’s combination of religious learning, scientific curiosity , and providential obeisance. Before his life as a merchant, the almanac-diaries from 1716 to 1721 venture outward to observe natural phenomena through the lens of the New Science; yet they also look upward to and downward at a devotional hierarchy that governs daily life, such that by 1728 a published sermon by Paine maintains that earthquakes are a product of divine judgment. For the aspiring minister, piety is the scrim through which the world is experienced, and, while the almanac-diaries were a touchstone for empirical knowledge, they were also a storehouse for devotional texts. 69 “Punctual rituals” that are “sources of order ,” almanac-diar y entries marked the social occasions defining, in Paine’ s case, his vocation as learned pastor.70 Along with copious attention to his correspondence, the early years of the almanac-diaries refer to the r hythms of a ministerial social life, where funerals, fasts, and ordinations regularly sur face: Oct. 1717 9 | The reverend Mr Appleton was ordained at Camb. (after a sermon preach’ t by Dr In. Mather ) by ye Impositions of Hands by Dr Increase & Dr . C. Mather ye Revnd Mr. Aringer & Rogers—Ipsw. & Prayer. Dr. I. Mather gave him ye Charge & Dr. C.M. ye Right-Hand of Fellowship. . . . Nov. 1717 1 | Dyed at Boston Capt. Andrew Becher Esq. 8 | Capt. Belcher is ver y magnificently interred. . . . April 1721 20 | A general Fast. Mr Gold preached all Day . 23 | Mr. Cleaverly preached for me at Weymouth. I waited on my Bride to ye New North Meeting wr Mr . Webb preached A.M. Mr Thacher P.M. After Sermon P.M. three Ruling Elders wr ordained, ye Charge give by Mr. Thacher. . . . July 1721 13 | A general Fast on ye Acct. of ye SMALL POX. I preached all Day .

But Paine likewise recorded moments of rupture among these rituals of social order:

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June, 1716: 1 | A Negro man is hanged at Boston for Burglar y. . . . Sept. 1717 13 | Another Day. I went to Boston, wr I ws informed yt a French man . . . lately killed his Wife. . . . Nov. 1717 15 | I ws present at ye Ferry Beech to see ye Execution of 6 Privates wo wr hangd there at abt. 4 P.M. . . . April 1719 24 | I went to ye Prison to visit ye Indian Woman who was yr on suspicion of murdering her bastard-child.

This oscillation also manifested itself in the trade between an empirical interest in astronomical and medical sciences and a reverential concern for mar vels and wonders. The early almanac-diaries featured repeated entries on weather and sky obser vations, mentioning eclipses, telescopes, and sunspots, intensively listed in the Februar y and March notes for 1716/17. By August 1718 he was a schoolmaster in Andover and a student of theology with Thomas Barnard, but continued his astronomical research: “1 | This Day I finish’ t & setup 3 erect Dials on Mr. Barnard’s & his Son’s houses.” A long transcription of an astronomy guide follows this set of early almanacs. Similarly , Paine noted the story of “a Negro Man” who said “he had a living Creature [in his stomach] wc he sometimes heard to cry Chip Chip” and who then “vomitted up a W orm of a prodigious Length & bigness”; Paine explains the means of measuring the worm, its independent verification by a separate observer, and the worm’s dimensions: “one Hundred Twenty & Eight Feet & Four Inches long.” In the 1716 and 1717 diaries, Paine kept a separate sheet at the almanac’s end of “Remarkable Occurrences,” read indexically and indicating a similar concern with the supernatural and the explicable. One entry comments particularly on the kind of wonder evident in a society where the material text carries symbolic power: Sept, 1717 6 | This Day came to my School an Andover Man, . . . desiring to be enformed of ye Meaning of a certain Writing (produc’t by him) wc ws given him by one Dr. Foster, to hang to his Brest to cure ye Feaver & Ague; wc appeared to be an Amulet written in a triangu:lar From with these W ords: A

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until the word so produc’t Aba

Ab

Abar etc. to Abaracadabara wc might yn be read both ways.

In Paine’s early diaries, the impulses of popular religion mix with the scrutiny of a nascent scientist; so too, the disruptions of a social world transgressed were balanced by the ordering function of a ministerial temporality. The almanac-diar y ser ved a collecting function as well, where devotional texts helped provide security as well for the aspiring minister . As with many almanac-diaries of the clergy and, indeed, of the laity , Paine cited the biblical text that organized a day’ s sermon: August, 1716: 30 | At abt 10 A.M. I went to ye Quakers meeting at Boston where I sat with pro: found attention about an Hour + heard not a Word: Then our Lecture being begun I went thither + heard a Sermon preach’t by Mr Sewall from Psalm 39:5. . . . Feb. 1717/18 27 | Was a day of general Fasting thro this Province—Mr. Barnard A.M. Hosea 4 . 1, 2. P.M. Job 22.2 7. . . . May, 1718 28 | I went to Boston & was at ye Election Lecture wr a Sermon was preach’ t by ye Rev.d Mr. Colman from Nehem.

The first example is perhaps especially illustrative of the perceptions whereby a puritan sensibility defined itself against a Quaker service’s radical Protestantism, unmoored by a sermon’s biblical text; and the latter leaves a blank space after “Nehem.,” as if Paine were to fill in the scriptural citation later . Paine noted his book-buying habits as well: May, 1718 28 | . . . after Diner I attended at an Auction of Books wr I bought some. . . . July 1719 4 | I bought Pool’s Synopsis Price 10 L. And Dr. Owen of ye Spirit. Pr 23 s.

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Matthew Poole’s learned, Latin commentary on scripture is, as its price suggests, a multivolume set designed for cross-referencing, its index appended to the end of volume 5. Yet Paine was equally attracted to homelier nonlinear reference works, as he transcribes the title-page detail of a Thomas Fuller steady seller, facing the calendar page for Januar y 1717/18: Good Thot’s in bad Times. together wth Good Thots in worse Times. Consisting of [in margin, angle points to] Personal Meditations, Scriptr, Observations, Historical, Applycns. . . . By Thomas Fuller . . . London, Printed by W .B. for J. Williams at ye Crown in St. Pauls Churchyard. 1649.

As noted in the Introduction, Fuller’ s was a disjunct set of affirmations to be dipped into as needed; going through at least eleven editions; it featured meditations such as “HA, is the Interjection of Laughter. Ah, is an Interjection of Sorrow . The difference betwixt them ver y small, as consisting only in the Transposition of what is no Substantiall Letter, but a bare Aspiration. How quickly in the Age of a Minute, in the ver y turning of a Breath, is our Mirth chang’d into Mourning.” As a prose stylist, Fuller shared the world of Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, but puritan readers were not immune to its baroque method.71 The devotional literature that was Paine’s recourse traversed the learned and the vernacular, and found a home in his almanac-diaries. One passage from October 1716 helps reveal Paine’s worldview at this early stage in his career, while telling us of literacy’s symbolic force in the culture of early New England: 21 | Mr Barnard At P.M. Mat. 19:16 It was very dark thick, cloudy Weather all day: but especially at 11 A.M. It was so dark for ye space of 12 Minutes yt one cd not see to read in very large Prints; & I diligently obser: ving cd not discern whether yr ws any Men in ye fore Galler ys unless only such as sat right against ye Windows, furthermore ye Maids wr forced to light Candles to dress ye Diners by, & at 3 P.M. it ws very darke, but not as before. Also in ye Darkness at 11 A.M. I obser ved a very bright red semicircle in ye N.E. abt 2 degrees high from ye Horizon, wc at last suddenly increasing dissipated ye darkness.

The day’s wonder is an eclipse, and Paine measures time and space with numerical specificity. Paine is equally sensitive to the social world of Har-

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vard hierarchy: his eye catches the meal’ s service as a means to explain the environmental conditions. So too, textual experience is the default to describe the loss of light: it is so dark that one could “not see to read in ver y large Prints.” Devotional textuality itself frames the report, as Paine duly heads this entry with the mention of Barnard’s preaching on Matthew 19.16—the parable of the rich young man that might have had special relevance to a well-educated son seeking the right way . Like Weld and Paine, Elizabeth Moore produced a personal miscellany that collected textual fragments; but Moore used the format to scrutinize the self for signs of grace. A more devotional mode, such “evidences” have been collapsed into the general category of confession or profession among the puritan devout and treated as a linear narrative comparable to the spiritual autobiography and conversion relation.72 Yet both semantically and practically, “evidences” need not entail narrative: its denotative meaning simply referred to personal signs of salvation, and its textual practice involved the recording of discrete scripture passages as tokens of one’s spiritual state. 73 There is no emphasis on narration in Calamy’s use of the term; instead, “evidences” are texts to be laid up as “provision against an evil day .” Nor were “evidences” intended to exist, generically, as an authored stor y; instead, they made up a read artifact, a collection for future use. In one of his more self-reflexive analogies, Calamy calls on a spiritual darkness—rather than Paine’ s astronomical darkness—to suture these meanings in the final advice from Rule 13: A man in the dark cannot (though never so learned) read in a book of the clearest print, or fairest character, hee cannot (though never so active) undertake any thing of weight. No more can a childe of God in the hour of distress, read his evidences for heaven, much less study to finde out evidences; hee looks upon all the promises with a black pair of spectacles, and wants light to see his interest in them. . . . And therefore my advice is, Make out thy interest in time of prosperity, and live upon it in time of adversity. Make, and read over thy Evidences for Heaven in time of health, and learn then by heart, that when thou comest into a dark condition, thou mayest neither have them to make, or to read. (209, 210–11)

In the stor y of Mrs. Diggons, the minister distinguishes the generic forms. She “had taken a great deal of pains to compose, and write down her evidences for heaven, and [she] also kept a Diary of her life”; on her deathbed, she tells Calamy her life stor y and how she was “exact in collecting Evidences for Heaven”: “the book was sent for , I read a great part of it to her , and tooke much delight and content in what I read. And it pleased God to come to her with comfort in the reading of it.” 74 In its image of devotional life, Moore’ s text is, however, both storage vessel and linear narrative. Printed for Calamy’s work, it is structured by

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the presentation of seventeen “evidences” in the form of twenty-six scripture citations, set off with paragraph breaks and flagged with marginal annotations and displayed in italics in the main text. These navigational aids allowed the audience ready reference to the evidences for admonition—say, the “ heavy burden” of sin, from Psalm 38.4 in the Third Evidence—and comfort—the joy of “Cant. 1. 7. O thou whom my soul loveth!” in the Tenth Evidence. Moore’s text also operates as a diptych, with the First Evidence (that she hopes she is “regenerated and born from above, and converted unto God,” based on John 3.3, 3.7) prompting a conversion narrative, which precedes the second part’ s list of the other sixteen evidences. In the conversion relation, her “ spiritual astonishment” leads her to the devout’s central question: “What shall I do to bee saved!” Moore follows the means and articulates the logic of puritan worship: “I was not taken off from the performance of holy duties, which is the way and means whereby wee may meet with God (For hee is ordinarily to bee injoyed no where but in his own ordinances) but the Lord took mee off from resting and trusting in Ordinances. And as hee made mee to see that without the practice of them hee would not accept of mee; so also hee made mee to know that it was not for holy duties, for which I was accepted.” Moore concludes with the unanswerable abjection that attends devotional practice: “The sins that cleave to my best performances are enough for which the Lord may justly condemn mee, if I had no other sins.” By the conversion narrative’s end, Moore sees the “ Superlative Beauty” of and finds the “soul-satisfaction” in “the Lord Jesus Christ”; yet part two, the set of sixteen evidences, begins with further awareness of her standing as a “sin-sick-sinner.” So too these evidences offer the paradox of the bruised reed (Matt. 12.20), of the “poor in spirit” (Matt. 5.3), of the humble and unworthy being closest to grace: “I acknowledge my self a guilty malefactor, and judge my self worthy of the just condemnation of the righteous Judge of all the earth.” The scripture evidences thus become isolated, charged moments to experience affliction and meditate on mercy . Nevertheless—and as the movement from the Third to T enth Evidence, from David to Canticles, suggests—there is progressive movement across the sixteen evidences as well. Her heart is “inflamed” with love for Christ; she waits with love and fear, with “a new heart, and a new spirit” on his “promise to give his holy Spirit to them that aske it of him (as I have done often).” Yet growth in grace brings with it later abasements: “Now I find nothing so hard to mee as to beleeve aright: to cast away all my own Righteousness as dung, in point of justification, and to cast away all myunrighteousness.”75 By text’s end, we understand the miscellany’s threefold function. The evidences were a means of grace, regulated by figures like Calamy: Moore writes in the prefator y “Design” for the text that “I have been

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often exhorted by Gods faithful Ambassadors, to gather together my Scripture Evidences, and to have the approbation of some godly and experienced Minister or Christian; and this by Gods blessing may bee a means to strengthen Assurance.” The evidences were a proof, assembling fragments to bolster faith, report progress, and perform abjection. “[B]y this I prove,” Moore writes in closing, “that this precious grace of faith is wrought in mee, because Jesus Christ is to mee ver y precious.” The evidences were ultimately a countergift, a nonexchange glimpsed in the climax to Moore’s collection: “Thus I have according to the Apostles exhortation endeavoured to give a reason of the hope that is in mee. What have I but what I have received? The desire of my soul is, that God may have all the glory. And if I bee deceived, the Lord for Christs sake undeceive mee, and grant that if I have not true grace, I may not think I have, and so bee in a Fools Paradise. And the Lord that is my heart-maker, bee my heart-searcher, and my heart-discoverer, and my heart-reformer. Amen.” “What have I but what I have received?”: here Moore names the impossible economy of puritan devotion, when belief is sincere and yet subject to self-deception, the “ Fools Paradise” that is coeval with “true grace” in the affective life of the pious. 76

The Godly Man’s Archive The irreverent Weld, the curious Paine, and the afflicted Moore indicate the range of affect expressed in textual storehouses of the period; humility and introspection are sounded loudly or muted softly, but these readers revert to devotional texts for succor or authority . The personal miscellany of Billerica educator Joseph T ompson (1640–1732) powerfully documents the gift dynamics, devotional subjectivity, and thickened aesthetics of early New England’ s book culture. The miscellany is part commonplace book, part spiritual diar y, and it repeatedly shows T ompson reflecting on favored steady seller writers such as John Flavel, Richard Alleine, and Thomas Shepard. Son of minister William T ompson and brother to poet Benjamin T ompson, garrison head during King Philip’ s War and ultimately captain of the Billerica militia, church deacon and court deputy, Tompson was nevertheless not part of that learned culture, and he does not arrange his excerpts according to topic within an alphabetical system. Instead, he transcribes passages that then become sources for his daily reflections, providing a demonstrable form of reader response. Covering a span of sixty-three years, the miscellany is at times joyous in its descriptions of practical piety and at other moments poignant in its commentar y on loss. The parent of ten offspring from two marriages, Tompson—ninety-two at his death—outlived four of his children, a point that clearly grieved him. His miscellany uses the codex format as

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information storage, but it is a container that measures the affect and anxiety of this pious reader: it is the house of his pilgrimage. 77 While reception theor y and readership studies fashion the literate as “recipients” of texts, T ompson’s self-understanding of this role is defined by the gift circuit. Certain godly books come to him beyond the market and accrue value through social networks of generosity noted by Tompson: “a friend hath lately lent me a boock of that Reverand Mr Flavells works i had sene severall of them before precious books [such] as husbandry spiritualized and the seamans compass. but this sems to excell . . .” Manuscript or print elegies were, as we shall see, part of the gift economy of funerals, and, after 1712, Tompson recorded eleven elegies that date from 1643 to 1712. Within a family network of ministers and poets, Tompson’s access to literar y culture is not surprising. But the preservation of such inheritances—a poem that dates to 1643 and that only has a scribal existence—and its preser vation once more in the miscellany bespeaks not only the memorial function of such elegies, but also the affective charge of obligation and deference symbolized by the textual legacy. Tompson even fashioned the miscellany as a countergift on an endpaper note written upon review of the document: “I am now aged and feble and shall be glad if i may wright so that my pore scribbling may be understood. this is the testimony that [I] have to give for god. of god that he is god a gracious and a mercifull god that i have experienced[.] i have bene cast upon his providence from the womb: as i have noted formerly in an other book” (November 24, 1726). This book and “an other book” attempt, as a return, testimonies to give to God; but, “cast upon his providence from the womb,” T ompson can only accept divine grace and mercy . This gift anguish was writ large in a devotional psychology premised on Christ’ s intercession, a sacrifice that cannot be reciprocated: “there is great caus of humiliation and abhorance of my self and loathing my self continuly in the sight of an all seing god. . . . what an unprofitable creature i have been under the long day of grace that [I] have enjoyed. haveing been born under the light of the gospell and so plainly informed of my condition” (December 5, 1726). As if commenting on the impossibility of the gift circuit within the Reformed tradition, Tompson here uses language of the market (“unprofitable creature”) to underscore a relation of benevolence: “the long day of grace” that renders Tompson “plainly informed of [his] condition.” This humbling expression is tellingly featured as one of Tompson’s last entries, when he is eighty-six years old. Though a church member whose experience of grace assured him, he cannot report full confidence at this late stage of his life. Indeed, the miscellany provides an exemplar y portrait of redeemed subjectivity, charting the practice of piety and the oscillating moods of delight and affliction. Public ordinances and gatherings

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are means of grace for Tompson, as numerous entries record a heartening spiritual visitation. On Februar y 20, 1669/70, he mentions the pleasure of holy ordinances as means to reconcile himself with God. “Upon a day of humiliation throughout ye Colonie,” T ompson writes of October 7, 1675, “I experienced throw infinit grace the Lord speaking to my hart and strengthening my hope in his mercie from Joell 2 from 15 to ys 18 verse.” The means and a passage from Job 33 likewise assure T ompson: “the lord visited my soul in his holy ordinances praying and singing & hearing 33 iob god loocks upon men & if any say i have sinned and it profiteth me not &c” (March 11, 1676). Rituals of devotion after a Sabbath meeting help cleave T ompson to the Lord (“drawinge near unto god in prayer and in reading and in meditation of that which I had heard in publick from the word of god” [June 6, 1670]), while on April 7, 1671, Tompson “found sumthing of the Lords quiknng preasence in a family meetinge.” Experiential piety was also structured by feelings of humiliation and insecurity, by the sense that God withdrew His favor from wayward and fallen humanity . Januar y 12, 1675/76, was also “a day of Calamity,” subject to chastening interpretation: he calls the day “an agravation of my sin.” This doubt persists, for while the mid-1670s appear to be Tompson’s moment of turning, conversion by December 1726 had left him unsure: when bemoaning his inability to “wright of . . . the circomstances of my soule,” he notes “i am fearing of my sincerity and satan hath been casting in his firy darts at me.” Further, the 1726 passages—entered on the “wast papers” or end leaves of the miscellany—were in part a result of his rereading the journal: “What my souls dificultys have been for severall years sumthing noted in this book after.” Preparatory humiliation was Tompson’s endpoint, a recursive abjection that is not the pilgrim’ s progress, but the ruminator’s stasis. Book format girds this style of piety. Tompson used the miscellany as a thick storehouse, a place for the discontinuous reading habits of random access and cross-referencing. Tompson reminds us of this codexical fact when writing on the initial endpapers to compose some of the miscellany’s final reflections: the first shall be last indeed. 78 The miscellany was certainly a reference work for Tompson, with discrete passages intended to be read independently as they guided the life of piety. For instance, he used the journal to record instructions for taking communion—one of the holiest of church ordinances for early New Englanders—and below the passage he indents and underlines the comment “Note this carefully” for future reference. While lacking the sacramental aura of communion, fasting was an important ritual expression of piety and, as I will show, importantly linked to worship ordinances. T ompson transcribes directions for fasting from Thomas Shepard, using printed matter that T ompson entitles “Closet Meditations” and copy which comes “out of another

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paper of Mr Shepherds writen with his owne hand.” T wo pages of itemization explain what a fast is, how it is to be conducted, and why . When the humble Tompson was eighty, he copied six signs of grace to look for as assurance when reading the self, a commonplace from Samuel Lee’ s Chara Tes Pisteos, or the Joy of Faith that also cites steady-seller Henr y Scudder.79 In numerous entries, Tompson records a textual universe that orbits scripture; he reflects on Sabbath worship by directly reporting minister, place, and biblical text, such as “Thacher at weimoth out of 8 rom 13” in 1665.80 The miscellany is itself cross-referenced with a book of sermon notes that is not extant. Reading material from a March 24, 1670 entry, he writes “se morning sermons. 1671 page 6.7: in after sermons, 1671 page. 7.8.9 . . . [these texts] caused me to circomsise my hart and cause me to Love him acording to his promise.” No doubt T ompson was also a linear reader. The March 24, 1670 entr y uses the era’s typical language of “reading in my course” to describe a schedule to complete the Bible in a year .81 He rereads the miscellany as well; “i had been writing severall times,” he notes, again in the opening endpapers, “out of the Reverend Mr Flavel and perusing of them and what i had long ago written in this book following.” “Peruse” in the early modern period lacked its connotations of leisurely reading: careful review , in order, is implied in Tompson’s comment. Y et Tompson equally used the spatial dimensions of the codex format for nonlinear consultation. The aesthesis of the miscellany represents Tompson’s devotional life as well, a thickened expression of piety found in the text’ s language, look, and sound. Tompson registers the sensor y dimensions of grace, alluding to spiritual visitation through a citation apparently from Canticles and expressing gratitude for his wife’s momentary deliverance from sickness: yet I have met with sumthing of the preasenc of god this day mouth. 2 can 2 (September 3, 1671)

. sum kisses his

& sum smiles I have experienced from ye Lord in ye hopes of ye Lord spareing my Dear wife (January 12, 1675/76)

These tropes are countered by images of divine judgment, embodied gesturally in the miscellany when he refers to “the frowns of God” (September, 1675) and being “afected by the frowns of his face” (October 1, 1675).82 Writing is its own documentar y aesthetic, imaginatively and religiously charged. In the 1720s endpaper entries, he links inscription to spiritual renewal, noting the act of writing as he reports affectionate thoughts of the divine: “it warms my heart while i am writeing to think i have such a god to go unto that delights in mercy .” In a moment of despair over the condition of his soul, he likewise relates self-doubt to scribal failure: “i am so impotent i can scarsly wright.” The same end-

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page features the sentiment “o i am now cring while i am writeing” and—not to burden this speculation too heavily—water stains at the base of the page. 83 We are on firmer ground in measuring the expressivity of the book and its devotional impact when comparing Tompson’s commonplaces to their sources. In “March 1725 when very feble,” Tompson copies the following passage from Samuel Moodey’ s The Vain Youth Summoned to Appear at Christ’s Bar; or, an Essay to Block Up the Sinful Wayes of Young People by Most Solemn Considerations (Boston, 1707): In a word; We may conclude we are Converted, when we come by Supernatural Light, to see so much of the Worlds Vanity, Christ’s Beauty, Sins Deformity, & Heavens Glory; that the bent and byas of our Hearts, the stream and current of our Thoughts shall be towards things Spiritual and Eternal. But if we would not be mistaken, we must after all our Searchings, Pray with the Psalmist, Psal. 139. 23, 24. Search me O God, and see if there be any Wicked way in me; and Lead me in the way Everlasting.

Its content reminds us that T ompson, devout through his eighty-five years, still sought assurance for his conversion, and ultimately prayed for God’s scrutiny and guidance. In terms of thickened form, however , the divergent intentionalities of text and reader can be gleaned from the title, a conduct book that belonged to a subgenre of third-generation literature designed for wayward young men, and the user, an octogenarian church deacon.84 As Tompson puts it after the commonplace: “A boock unknown to me. while i came to read it throw i hope mine understanding sumwhat enlightened and encouraged in the ways of holines.” A devotional sensibility can refit a youth-culture title for the purposes of an elder’s self-scrutiny, intimating the imaginative reach that sacred text can achieve. Further, his transcription features key variants that specify Tompson’s spiritual plight in a word we may conclude we are converted when by super naturall light to se so much of the words vanity , Christs Beauty , sins deformity , and heavens glor y that the bent and bias of our harts and our thoughts shall be toward things spirituall and eternall if we would not be be [ sic] mistaken. W e must after all our searching pray with the psalmist psalmist [ sic] psalm 139.234 verses Serch me o god and se if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the everlasting way .

Of the four nouns in the first sentence only the capitalized “Beauty” of Christ receives similar emphasis to the original’s italics, suggesting the centrality of Christ’ s emotive and sensor y appeal. Tompson omits the phrase “stream and current” so that “thoughts” are subject to “the bent and bias of our hearts”; this demotion of the mind’ s activity gives priority in the sequence to the heart’s inclination, its direction towards the spiritual and the

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Figure 6. The personal covenant: a passage (“The author’ s advice”) from Richard Alleine’s Vindiciae Pietatis, transcribed in Joseph Tompson’s journal. By permission of the Houghton Librar y, Harvard University, Ms Am 929.

eternal. This felt relationship to divinity is defined as uncertainly incomplete, when Tompson’s voice ruins the chiasmus of the psalm by reversing “way Everlasting”—its denotative eternity, its promising gerund, its polysyllabic stretch—to “everlasting way.” In making “wicked way” and “everlasting way” parallel, Tompson stresses the static noun, not the processual adjec-

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tive: “way” amounts to a linguistic fixity, an emblem of the pilgrim’s regress. If the passage’s content provides the devout with measures of grace only to qualify them with appropriate anxiety before the Lord (“Search me O God”), its thick form in Tompson’s miscellany enriches this message. Its variants in voice, syntax, and presentation document an affective desire for Christ and heart piety’s subjective push, only to temper that success by maintaining Tompson on the “way.” Waylaid on the way , he surely found solace in the Moodey commonplace; it encouraged Tompson in, as he says, “the ways of holines,” however structurally incomplete these were. Other commonplaces afflicted Tompson, a mood most startlingly glimpsed in a transcription from Richard Alleine’s Vindiciae Pietatis; or, a Vindication of Godliness (Figure 6). Traits of the thick style—retrievable information, documentar y aesthetics, imaginative rhetoric—gather in what becomes arguably this nonlinear miscellany’s climax. In 1678, Tompson records a covenant vow from Alleine, a personal vow akin to the church covenant renewals that became common in the second- and third-generations of English settlement.85 The covenant asks for his signature as testimony to “the solemn transactions that have pased betwene god and you.” The authors advice This covenant I advise you to make. not onely in hart but in word & not onely in word but in writeing. and that you would with all posible reverence spread the writeing before the Lord as if you would present it to him as your act and deed. & when you have don this set your hand to it. kepe it as a memoriall of the solemn transactions that have pased betwene god and you. that you may have recourse unto it in doubts and temptations 86

Tompson heads the entr y from Alleine “Taken out of a printed Boock, Namely the Vindication of godliness transcribed 29 November 1678.” Yet he does not sign it in 1678, and, upon rereading the covenant in 1728, shamefully judges himself: next to the commonplace, he notes “writ many years ago but never signed until the day mentioned below 1728”; and below it, his signature: “Joseph Tompson I am ashamed of my self that i have so long neglected the Duty of signing until the 88 year near expiring.” The wide dispersal of sacred writing begins with the vow itself, which duplicates identical covenants in other steady sellers such as Doolittle’s A Call to Delaying Sinners, Joseph Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted, and Thomas Vincent’s Wells of Salvation Opened.87 The vow assumes multiple copies in other commonplace books or private journals. In terms of figuration, the vow suggests that writing is a form of culminating sincerity (after covenants of the heart and the word); it imagines the manuscript hand as personal communication with the Lord, rather than the impersonality of print reproduction; and it figures transcription as

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offering, but as a gift that loops back on itself, an act and deed for Him that is ultimately a memorial for the user. Tompson records the vow; and his failure to sign it during the fifty years of its presence in the journal ultimately becomes part of his scribal performance. The bibliographic code of later commentar y by T ompson—a surplus of shame framing the vow—dramatizes his anxiety . The vow was to be read as an independent fragment—“Kepe it as a memorial . . . that you may have recourse unto it”—and the seeming half-century hiatus surely makes for a discontinuous reading experience. So too, this 1728 evidence makes us revalue that 1726 endpaper entries which implied that Tompson read through the miscellany at that earlier time; the mid-1720s seem to have been another occasion for random access. Yet the irony that it was not a “memorial” to which he took “recourse” should not be too inviting as exegesis. T rue, he may have simply overlooked the vow. At the same time, the lack of a signature over the fifty years may indicate his own spiritual distress, its lack exactly expressive of possible moments of struggle when reading the passage, where he did not feel assurance and so could not sign his name. Chronologically, 1728 is this codex’ s point of closure because the signature is one of T ompson’s last entries; the signature is located, however, in the interior of the miscellany, correspondent to the 1678 middle phase of T ompson’s life when the vow was recorded. As the vow and the signature simultaneously witness 1678 and 1728 on the space of the page, so Tompson’s linear development—a movement, because he signs the covenant, toward acknowledging his election—coexists with the abasement coloring such testimony, because he has failed his duty for fifty years. In any event, with the anxious writing of the later additions “spread . . . before the Lord,” the documentar y form of the text clearly functions to signal his penitence as he “near[s] expiring.” Tompson’s response to steady-selling literature and the book format underscores the thickened power of sacred textuality in early New England. The material condition of written records nurtured piety; they accrued meaning through their status as present—and as presents—to devout readers. Their organizational makeup, visual appearance, and verbal artistry participated in the larger life of disciplinar y religion that structured ordinar y worship for the converted and the unsure. Psalm 119, the Calamy text, and the individual miscellanies were not, however, aberrations from typical prescriptions for reading. A sur vey of steadyseller advice for reading practice reinforces the argument presented here: that devotional literacy meant both discontinuous access and linear progress, and that pious reading gained from an appreciation of the qualitative differences of the material text, its look, feel, and heft. To the steady sellers advocating for these modes of literacy we shall now turn.

Chapter 2

Devotional Steady Sellers and the Conduct of Reading

A striking image of literacy circulating in early modern devotional works appeared in a 1702 title for young readers, Thomas White’ s Bostonpublished A Little Book for Little Children. The image is preceded by conventional advice for reading, advice that names the centrality of the steady-selling canon to early New England: “read the Bible, and the Plain Mans Pathway to Heaven, a very plain holy Book for you, get the Practice of Piety, Mr. Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, Meads Almost Christian, Vincents Advice to Young Men.” And it is preceded by a method for reading familiar from our sur vey of psalms, steady sellers, and miscellanies in Chapter 1: “as you read (if the Books be your own) mark in the margin, or by underlining the places you find most relish in, and take most special notice of, and that doth most concern thee, that you may easily, and more quickly find them again.” The digested and repackaged story which follows is equally prescriptive, but hardly plain: “There is a Book of three leaves said one, and I have been reading it all my Life, and I have not read it over: one was a red Leaf, the other a white, the third a black Leaf; the black Leaf was of Death, Hell, and Judgment, the white Leaf was of Heaven, the red Leaf was of the Blood of Christ.” David D. Hall finds in the image the kind of textual wonder that animates popular religion in the period. The passage’ s context deser ves attention as well, however, because the list of books and the ready-reference methods capture the what and the how of early New England reading, the steady sellers and their invitation to discontinuous literacy. Moreover, the story of the three-leaf book deepens our sense of the thick style organizing devotional reading. Because the nonverbal elements of the work render the book acutely visual, the redacted stor y calls on the sensor y dimensions of textual aesthetics. Because the leaf order is unspecified and indeed reversed by sentence’ s end, the stor y invokes the nonlinear dimensions of textual cross-referencing. The thickness results in an especially ruminative reading style. 1 But why read? The stor y’s prehistor y helps us pursue this question,

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furthering a revised sense of early New England’ s textual aesthetics, while contributing to the salutar y long view of Reformation Protestantism for which Hall, Dwight Bozeman, and Stephen Foster advocate when studying the region. If the redaction stresses meditation, its source conjoins pious literacy’s key tropes of pilgrimage and rumination, linear progress and contemplative stasis. Located in devotional literature circulating in seventeenth-centur y England and New England, the stor y has medieval antecedents and is thus thickened as well through its multiple versions and wide dispersal. Godly writer George Swinnock borrows from the fifteenth-centur y Speculum Exemplorum—a reference book of exempla consulted and appropriated throughout the early modern period—to relate the story: I have read of a person who led a dissolute life, and was so wrought upon by the Counsel of a good man, that he turned over a new Leaf; and when his Companions asked the ground of that change, which they soon obser ved in him, and why he would not walk along with them in his old wicked ways; he answered them, I am busie, meditating and reading in a little book, which hath but three leaves in it, so that I have no leasure so much as to think of any other business; In the first leaf, which is red, I meditate on the passion of my Lord Jesus Christ, and of that precious blood which he shed for the remission of my sins; In the second leaf, which is white, I meditate on the unspeakable joys of Heaven, purchased for me by the death of my Redeemer; In the third leaf, which is black, I meditate on the intolerable torments of Hell provided and kept in store for the wicked and ungodly.

In the story’s textual history, we glimpse a shared culture of texts in the early modern period, from learned Latin to preliterate vernaculars, from the Middle Ages to colonial North America. A key difference in the life cycle of the story, however, is the contrast between the truncated excerpt of the children’s book and the narrative elaboration of the source. The source features drama and conflict, a central character and antagonists, an articulated point of view . This thickening process of verbal artistry ser ves a tale that is per haps more intensely discontinuous than its redaction, indicated by both the brevity of the three-leaf text—each page a locus for meditation—and its obsessive nature for the reader—“I am busie,” he declares, with “no leasure so much as to think of any other business.” Yet the stor y is also continuous, a tale of pilgrimage from dissolution to conversion, a linearity present in the leaves of the imaginar y book. From first to second to third; from red to white to black; from Christian sacrifice to heavenly joy to hellish torment: the narrative begins with the anxiety of the divine gift register , presents a middle of the promised land, and concludes with an alternative ending of damnation. It warns the reader away from rejecting Christ’ s gift with this coda. Still, for all of its narrative arc, the book is ultimately not a progressive, climactic tale with the black page providing resolution. It starts well. But

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just as the devotional reader can never be certain of his or her end, Swinnock’s reader returns to Christ, heaven, and hell as topoi, as spatial preoccupations alluding to temporal ambiguities with no plain meaning. 2 For early New Englanders, literacy was directed to moral transformation, a purpose answering to the why of reading and revealed in Swinnock’s apt figure of the protagonist having “turned over a new Leaf,” a metaphor entering English in the late sixteenth centur y through the codex format’s use in pedagogic literature. Yet given the vertiginal experience of piety, such progressive transformation was qualified by cycles of abjection with no clean growth in grace, and thus no single message. To be sure, the abstract color fields of the book—auguring forth none of the mysteries of a Newman or Rothko—are tightly regulated within the readerly discipline of Reformation Protestantism: the reader is certain of the text’s spiritual messages. But the plural here matters. And the structural ambiguity of a worldly pilgrim’ s life generated meanings through both the verbal and extraverbal properties of sacred texts. Indeed, the three-leaf book accentuates the tactile handling of the codex, its turning of leaves and indexical access. So too, in lacking language, the book’s series of three color planes is a plain style both more plain and more eccentric than anything in the devotional canon. Pedagogic and aesthetic, the literar y culture of early New England drew on the imaginative and physical properties of sacred texts to seek readerly change. With its activities of the eye and the hand and its mixture of the linear and the discontinuous, the stor y of the three-leaf book illuminates the performative nature of literacy in early New England. T o comprehend reading as a kind of per formance is to enrich the description of “intensive reading” or “traditional literacy” often used to characterize readership in the early modern period. 3 Early modern reading styles engage sound and gesture, conduct and change. Certainly the story of the threeleaf book displays the traditional mode of Reformation literacy—“heart piety”—associated with intensive reading: Swinnock’ s pious reader incorporates the text and its spiritual tenets, to the neglect of his worldly life. It even conforms to a normative view of literacy: reading is private and silent, an activity that removes the reader from others, deeply focusing him on the text. Yet the image makes literacy a social phenomenon, and one constituted by a variety of practices. Reading is communal and aural, mediated through “the Counsel of a good man” and the inquir y of the reader’s “Companions.” Reading is ocular, with visual images affecting the textual experience. Reading moves forward, from red to white to black; and reading is interrupted, inviting meditation. Further , the performance of reading was routed through the book prop, a revered object that anchors the reader, keeping him from the wayward path of his

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companions. “Heart piety” worked alongside what might be called “hand piety,” the tactile feel and indexical movement within and across godly books, and “eye piety ,” the visual contemplation of material images. Whether through heart, hand, or eye, the three-leaf book and the Swinnock and White texts guide conduct, participating in the Protestant tradition of transformative reading that uses the written and spoken word to alter behavior, to script the reader into God’ s redemptive plot. Attending to the what, how, and why of literacy among the puritan devout, this chapter will sur vey representations of reading in prescriptive literature such as the White and Swinnock texts. What’s black and white and re(a)d all over early New England? Along with biblical passages, prefaces addressed “T o the Reader ,” and manuals on reading, devotional steady sellers make up this prescriptive literature. Beginning with books of the Bible, I discuss images of the written word and directions for reading that describe the conduct of literacy in both its practical and moral senses. The devotional works establish protocols for reading. The protocols indicate that conventional literacy—that is, the silent, solitar y, and linear consumption of a wide range of written texts—is not the sole reading practice; rather, the devotional works value equally the nonlinear cross-referencing of passages, experienced aurally in groups. Steady sellers encourage reading aloud and even imagine the voice of God speaking to readers. These practical protocols are complemented by prescriptions of moral conduct, where the preparation for and application of the written word seeks to transform the reader . Images of reading subtend languages of judgment and mercy that attempt to push readers along the way to salvation. Both practical conduct and moral transformation are assisted by the symbolic representation and material presence of the book format. The devotional works figuratively associate the written word with durability, with aesthetic achievement, and with a visible sign’s ability to permanently remind its viewer of its lesson. Moreover, the steady sellers exploit the codex to underscore the performative nature of pious reading. Design elements such as the book clasp or tie and format choices such as the indexically arranged manual foreground the physical movement between exterior and interior , apparatus and main text. These material traits indicate qualitative differences of the book format. The codex deploys visual and tactile elements located in its physique, while enabling modes of random access and discontinuous navigation through paratexts, those ancillar y features—such as the index, frontispiece, pagination, or binding—of a main text that help distinguish a book from other kinds of print and manuscript culture. Literacy is intimately related to behavior, a devotional discipline integrating reading and life, captured in one of the most widespread tropes for books in early New England: the mirror . While at one level the mir-

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ror fuses “the book with life,” it also functions disciplinarily , remarking the distance between the subject’ s reality and the divine’ s ideal. John Downame writes of scripture that “It will ser ve for a looking glasse, wherein we may see our spots and spirituall deformities, and bee directed also by it to reforme and mend them.” 4 Reading protocols and the book objects they orbit thus shape the religious subjectivity of readers; they help determine the structure of feeling scholars have called “redeemed subjectivity ,” with its intense anxiety over salvation. An understanding of reading habits and redeemed subjectivity in the steady sellers might best start with the popular work of early New England: the codex form that joins Hebrew and Christian testaments.

Biblical Exemplars Influential images for understanding how the act of reading was perceived in early New England are found throughout scripture, but certain scenes—each cited in the popular discourse of the period—are especially helpful in explaining the meanings of literacy for English pilgrims. Passages from Revelation, the Book of Daniel, the histor y of Nehemiah, and Acts capture protocols of early modern reading, such as the internalization of the Word, its mediation through speech, and its divine registers of mercy and judgment. The scenes also dramatize the collative practices and prophetic impulses of typology . Each passage is significantly intertextual—referring variously to Ezekiel and Jeremiah, to Mosaic law and Isaian song—and each thus prompts the alvearial reading mode of discontinuous cross-referencing enabled by the codex. Images of reading in the Bible suggest the reverence with which the written artifact is treated, its public, ceremonial display in sacred and civil settings. Finally, the passages indicate the per formative effects of literacy , marking change in conduct and identity among readers. Symbolic associations that accrue to the act of reading inform and reinforce customs of literacy for early New England. To begin at the end, the Book of Revelation presents in two scenes perhaps the most familiar figures for reading and the book in the Reformed tradition. First, the apocalyptic image of the mighty angel with the little scroll represents John’ s vision by calling on Ezekiel 3.1–3. In a figure that epitomizes the mode of ruminative reading extant in texts from Jeremiah 15.16 to steady sellers by Henr y Scudder and Edmund Calamy, a voice commands John to “Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel” and the angel commands John to “T ake it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter , but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey” (Rev. 10.8–9). The book image makes literal the reading mode of heart piety, where the devout are to incorporate a text,

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and it recalls the more vernacular figure of “chewing the cud” as a metaphor for deep or intensive reading in early modern Protestantism. The scene mirrors the dual nature of godly rhetoric, which is both merciful and punitive: the image provides sweet consolation and bitter judgment, a tension parsed in Joseph Mede’ s influential The Key to the Revelations to describe the sequential moods of John’ s forthcoming prophecy.5 Second, the final judgment of souls is of course figured with book imagery, the dead standing before God: “and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works” (Rev . 20.12). With forty-five editions by 1729, Samuel Smith’s The Great Assize steadily meditated on the verse: the volume’ s four main sermons took as their biblical text Christ’ s second coming in Revelation 20.11–15, and thus returned repeatedly to the passage to elaborate the juridical metaphor of its title. The plural books in Revelation 20.12 are the records of conscience for each of the dead, while “another boke” is the list of the redeemed. W ritten artifacts are central to the eschatological imagination, witnesses at the moment of salvation or damnation, sources that are as seemingly knowable as conscience but as implacable as divine judgment. Images from Revelation are motifs of the prescriptive literature and indicate ways in which book reading is structured by the urgent questions of God’ s providence for the devout. 6 A passage from the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Daniel’ s final chapters (9.20–27) usefully emphasizes the prophetic, divinator y, and historicist collation that is Reformation typology. Pamphlets by Mede and by Windsor, Connecticut, pastor Ephraim Huit examine the passage’ s apocalypticism in depth. 7 The author of Daniel compiled the book around 167–164 B.C.E. in a time of Jewish oppression under the reign of Antiochus IV. He set the stories in years roughly around 539B.C.E., just before and just after Babylon’ s fall to Persia, and two generations after the prophet Jeremiah, who was active from 626–580 B.C.E. Among the apocalyptic visions that make up the latter half of the book, Daniel reads in chapter 9 from Jeremiah 25.11–12, where the prophet foretells both the Babylonian destruction of Judah and the fall of Babylon in seventy years. The angel Gabriel visits Daniel and helps interpret the passage, converting seventy years to “seventy weeks” of years—that is, 490 years—and promising an era, after atonement, of “everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy , and to anoint the most Holy” (Dan. 9.24). While Jeremiah can promise punishment for the Babylonians, Gabriel’s numerology restores hope to the Jeremiah text; the angel suggests that there is a future of Judean power, rather than further service to Babylonians. Written some 440 years after Jeremiah, the Book of Daniel

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uses Gabriel’s math to assure contemporaries that Jerusalem will be reclaimed from Antiochus’s persecution in the near future. The scene recreates the rich apocalyptic tradition of Reformation Protestantism, suggesting the typological and divinator y meanings that emerge from the written word. Its apocalyptic mode is consistent with the landscape of Daniel 7–12, where dream visions of four beasts and male goats hold sway; and with early New England’ s world of wonders, where John Winthrop can describe the tussle between a mouse and snake as revelatory of God’s will for the Bay Colony’s church.8 Yet significantly, the source for this apocalyptic message is neither dreams nor natural and social phenomena; rather, it is the textual artifact. Typologically, the passage cross-references Jeremiah and Daniel, and then relates scripture histor y to the contemporar y histor y of the author of Daniel. So too Daniel’ s visions are a type of the parables Matthew defends in Jesus’ deliver y of the gospel (Matt. 13.34–35). The interidentification of types across the books of the Bible and their merger with contemporary history suggests the collative and prophetic power of the written word. These temporal schemes are matched in readerly experience by familiar moral schemes: the punitive, castigating voice of Jeremiah 25.12 and the hopeful, reassuring language of Gabriel in Daniel 9.24. Most striking, per haps, is the liberal algebra of Gabriel, wherein the number seventy is refashioned to refer to a 490–year period. The associative logic that often guides spiritualized interpretations of phenomena is here applied to the textual record. A passage from the history of Nehemiah (8.3–6) foregrounds the theatrical role of the written word, its power to alter behavior through public display. Nehemiah is a central text for early New England: it is the biblical frame for Cotton Mather’ s biography of John Winthrop in the Magnalia and the particular text of 8.3 featured as a title-page epigraph for William Perkins’ s preaching manual The Arte of Prophecying. Nehemiah is also a storied text in the exceptionalist canon of early American studies: Mather’s biography of Winthrop was itself the palimpsest for Sacvan Bercovitch’ s The Puritan Origins of the American Self. But John Drury and Patrick Collinson find the scene to be central to puritanism as a devotional movement more broadly conceived. 9 The story of exiles returning to Judah and rebuilding the walls and temple features a scene that dramatizes the role of the text as a divine prop. In a civil setting—a wooden platform built above a plaza—the priest Ezra reads the book of the law of Moses “from the morning until midday”; and “the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law” (Neh. 8.3). After reading the law , Ezra, positioned on the platform above, “opened the book in the sight of all the people”; observing the spectacle of the scroll, members of the audience stood up and then bowed their heads and

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“worshipped the LORD with their faces to the ground” (Neh. 8.5–6). As Jack Miles argues, the silence of God in the historical books of the Hebrew Bible culminates in this scene from the final chronicle, with God wholly materialized as text. Because God does not reciprocally ratify the law through speech or action, the scene is startling as a covenant renewal from Jewish scripture and draws attention both to the scroll object’s symbolism and to the gift register’ s economic asymmetr y.10 The civil setting parallels the vision of Massachusetts as a “Bible commonwealth,” where authorities searched houses to insure that scripture was shelved therein, and where private and public covenant renewals helped ritualize puritan worship. Further , the prostrate per formance in the plaza implies a reverence for the scroll that sacralizes the written artifact. The conversion of the Ethiop in Acts 8.27–39 is per haps a summa of Protestant evangelical literacy; the stor y’s echo of another key trope for literacy—pilgrimage—lays particular stress on reading as an activity that inspires application and transformation. In directions from the conduct literature, John Downame, Joseph Alleine, and George Swinnock cite 11 The the passage, suggesting an ideal of reading for devout settlers. evangelist Philip meets “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority . . . who had come to Jerusalem for to worship, was returning, and, sitting in his chariot, read Esaias the prophet” (Acts 8.27–28). Directed by the Spirit of the Lord to join the Ethiop, Philip “ran thither to him, and heard him read” (Acts 8.30). Asking for guidance with the text, the eunuch ponders Isaiah’ s Ser vant song: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer , so opened he not his mouth” (Acts 8.32, Isa. 53.7–8). Philip “began at the same scripture and preached unto him Jesus”; the Ethiop obser ves some water “as they went on their way,” immediately requests baptism, and “went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8.35, 36, 39). The story alludes to customs glimpsed so far in the biblical scenes. Literacy as a per formance is suggested in the oral qualities of even private reading, a mode of group reading evident with Daniel and Gabriel. The text indicates that Philip “heard” the Ethiop reading; while typical of literacy in antiquity, reading aloud is also a norm of the early modern period. The sonorities of the Isaiah verse similarly amplify the acoustic emphases of the Christian message. Like Revelation and Daniel, the passage invokes a typological cross-reference; it is organized around the figure of Christ, as Jesus is prophecied through the sacrificial lamb of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible and recapitulated in the cleansed Ethiop of the New Testament. The passage casts the book as a fulcrum of dramatic action as well, akin to the totemic power of the scroll in Nehemiah: while Philip is moved by the Spirit, the Ethiop is moved by the book, which prompts his inquir y and invitation to Philip, and ultimately their joint

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motion in the chariot. Indeed, the scene specifies certain dimensions of New England devotional life in the Americas. The chariot setting and its movement—“as they went on their way”—connote the pilgrimage metaphor that takes on special resonance for the pious life of transatlantic immigrants. Yet most power fully the scene explains how reading was thought to shape conduct—responding affirmatively to the prostration of the Nehemiah scene—and to convert its practitioners—answering to the salvific uncertainty of the scene of Christ’s second coming in Revelation 20.11–15. The evangelist Philip symbolizes this guidance; while access to vernacular scripture is a premise of the Reformed tradition, interpretive freedom was always hemmed in by ministers, conduct manuals, and biblical apparatus. The subtle valences of orality that mark the eunuch’ s transformation suggest a Christian ethos as well: he moves from the scripted speech of reading Isaiah, to the imitatio of the passive servant— “opened he not his mouth”—to a renewed, expressive “rejoicing” after baptism. Literacy’s impact is immediate in the tale, as it condenses an ideal of spiritual movement for New England’s devout: reading, an informal means of grace available to all, eventuates in the most holy of ordinances, the sacramental ritual of baptism available only to church members.

Reading as Performance Representations of reading from the prescriptive literature codify the practices implicit in the biblical scenes. As with the images from Daniel, Nehemiah, Revelation, and Acts, the devotional works continue to show the wide range of reading practices available to early New Englanders: silent and aloud, individual and communal, linear and sequential, deep and discontinuous. The reading modes embedded in these scriptural passages find their corollary in practical advice. Yet the styles of reading evident in the steady sellers are also promoted to seek psychic and bodily reform of their users. Through figurative and referential language, the devotional works illuminate the conduct of reading, both in its routine activities and in its hoped-for renovation. Godly writers imagine the act of reading in sensational terms, exhorting behavior through dramatic figuration. Lewis Bayly’ s guidance for reading scriptures culminates in a theatrical turn, where voice and posture direct one’ s experience of the written word: “[R]ead them therefore with that reuerence, as if God himselfe stood by and spake these words vnto thee, to excite thee to those vertues, to disswade thee from those vices.” John White imagines book reading similarly. “Wherefore when we take in hand the Book of the Scripture,” he notes, “we cannot otherwise

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conceive of ourselves, than as standing in Gods presence, to hear what he will say unto us.” While Bayly and White emphasize vocal presence, Cotton Mather discusses literacy in language that equates the act of reading with God’s writing of the Bible through His “Faithful Ser vants.” Though Mather’s divinity manual is directed to the learned, he argues that the Bible is “very Legible, and an ordinary Capacity may discover.” The reader is then instructed to “Be Restless, till you find your Soul Harmonizing and Symphonizing, with what the Holy SPIRIT of GOD raised in His Amannensis at the time of His W riting . . . until you find your Heartstrings quaver at the Touch upon the Heart of the Writer, as being brought into an Unison with it, and the Two Souls go up in a Flame together .” Mather’s interest in literacy’s effects is echoed in less rapturous language by Joseph Alleine. After advising readers to reread his chapter on the misery of the unconverted—“to get it out of the book and into thine heart”—Alleine asks “And doth not thy soul tremble as thou readest? Do not thy tears bedew the paper, and thy heart throb in thy bosom?” Each of these examples invoke the scene of reading, suggesting that the setting and presence of the book shapes and directs behavior .12 These vivid descriptions of a theater of reading should not obscure advice from the devotional manuals that privileges the silent, solitar y reader. The reading schedule, a commonplace of the conduct literature, best illustrates this role for the reader. Bayly’s ideal figure, consistently addressed as “thou,” reads daily three chapters of scripture, in the morning, noontime, and evening, in order to complete the Bible in a year; Cotton Mather details this system in his 1683 almanac. While available to groups, frequent daily reading is managed most easily by an individual. Downame expects daily activity and allows the time of “private reading . . . to bee prescribed by mens leasure and opportunity”; he indicates that family reading must be accommodated to times of group prayer “because then [family members] are assembled together .” George W ebbe’s directions concentrate on the interiority of the individual; he notes that the morning supplication purges the reader of worldly thoughts, while evening reading allows the reader to “passe our accompts with God, concerning our carriage the day before, that having made all our reckonings even with him, we may with assurance lay down.” In being led to prayer after the evening chapter, Bayly’s reader is located in private space: “Reade a Chapter in the same order as was prescribed in the morning: and when thou hast done, kneele down on both thy knees at thy bed-side, or some other convenient place in thy Chamber .” Images of individual privacy connote a reflective and isolated reader.13 The godly books are equally concerned, however , with the aural and communal conditions of literacy. In language that highlights the performative aspects of readership in early New England, Downame describes

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“private reading” as an “exercise” which “may be per formed when we are alone, by the sight of the eye, and the discourse of the minde, either with or without the use of speech; but with all necessarily joyned together , when we per forme the dutie with others.” Sound is not only a necessity for group reading, but an option for the solitary reader. John White’s directions also describe the overlap in reading styles: “The authority and wisdome of him that speakes requires great attention of him that reads or hears Gods W ord.” Reading is also cast as a social per formance in Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Man’s Pathway to Heaven, where “Theologus” defends “both publique and private reading of the Scriptures [as] ver y necesarie and profitable.” 14 These prescriptions about aural reading are complemented by details from the steady sellers that construe written works in oral terms; as in the case of Philip and the Ethiop, reading entails its per formance through speech. The narrator of Joseph Alleine’s steady seller identifies the manual’s discourse with speech: “Have I been at this while speaking in the wind? Have I been charming the dead adder , allaying the tumbling Ocean with arguments? Do I speak to the trees or rocks, or to men? to the tombs and monuments of the dead, or to a living auditory?” But the godly books also literally refer to the fact that they are heard. Patrick Ker addresses his audience “O man, whoever thou art then, whether Reader or Hearer of this little Book, meditate much on this Day.” Richard Bruch prefaces the meditations in Johann Ger hard’s The Soule’s-Watch by suggesting “that he that reades or heares them” will be moved and affected. Near the opening of An Alarme to Unconverted Sinners, Alleine frames his work as both a written and an oral text. He attempts to reassure the “prophaned sinner” who, beyond hope, may “scarce cast his eyes, or lend his ear to this discourse: but if there be any such reading, or within hearing, he must know from the Lord that made him, that he is from the Kingdom of God.” 15 The link of voice and writing is often explicit in editions of sermons, which make their way from pulpit to print. The preface to the Cambridge edition of Dublin minister Samuel Mather’ s A Testimony from the Scripture against Idolatry closes with an exhortation that brings the print publication in line with sermonic inspiration: “Now the same Spirit that breathed mightily in the Preacher , when ( viva voce) delivering what is here Published, go along with his T ruth, that the Lords Name may be glorified, and his People edified thereby.” Readers are told that Eleazar Mather’s final sermons are “ Swan-like Songs of him that was once a sweet singer in your Israel” and even that his sermon notes “came ever y way short of what the same Sermons were when delivered viva voce.” References to intangible song and speech remind readers of the oral power of the word as it is mediated by the print text being encountered. 16

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While reading aloud alone is countenanced, aural forms of literacy primarily assume a group context in the conduct literature; through, again, references to a reading schedule, godly writers invoke a social setting, the book a public conduit for speech. W ebbe specifies the threechapter-a-day ritual by advising the reader that “it shal be ver y good if thou read it after this manner , in thy house before thy Family .” Paul Baynes lists “Reading” as one of the “helps” or exercises “in our families . . . to maintain the knowledge and true worship of God, and of true happiness amongst us.” Downame likewise discusses reading as a “family exercise.” Bayly’ s directions for morning piety asks the reader that “eyther before or after thy owne private devotion call ever y morning all thy family to some convenient roome; and first, either reade thy selfe unto them a Chapter in the word of GOD, or cause it be read distinctly by some other.” In the marginalia to this passage, Bayly calls on church fathers to explain the oral authority of this practice: “ Augustine saith, that which the Preacher is in the Pulpit, the same the householder is in the house.” As in Nehemiah and Acts, reading habits involve the oral delivery of written words in a social context. 17 As with the overlap between silent and oral modes, the prescriptive literature encourages both linear and discontinuous styles of reading. T o be sure, the steady sellers promote continuous reading through, as noted, the daily schedule of Bible consultation that would allow the devout to complete the text in a year; consistent with conventional literacy, the reading schedule of three chapters a day promoted by Bayly and others directs readers to move in order from Genesis to Revelation. Downame makes the schedule a precept, a “constant course” where “holy Scriptures” “must not be read by pieces without order, as the Booke hapneth to be open, when we take it into our hand, but the best way is, in our ordinarie course to begin at the beginning, and so to proceed till we come to the end.” Baynes instructs readers “That in the Scriptures there be a constant going on in order, and not heere and there a Chapter.” Johann Gerhard similarly finds the learned apparatus of annotations a distraction from deep reading: “yet no where doe I put to the names of the Authors, seldome note the places of Scriptures; for I did feare, lest thereby the meditation of those that read, might be troubled.” Arthur Dent’s preface gives linear reading its strongest pitch, begging the “deare Christian” reader “that thou wouldest not reade two or three leaues of of this Booke; and so cast it from thee: but that thou wouldest reade it throwout, euen to the end. For I doe assure thee, if there be anything in it worth the reading, it is bestowed in the later part thereof, and most of all towards the conclusion.” 18 Nevertheless, the devotional works encourage a discontinuous form of literacy, and the manuals implicitly refer to the advantages of book tech-

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nology in pressing readers to collate biblical passages and cross-reference their reading matter. The godly writers cultivate piety by taking advantage of the codex’s navigable format. Calling on John 5.39, John White directs readers to “Searching of the Scriptures . . . which is done not by Reading them over cursorily, but by examining them diligently , comparing Scripture with Scripture, that we may know the full minde of God revealed therein, who many times layes no down the whole truth together in one place, but leaves us to take in some other clauses, out of other places, to make up the full truth which he wouuld reveale unto us.” Cotton Mather’s almanac for 1683 prescribes that a single day’ s reading should feature a set number of chapters from the Hebrew testament, the Christian testament, and Psalms, in order to complete the Bible in a year , a schedule that is deliberately nonlinear . In his manual for ministers, he advises readers of scripture to “lay One Sentence, and then Another, and so a Third.” Though Downame champions a linear sequence, he immediately suggests deviations from the “constant course”: “upon extraordinary occasions, it is fit and necessarie to read in any place as the occasion requireth.” There are select biblical passages that should be read because they are “most full and fertill of spiritual instructions”; there are certain chapters that should be read “much more seldome than others”; and he then elaborates a handwritten marginalia system to facilitate access. In reading over the “whole Scriptures” and discriminating passages of “of lesse ordinarie use” and “of greatest excellencie,” and “as we goe, to prefix before them, with our pen, a severall marke: as for example; before the former sort, this *; before the other, this *, or some such like: that we may readily chuse the one upon extraordinar y occasions, and more seldome reade the other in our ordinar y course.” Unlike Ger hard’s avoidance of annotation, John White advocates that readers move between the Bible and biblical commentar y: “there needs . . . much use of learned mens writings, which give great light to the understanding of darke places in Scripture.” Discontinuity—from the centrality of typology for Reformation Protestants to the indexical cross-referencing integral to steady-selling devotional manuals—characterizes a standard mode of reading for early New Englanders. 19 Certain steady sellers imagine the discontinuous reading style more richly than the literal precepts of Downame and White. While Christ could have “driven the devil away with the breath of his nostrils,” Richard Rogers explains that he “did answer with Scripture, to shew us an example”; hence to renounce temptation is to know biblical texts well, to “read them often, use conference & marking the true meaning of the words, and conferring one place of scripture with another .” Thomas White presents an exemplar y child, in a characterization that models literacy training: the young boy marks the margins of his books,

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particularly a copy of Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted which he (and later White) retained for ready reference. In God’s Terrible Voice in the City—his steady-selling response to the London fire—Thomas Vincent endorses a sensational form of collation as a means to acknowledge the sinfulness that has angered God. Striving to “bewail and amend” his sins, he would beseech ever y one of you that cast your eyes upon these lines, to do the like, and to compare them with those lines which are written in the Book of your Consciences; and where you find a T ranscript, read, and read again, consider , and lay to heart, get to your knees and confess, and labour to drop at least some teares into the Bottle, which if this little Book might help water from your eyes, and you could be perswaded to pour forth such waters before the Lord, they might help to quench the violence of the fire of Gods anger, which we have reason to fear, is still burning against us.

Plain style? In a mise en abyme of affective reading, Vincent figuratively recreates the nonlinear comparison of texts godly writers urge. 20 Recommending both linear and collative reading practices, the devotional manuals likewise promote habits that are, on the one hand, deep and sustained, and, on the other, interrupted with pauses, interjections, and extratextual per formances. Most often the conduct literature expects an intensive reading style, characterized by repetitive consultation and internal meditation. “Deep” reading of this sort is valued by Lewis Bayly: “One Chapter thus read with vnderstanding, and meditated with application, will better feed and comfort thy soule, then five read and run ouer without marking their scope or sense, or making any vse thereof to thine owne selfe.” “Read over the foregoing Chapter again and agin [sic]” counsels Joseph Alleine, referring to his own work. Downame argues that readers “should not so much affect the reading of many Authors, as to studie thorowly those which they do reade, & by distinguishing them through serious meditation, to turne them in wholesome nourishment.” Reading itself becomes a substitute for personal experience as a prompt to meditation. If the worshipper is having difficulty, Baynes writes “let him read some part of Scripture, or other booke fit to season and wel affect his mind that so his minde may be quickened to the per formance of this dutie.” Meditations are of course also included in the manuals to provide for this form of reader response. In correspondence directing his younger brother to read “Serious Divinity,” Joseph Beacon suggests that “there must be a Time allowed for digesting, and meditating wt you read, if you Expect any good by it.” From Ezekiel and Revelation to the idiom of “chewing the cudde,” the familiar trope of consumption illustrates this reading mode’ s incorporative effects.21 Such deep engagement is qualified, however , by the variety of per-

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formances expected of readers, per formances that suspend the act of reading as it is conventionally understood. Meditation itself might be considered one form of suspension, a “pondring and weighing well the point in hand, before we passe to another.” Similarly, the conduct manuals encourage pausing over the text. White writes that “The manner of Reading the Scripture, must be with great deliberation,” while Cotton Mather recommends that readers “Make a Pause upon ever y Verse, and see what Lessons of Piety are to be learnt from every Clause.” Time permitting, family reading was, for Bayly , to be interrupted, with the father to “admonish them of some remarkable good notes; and then kneeling downe with them in reverent sort, as is before described, pray with them.” Expressive speech in the form of prayer arrests the act of reading. Downame suggests praying out loud when convenient. “And yet I fear more of the manner how you Read,” worries Joseph Alleine. “Did you begin with Prayer , and obser ve what Promises, or Commands, or Threatenings, or Examples were there for you to Imitate, or to fear and avoid? And did you turn it intoPrayer afterwards? That I would advise you to, to turn some of the Chapter into Prayer after ward.” White encourages “above all fer vent and continuall Prayers, wherein acknowledging our own blindness and inability . . . we beg earnestly the assistance of God’s Spirit.” He later explicitly sees the practices as “fit to be joyned together”: “For the Word ministers matter of Prayer and is the ground of our Petitions, who have no promise to be heard, unless we ask according to Gods will . . . Again Prayer must needs awe us with the reverence of Gods Majesty , and consequently prepare our hearts to tremble at Gods word in reading it.” This mixture of humility and rejoicing recalls the Ethiop’s scene of expressive reading in Acts. A deep reading mode is further complicated by Bayly’s opening instruction for his book, where he hastens the pace of devotional literacy: “Yet reade it, and that speedily: lest before thou hast read it over, God (by some unexpected death) cut thee off, for thine inveterate Impiety.” Ministers John Wilson and Jonathan Mitchel remark on the advantages of interruptions in a preface, noting that the “Reader will find . . . much in a little room” and encourage the reader to “ Pause upon what he reads . . . with intermixed meditations and ejaculations suitable to the matter in hand.” 22 Godly writers direct the physical conduct of reading through these overlapping and sometimes contradictor y protocols. But the ministers were no doubt more interested in altering the moral conduct of readers, stressing ways in which literacy might ser ve as a means of grace. The techne of reading—to read aloud or read silently , communally or privately, discontinuously or sequentially—will only be as valuable as the transformative effects of literacy. Representations of reading in the prescriptive literature thus also seek life-altering behavior , whether it be

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through the modes of preparation and application that structure acts of reading, or whether it be through discourses that offer judgment or mercy to the anxious reader. The behavioral mores pressed upon the audience to prepare for reading conform to what Michael Clark isolates as crucial to puritan meaning: the necessity of a desiring will that precedes any effective communication for the devout. Bayly opens his work by enjoining this form of preparation: “Who ever thou art that lookest into this Booke, never undertake to read it;; unlesse thou first resolvest to become from thy heart, an unfained Practitioner of Piety.” While he subsequently recommends speedy consumption, the reader’s need to prepare for books with the proper will is underscored by Paul Baynes as well. “It must be with heartie good will to learn and profit by it,” Baynes writes, “desiring God to prepare us with reverence.” Preliminary steps include ritual modes of preparatory humiliation, with White prescribing a purged heart: “The first work, when we come to read the Scripture, is to cleane the heart . . . Unlesse vessels be emptied, whatsoever we powre into them runnes over.” He also casts this preparation in common agricultural metaphors, comparing the reader’ s purged heart to cleared ground, and the read Word to nature’s seed. These habits of mind are complemented by expressive per formance; as signs of humility , readers are encouraged to pray or are given prayers “to be used before Reading.” 23 While the godly books cultivate humility , they also much more profoundly seek altered behavior through application of the read material. Downame quotes Augustine on Psalm 30, suggesting that the saint’ s comment may “in the perusing of other parts of Scripture and holy writings, be profitably obser ved”: “If (saith he) the Psalm prayeth, doe yee also pray; if it mourneth, mourne ye; if it congratulateth and rejoyceth, rejoyce ye likewise; if it hopeth, hope ye; if it feareth, doe ye also feare; for all things are our looking glasse, that we may compose ourselves as it directeth.” William Dyer petitions the reader to “mind this book and my former Treatise; not only read them but reform your lives by them.” This focus on application and effects is clarified by Baynes, in a r hetoric of active verbs that highlights the affirmative consequences of reading practice: “If reading be thus used, it will many waies appease the conscience; inlighten the judgment; inlarge the heart; relieve the memor y, move the affections, and in a word, draw the whole man unto God.” The intimate link between literacy and living is defined by Bayly , who sees the act of reading as a day’ s event that deser ves reckoning: “Sit downe a while before thou goest to bed, and consider with thy selfe what memorable thing thou hast seene, heard, or read that day, more then thou sawest, heardest or knewest before, and make thy best use of them.” Equivalent to what is “seene” or “hearde,” reading is experience for Bayly , a process of transformative

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knowledge that is then applied further during nightly meditation. Figuring conscience as “the book within,” Alleine elaborates the steps of application and internalization by asking self-reflexively “Reader , hath conscience been at work, while thou hast been looking over these lines? Hast thou pondered these things in thine heart? Hast thou searched the book within, to see if these things be so? If not, read it again, and make thy conscience to speak whether or no it be thus with thee.” Alluding to Revelation, Alleine uses book imager y as a motive force for individual change.24 While godly writers stress literacy’ s general results in these passages, Alleine’s focus on conscience specifies the effects of reading within the devotional culture of early New England. In seeking to change their readers through application, godly writers oscillate between a discourse of judgment and a discourse of mercy . Image patterns, modes of address, and symbolization associate books and the act of reading with the audience’s salvation, and these discourses seek particular kinds of transformation. The discourses of judgment and mercy derive in part from a shared perception among godly writers of a book’ s metaphorical meaning. In scripture, the trope “book,” according to Benjamin Keach, “is ascribed to God, by which his most exact knowledge and Providence is noted—the metaphor is taken from wisemen who are wont diligently to note down in their Books such Persons, Things, and memorable Actions, which they would remember .”25 The book as a written source of providential knowledge is elaborated by Keach in explaining the familiar figures of the Book of Life—cited repeatedly in scripture and referring to God’ s record of the Elect—and the Books of Judgment—cited most famously in Daniel and Revelation and referring to the separate volumes of the damned and the saved. Another conventional trope that shapes reading habits is the Book of Conscience, where deeds and sins in this world are permanently stored for the perusal of both God and the fallen individual. Representations of book technologies are thus lifealtering in ways specific to the Reformed tradition. The steady sellers invoke the discourse of judgment to transform readerly conduct. Of salvation, Joseph Alleine observes that “God hath written it as with a Sun-beam, in the book out of which you must be judged.” Bayly prefaces his manual in language from Revelation, reminding readers of the book record’s association with divine knowledge: “And what honour is it for great men to haue great titles on earth; when God counts their Names unworthie to be written in his Booke of life in Heauen?” Henr y Stubbes isolates his own tract within this discourse, comparing his reader to Belshazaar—“Conscience will see an Hand-writing, not on the Wall, but in this Book”—and further notes that there are “W ords enough in this Book against you.” In rhetoric that is both oral and visual,

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Bayly builds to a figure of the book that pleads to God for salvation: “Behold the mysterie of his Incarnation, and remit the misery of my transgression. And as oft as the wounds of thy Sonne appeare in the sight: Oh, let the woes of my sinnes be hid from the presence. As oft as the rednesse of his bloud glistens in thine eyes; Oh, let the guiltinesse of my sinnes be blotted out of thy booke.” While the form sounds the hoped-for change in its parallelism, the content—Christ’ s sacrifice—is organized around a visual economy; the Son’s “wounds” and “bloud” in God’ s “sight” replace—in the phrasing’s rhetorical balance—and thus blot out the sins appearing in the divine book. 26 The Book of Conscience likewise makes up the reading matter imagined in the steady sellers and attaches to the written word a similar discourse of judgment. Distinguishing it from the book of biblical law that must be followed, Smith’ s The Great Assize—which is thematically structured through the civil trial metaphor—defines this figurative codex: “thy conscience is the booke that shall be opened; and that shall bee as good as ten thousand witnesses, either to excuse or accuse thee before God. . . . hee hath given unto every man and woman a booke, their own conscience; wherein are written all our thoughts, words and deeds, so as none shall escape.” Elevating it to the status of the testaments, Henr y Scudder advises that “You should therefore bee well read in the booke of your conscience, as well as in the Bible.” Stubbes explains the office of individual conscience with the language of inscription, permanence, and access: “It is imployed as a Notar y or Register, to Write down all we do; to W rite it down as with the point of a Diamond, to Book it down, and Seal it up, that it may come to Light again.” 27 Acts of reading the written word are sensationally rendered as judgment in two passages from devotional texts, in images that chart the epistemological extremes of fallen humankind and divine providence. Harvard student and Dedham minister Joseph Belcher (1669–1723) commonplaces a passage under the heading “Promiscuous Sayings” that figures a scene where the book of conscience is conflated with the atmospherics of hell: “As a letter writ with the Juice of oranges cannot be read untill it be brought to the fier and then they appear; So thou Sinner canst not Read that Bloody bill of Indictment thy conscience hath against thee now but when thou Shalt Stand near unto god a consuming fier then wt a heavey reconing will apear .” Rather than cr yptography’s clandestine politics or shorthand’s speed and brevity , secret writing here functions symbolically to suggest the internally unknowable status of sin, the mortal’ s blindness to its severity and its ultimate presence on Judgment Day . Stubbes advises in the “Application” of his third sermon to “Set God alwayes before you,” pursuing the precept in language that conjoins readerly consciousness and a divinized textual record: “have this always run in our thoughts,God heareth,

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God sees and knows. O that this were W ritten upon your Desks and ShopBoards, God sees; O that this were W ritten upon your T ables, God sees; O that this were W ritten upon your Looking-Glasses, God sees; O that this were Written upon all your Attire and Dresses, God sees; and O that this were Written upon your Naked Breasts and Shoulders, God sees; and upon your Faces and Foreheads too.” From external setting to the intimacies of the body, Stubbes’s divine graffiti settles on the forehead, as if progressing by metonym to the reader’ s mind. If Belcher’ s commonplace uses secret writing to indicate that “sin will out,” then Stubbes aligns the internal mechanisms of conscience with God’ s omniscient signage: “Conscience does see you; O that you would live in the continual Apprehension of it. God sees thee, God knows what all your thoughts are, what all your designs are, what all your sayings and doings are.” In these instances, devotional literature “condemns thee in ever y leaf,” collapsing images of writing with readerly subjectivity and divine judgment. Whether secret or public, the written record is present, troped as a textual artifact and figured as a transformative power.28 The effects of literacy are delivered in merciful language as well, in discourses of benevolence and delight that enjoin readers to find in the written word means of grace and assurance of salvation. In his directions for reading, Scudder suggests that adult literacy is nearly a converting ordinance: “[T]hough the Spirit of God is able to worke conversion and holinesse immediately without the W ord . . . yet in men of yeares the holy Ghost will not (where the W ord may be had) work without it as his instrument.” “[W]ho cannot daily with much comfort spend some time perusing these assurances,” asks Downame rhetorically, “wherein so rich and glorious a Kingdom is ratified unto him?” Downame’ s soothing directions give way in White’ s manual to more ecstatic language: “It happens sometimes that such Spirituall Rapture seize on a man, even while he is reading the Scripture . . . whereupon the heart opens itself, to close with, and draw in the ravishing Object.” Samuel Whiting’ s prefatory instructions continue this life-altering r hetoric of grace, here combining it with imager y of the textual record: “ Printed books will do little good except Gods Spirit print them in our hearts. Gods words written with Ink will not profit, except they be also written with the Spirit of the Living God.” At one level cast in the conventional language of Protestant heart piety—where sacred message rather than worldly media is valued and internalized—Whiting’s prose nevertheless construes “print” in spiritually affirmative terms. The abstract substantive of “ Printed books” is transformed into the verb form of “Gods Spirit print them in our hearts”; and God’s inky words should also be written with the “ the Spirit of the Living God.” The preface marshals textual presence as a way for readers to experience the restorative powers of God’s grace.29

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The devotional literature presents this discourse of mercy as more than just a routinized exercise on the way to salvation; reading as a means of grace brings delight and pleasure. Unlike those moments of punitive admonition by other godly authors, a passage from White’ s manual describes reading as a “holy Ordinance,” an action motivated not by necessity but rather by the feeling of “delight” and the accrual of “wonderful wisdom” (136). The steady sellers also contrast these pleasures with those of the carnal world. Before concluding his sermon instructions with “Oh beloved, let us read the W ord,” Dyer explains that “The Delight of a Saint in Gods W ord, over -tops all his Creatures delights. Wicked men can delight in the Creatures of God, but not in the Word of God” (29, 28). The short preface by John Cotton and John Wilson to Richard Mather’s The Summe of Certain Sermons describes the “gift of [Christ’s] grace,” and, after adverting to “other [titles] of this kind” that tend “to the discovery of grace,” the preface writers distinguish their “little Treatise” in sensual terms: “(Good Reader) thou shalt find this little Treatise, to be like Mar yes box of spiknard, which washing the paths of Christ towards us (as that did his feet) will be fit to perfume not only the whole house of God, with the odour of the oyntment of his Grace, but also thy soul with the oyl of gladness, above what creature-comforts can afford.” Again, acoustic parallelism (“oyntment”/“oyl”; “Grace”/“gladness”) complements the figurative rendering of the written word as a sensory pleasure beyond “creature-comforts.” Giving the written word italicized equivalence to the preached word, Scudder underscores the redemptive power of Protestant literacy: “For it is by the Word both read {Rev. 1.3} and preached that Christ doth sanctifie all that are his, that he may present them to himselfe, and so to his Father , without spot or wrinkle a Church most glorious {Eph. 5. 26, 27}.” The act of reading is here united with an image of salvation, a glimpse of the restored body enabled by salvation and promised in the afterlife. 30

The Imagined Codex The texture of these moral prescriptions—referring as they do to conscience, introspection, anxiety, and pleasure—sharpens our focus on the psychological dimensions of reading practice in the period. V aried as they may be, reading habits are of course routed through the religious socialization of Reformation Protestants. Clearly reading cultivates mechanisms of self-reflection and spiritual fulfillment that lead scholars to characterize literacy as a process of “sacred internalization,” wherein the subjective transformation of the reader effaces the material form of the text. 31 Yet the stress on interiority is misconstrued if it neglects the role book objects play in nurturing the pious life. The moral prescrip-

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tions remind us that subjectivity is also a process of subjection, of readers becoming subject to religious discipline, with all the restrictions and potentialities a discipline implies. Book artifacts assist in this process, their physical presence shaping spiritual conduct. A final turn to the devotional literature—studying both its symbolic representations and its material form—illuminates the sacred externalization of the word in early New England. The qualitative differences of writing technology—its tactility and visibility, its durability and gravity , its indexicality and sequentiality—are used in the godly literature to assert the value of the written word as ministers perceive it. These differences also distinguish books from oral discourse and from other modes of manuscript and print culture, helping to explain the cultural work of the codex format in early New England. The conduct literature explicitly values the written over the oral on occasion, a surprising rhetoric given the centrality of preaching to evangelical Protestantism. In promoting Bible reading, Dyer associates the oral with secular humanity: “compare what is spoken in thebooks of man, with what is written in the book of God.” John White comments that biblical writing differs from preaching; in the latter, the matter is God’s but the form is the minister’s, while in the former, “the very forms of expression were not of man’ s devising”: God’ s authorship merges form and content. The preface to William Stoughton’ s election sermon NewEngland’s True Interest contrasts the real-time continuity of oral discourse with a book’ s temporality. While hearing requires the listener to “hold pace with the speaker [,] . . . in reading we have this advantage, that we may stay and dwell upon what we have first a minde too, and by serious thought and humble prayer, improve it to our good, without depriving ourselves of opportunity of doing the like, with any other part of it afterward.” Pausing, meditating, praying, and reforming are modes of ritual action present at a sermon, but the preface’ s advice understands orality as restrictive and instead makes the written word essential for such extratextual virtues. While acknowledging the value of “preaching and hearing . . . in the worke of our Regeneration,” Downame advocates written texts for the acquisition of knowledge, which can lead to conversion. Writing can provide thorough and speedy instruction in “the whole body of Divinity,” while “by preaching we cannot come to know, but in a long time.” The written word allows recursive review , assistance or “helpes [that] hearing affordeth not.” The written word permits customized knowledge, suited to addressing vices and sins specific to the individual reader: “we may . . . fit our reading for our owne occasions, and furnishing us in the knowledge of those poynts, wherein we are most defective . . . whereas the Preacher speak[s] generally for the good of the whole Congregation.” These dismissals of oral discourse recognize in

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the written word its accessibility , both as navigable object and portable vessel, while imputing to it virtues of superior education and individualizing particularity. To this latter temptation, literacy’ s liberal defenders and Protestant mythographers might fall, conjuring a proto-Enlightenment impulse in the Reformed tradition’s culture of the book. But notice that these passages frame literacy in terms of religious discipline, its means (meditation, prayer) and ends (self-scrutiny , transformation) wholly spiritualized: reading subjects, rather than individualizes. Accessibility— understood here as a format trait, rather than a set of literacy skills—is one qualitative difference of the written word that is then culturally constructed in the salvific mode of Reformation Protestantism. 32 Artifactuality is another such difference. W riting and the book are troped as artifactual records, as permanent, enduring witnesses to events and memories. Invoking “ Vox audita perit, litera scripta manet,” Vincent presents this symbolic meaning in its classic formulation: “That which you only hear, you may quickly forget, and so the words with the sound perish in the Air; when written, especially printed words abide, and may bring to your remembrance the things which you have heard long ago.” “Why man,” asserts Joseph Alleine, “the whole book of God doth testify against thee”; “condemn[ing] thee in ever y leaf,” the Bible is ultimately figured in language from Matthew 5.18 to underscore Alleine’s message: “Heaven and earth shall pass away; but one jot, or tittle of this word shall never pass away.” If letter forms animate Alleine’ s r hetoric, Samuel Whiting refers to format in his image of the book as apocalyptic witness. He argues that, if readers maintain their sins and lust, “My Soul shall weep in secret places for you: and this Little Book, with what you have heard and known from other of the Lords Worthies, shall Witness against you at the Last Day.” Gathered in sixteens, Whiting’s theological history is indeed a “Little Book,” and his conceit trades on the irony of the cheap tract extending itself beyond the sinful reader’ s earthly existence to Judgment Day. Introducing Richard Mather’ s A Farewel Exhortation, Charles Chauncey claims a similar authority for the humble tract; like the enduring evidentiary role imputed to the covenant in the ark and the stone of Joshua in the Hebrew Bible, “it hath pleased the Lord . . . to leave this precious treatise, as a jewell, little in bulk, but great in vertue & value, as witness that may sur vive after [Mather’ s] departure.” God’ s ser vants in the new Israel will follow a “like course,” with works like Mather’ s representing “monuments & witnesses against the backsliders in these dayes.”33 Environmental presence denotes a third difference of the book format from oral communication, a difference then cast in the admonitory and affirmative language of evangelism. The written word is set as a prop within a theater of literacy; the steady sellers install figures of inscription, figures with a gravity and heft that guide readerly feeling. Thomas

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Doolittle mentions Ecclesiastes 9.10 and then imagines the cite in the visual space of the home: “O that ever y Trifler in matters of his God, and of his Soul, would write that verse upon his Chamber Door .” “Make much of [scripture] while you live, be for ever thankful for it” advises Joseph Alleine, and, conflating Proverbs 6.21, 22 and Isaiah 49.16, continues: “Tie it about your necks, write it upon your hands, lay it in your bosoms.” Worrying over the preponderance of the unconverted, Alleine later bewails readers “Alas on how many doors, on how many faces must 34 Inspired more generally by we write, Lord have mercy upon us!” Deuteronomy 6.7–9, godly writers in these passages imagine language as a visual phenomenon. The prop semiotics of the book perhaps resonate especially with early New Englanders, for while the Reformed tradition defines piety in terms of a spiritual journey and trial, the pilgrim identity is both metaphor and reality for the transatlantic movement of the English devout to the northeastern Americas. In this context, godly writers fashion the reading act as an anchor, a stabilizing force in the pilgrim’ s travel in this world. “In reading, settle thyself,” counsels George W ebbe. Baynes’s directions for reading make the heart wayward, the book secure: “W e must settle ourselves for the time to be attentive, and so to abandon the wandring of the heart as much as may be.” Swinnock refers to conversions (the Ethiop, Augustine, and Cyprian) caused by a book’ s per formance, and explains that “the wandering sinner is most frequently reduced by the Scripture, heard or read,” “reduce” here referring to its common early modern meaning of leading back and restoring. Vincent publishes God’s Terrible Voice during a “ retiring time of consideration,” after the immediate dislocations of London’s plague and fire but during the period of providential trial these judgments portend, when “ most have attained to some kind of Settlement at least so much, as to give them leave to sit down and ponder upon the meaning of God.” The Protestant life as a test is connoted in another conventional trope for reading matter , here ser ving to justify Matthew Mead’s tract: “Reader, Expect nothing of curiosity or quaintness, for then I shall deceive thee; but if thou wouldst have a touchstone for the tryal of thy state, possibly this may stead thee.” Portability and navigable access—properties that distinguish the written from the oral and that would abolish the oral’s temporal and spatial constraints—are themselves redefined as modes of physical anchoring comparable to one’s fixed position at a sermon. Because of its stability, the steady seller can steady readers. 35 Finally, godly writers draw on the visual properties of the written word to connote the sacred aura of divine communication; a final difference from orality for our purposes, bibliographical aesthetics become a socializing force for readers. John White indicates evidence for God’ s authorship of the Bible “at the first view” of holy text, there “being lively

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characters imprinted on the face and body of this sacred Book, by that divine Spirit that composed it.” Downame defines the “Booke of grace” as not only the “internall writing of God’s Law and will in the heart and inward parts”—the conventional trope for divine inscription—but also as “the outward Booke of the holy Scriptures, in which are contained all things to knowne of God and his will.” After a series of images that associate God’s creation of the world and humankind with drafting and epitomizing in books, Swinnock further transforms the mar vel of Hebraic law on “Tables of stone” to bookishness: “What a rare Manuscript was that, where the book, the matter, the writing were all of Gods own making and doing!” Smith imagines the “ Booke of Life”—God’s record of the Elect— in visual terms as well: in Christ’ s “eternall purpose he hath chosen, [that it] be written, as it were, with Letters of Gold.” Thus books are figured in r hetorics of beauty that impute to the written word a divine power, here more merciful than punitive. 36

Hand Piety Textual access, artifactual permanence, environmental presence, visual appearance—the symbolic renderings in the godly books of these physical properties conveyed how technologies of writing were used to pursue the spiritual transformation of readers, how objects shaped subjects. These properties distinguished writing from speech in the early modern period; but they do not tell us of qualitative differences among writing technologies, nor how these technologies might specifically cultivate piety. Study of binding practices and book organization allows us to glimpse the role played by the tactile dimensions of the codex format. A general awareness of the methods of collecting, adhering, and covering a text block helps illustrate the varied modes of interaction available to devout readers in the early modern period. So too, the navigable and composite qualities of these pious texts remind us of the root meanings of “manual” and the genre’s exploitation of paratexts. Indeed, we might best comprehend book assembly through the metaphor of the index, which connotes both the fingering of the physical object and the crossreferencing choreography of nonlinear reading. Books were anthologies, the codex a compendium, paratexts interacting with main text, indeed, “main” texts interacting with “main” texts. Attention to individual copies that date from the era permits analysis of the historical witness, a text that bears marks of use over time and use in its moment. Given the massive publication of early modern religious manuals in English, and given the contingencies that have preser ved a select few copies of these titles, study of such individual devotional steady sellers is, from a quantitative perspective, necessarily conjectural.37 Put affirma-

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tively, such study, from a semiotic perspective, is necessarily conjectural: in constructing what he variously calls a “divinatory,” “semiotic,” or “conjectural” paradigm for historical research, Carlo Ginzburg rethinks schemas of both generalization (which would predetermine how data is selected for study) and accumulation (which would amass data following the scientific method). Drawing on venatic lore, medical practice, Conan Doyle, Freud, and fingerprinting, Ginzburg promotes focus on the singular, on the richly evidential nature of the symptom, the clue, or the fragment: that is, the way an individual piece of evidence can open out onto a social circuit of cultural relations within a specific historical moment. In this sense, reading a singular clue or isolable symptom reveals a substratum and complex of meaning otherwise unavailable to deductive reasoning or quantitative analysis. 38 The assembly of a codex could take many forms, and there was certainly no essence to a book, by which a volume was to contain a single title read front to back. Titles from the London trade were often prebound. As Stuart Bennett demonstrates, over 80 percent of books in Britain during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were sold ready-bound, and colonial purchasers could expect similar trade bindings of a plain sort. 39 But buyers could also customize the binding of sheets and include multiple titles in one volume (a practice soon to be renewed in the digital age, with print-on-demand purchasing and perhaps even A TM-like printing and binding machines). An assemblage owned by William Adams features such tract binding, a set of Cambridge and Boston imprints from the second generation, but also a Hugh Peters treatise from 1646 London. 40 Although seventeenth-centur y colonial buyers made do with ready-bound books from London, Bible editions, for example, would be appended with genealogical tables, metrical psalms, and even the Book of Common Prayer .41 Steady sellers themselves were more varied than their short titles or main text form indicated. Samuel Smith’s The Great Assize is a different work when we see that it was published and bound with his sermon on Canticles. Smith’ s “A Fold for Christ’s Sheep” employs language of a loving Christ that differs markedly from the title sermon’ s punitive tone; and, because the Canticles sermon closes the volume, a linear reading would surely alter the entire volume’s message. Although Arthur Dent’s Plaine Man’s Pathway is a dramatic dialogue between four fictionalized interlocutors, this conceit is qualified by the handy table appended to the work’ s end, which directs readers to kinds of practical behavior . A user such as Thomas Weld indexed his personal miscellany: the commonplace book surveyed in Chapter 1 concludes with a table to all of its contents keyed to handwritten page numbers. 42 Tract binding and customized navigation combine in a volume owned by Theophilus Cotton; multiple titles

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from the 1610s by Daniel Dyke, John Yates, and Richard Clyfton exist in a single binding, most likely an inheritance that Cotton then provided with a navigational aid on the blank endpaper facing the title page, as he heads a vertical, handwritten column of the titles with “Three treatises on several subjects.” 43 The assembly of a cover likewise involved variability . Tanned leather over boards of wood, scabbard, or pasteboard might constitute a cover; so too limp vellum might protect the work; or paper itself might simply wrap around a text block without boards: consider the almanacs of Thomas Paine from 1716 and 1717 discussed in Chapter 1, where paper with a bold-lined black-and-white floral pattern—the flowers colored orange and green—provides an exterior to the diar y-calendar’s interior. Leather covers might wrap around the boards for a full binding, or stop short in a half or quarter binding; there are thus tactile differences based on the inner or outer location of the wrapping material. For example, a full binding necessarily entails fingering of the leather on the insides of the board, a continuum of animal hide and human hand—a fold of Christ’s sheepskin—that both broaches and opposes the book’ s holy interiority.44 In contrast to skin continuities, the vegetable fibers of a paper cover make exterior and interior coterminous, and connote for the text block a sacral holism, distinct from the user . Animal, vegetable . . . mineral? Metal tools impressed leather surfaces and metal fittings occasionally adorned the cover . A leather cover might be decorated with work that is both visual (the metallic shine of gold tooling or the darkened relief of blind tooling) and tactile (the depressed surfaces produced by the tooling): the full binding on Joseph T ompson’s personal miscellany includes a conventional blind panel stamp, with fleurons at the panel corners that draw the reader outward to the cover’s edges. Sight and touch might be engaged by clasps and furniture of brass that could frame and lock the text block. So too, stitching supplies textural differences in the feel of the book, resulting in exposed bands inside or outside a book, raised bands on the spine as both functional and expressive features of the leather , or unobtrusive bands hidden by the cover. The archive of early New England presents local and international bindings, with ever ything from the humble paper covers on a copy of Bayly redacted for a 1728 pamphlet (Figure 7, center), to the gold-tooled death’s head at the panel corners of a copy of The Mysterie of Self-Deceiving (most certainly bound abroad), to the Winthrop Library’s “Silver Bible,” a 1680 imprint bound in a sixteenth-centur y silver missal covering and painted at the fore-edge around 1700 with a floral design that reads “SEARCH THE SCRIPTURS,” a copy whose colonial provenance can only be traced confidently to the 1740s (Figure 8). 45 This range is familiar to anyone working with old books, though the

Figure 7. Binding’s plain style and its variants. A utilitarian cover on Smith’ s The Great Assize (Boston, 1727) ( left), the paper cover of an abridged The Practise of Pietie (Boston, 1728) (center), and the tactile effects of a blind-tooled ribbon roll on the cover near the spine of The Almost Christian Discovered (Boston, 1742) (right). Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Figure 8. The Withrop family “silver bible”: a 1680 imprint bound in a sixteenthcentury silver missal covering and painted, around 1700, at the fore-edge with a floral design that reads “SEARCH THE SCRIPTURS” when fanned. Courtesy , Massachusetts Historical Society.

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devotional steady sellers present a few distinctions worth noting. First, the brickishness of the more encyclopedic manuals meant that bindings around a Bayly , Dent, or Scudder would usually feature just this title, rather than multiple titles. Second, twelvemo (or smaller) manuals and psalters were eminently portable, so that their heft and touch were felt whether anchored at home, seated in church, or traveling on life’ s pilgrimage. The colonial reprints of the steady sellers supply further means to specify these obser vations; the physical state of sur viving copies present format and binding traits indicative of the puritan devout’ s hand piety. Early eighteenth-centur y editions published in Boston were thin bricks relative to their English sources, as colonial printers economized on paper costs through small formats, tiny fonts, and absent margins. The 1718 edition of The Practise of Pietie is anywhere from two-thirds to one-half the length of English editions; the cramped 1727 version ofThe Great Assize runs 194 pages, compared to editions from London that averaged 320 pages and displayed spacious margins; a 1722 reprint of Christ’s Famous Titles presents eye-aching typography. Abridgments were also an economical option: Vincent’ s God’s Terrible Voice was condensed in 1667 and meditations from Bayly were extracted for the pamphlet-like 1728 edition. Colonial printers later in the centur y would likewise avail themselves of cutting and cramming to produce quite variant editions of English novels such as Robinson Crusoe.46 The high cost of paper in the colonial book trade affected binding practices as well and contributed to the tactile properties of local binding. For if colonial reprints were less brickish in volume, they were more so in firmness, when bound with boards. Because pasteboard—the creation of boards through the laminating of waste sheets—was in short supply relative to, say, London, local binders used scabbard, a thin wooden board made from oak, maple, or birch. This stiff format prevails in extant copies of colonial devotional steady sellers.47 Finally, Hannah French found blind tooling at the board edges common in seventeenth-centur y colonial binding, a practice that—adding to French’s observation—the stiffness of scabbard permits (Figure 9). For the reader, leather covers with such tooling provide a textural contrast at the place of tactile priority when entering a book. 48 It is safe to say that the bindings and décor of steady sellers were overwhelmingly plain (Figure 7, left). For leather -covered colonial reprints, this plain style included a full binding over scabbard, with a simple blind-tooled, double-line fillet framing the cover and flat spines with horizontal tooling, also blind and single- or double-lined. 49 Yet if the variety of tactile interaction implicit in the range of binding styles available to readers is understood, then we might be in a better position to appreciate examples that especially exploit touch and sight. The Boston Athenaeum’s copy of the 1700 edition of Flavel’s Sacramental Meditations

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Figure 9. Tooling at the board edges on a copy of Edward Pearse’s The Great Concern (Boston, 1711). Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

features the autograph of “Grace Tilley” on its endpaper; further , Tilley records above her name that the volume was “New Bound, Jan. 17, 1730” (Figure 10). A twelvemo volume of 160 pages, Tilley’ s copy of Flavel is bound in leather treated by blind tooling. A blind panel stamp of roughly one inch by three inches decorates front and back covers; a roll of impressed dots adorns the inside of this frame, while the tooling outside the panel’ s rule presents a repetition of tiny arches that are surrounded by another rule. Outside the panel, at each of its four corners, is an ornament combining floral, circle, and acorn motifs, while at the panel’s waist two triangle designs made up of branches bracket the rule. Following French, the tooling continues in fact to the turn-in of the leather over the boards, the full binding thus making the board edges a sensory experience as the book is operated. Signed “Benja Bird’ s Book 1748,” the American Antiquarian Society’ s copy of Mead’ s The Almost Christian Discovered (Boston, 1742) is more modest, with triple-lined fillets framing front and back cover and a vertical rule toward the spine on each, between which is presented a blind-tooled ribbon roll, the ribbon itself decorated with branches, flowers, and acorns (Figure 7, right). The

Figure 10. Grace Tilley’ s copy of John Flavel’ s Sacramental Meditations (London, 1700), with electrical tape repair. Courtesy, Boston Athenaeum.

Figure 11. William Dodge’s copy of the 1697 New England Psalm Book. By permission of the Houghton Librar y, Harvard University, Bible K.697.

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tactile effect here is only in the cup of the hand as the book is held open. The Houghton’s London, 1697 New England Psalm Book is bound in calf and offers an endpaper inscription: “Me William Dodg His posallm Book Bought of James Gray this Day faboruary the first 1698. Come sing prais Come this Day mak no Delay” (Figure 11). This copy of the eightyfour-page twelvemo steady seller features a tooled ornament pattern, rather than panel, with three columns of five, four, and five hand stamps respectively, on front and back cover . The hand-tooled figure is a decorative ellipse with acorn-and-drawer -handle imager y, and its saturation of the cover creates for a constant textural awareness of the book as held object. The spine’ s four raised bands and caret tooling heightens the sensory experience of the binding. 50 Book fastenings were another structural component of assembly that affected reader response. Codex-formatted religious literature of the early modern period was occasionally designed with ties and clasps fixed to the covers for users to fasten the book over the fore-edge. It may be that the fitting’s purpose was for texts that were “too frequently used to be shelved,” but it is also the case that a fastening’ s functional role declined with paper text blocks and its postvellum purpose was atavistic and symbolic. 51 While there are certainly worldly works with ties, early modern Bibles and psalmbooks tend to employ such devices more commonly than secular literature: the fixture secures the book’s interior but also symbolizes its sacredness. One can imagine the reader hovering— like a bee upon a flower—at the moment of delay and opening, where the obstacle to immediate access is also a liminal sign of religious commitment. And one can see in the Barber family’s large folio Bible (Amsterdam?, 1683) remnants of metal fittings, with the clasps’ catch on the back cover, and in the Dexter family’ s equally large Bible (Amsterdam, 1708) an extant leather strap with a brass clasp.52 Hugh Amory describes a “‘woman’s Bible,’ ” the small format duodecimo of three generations of Hannahs, isolated in the Essex county probate records and found extant as “bound in red morocco, gilt and clasped” with silver fastenings.53 Humble editions of scripture likewise featured clasps. Sur viving on a portable, double-column format Bible held by the Massachusetts Historical Society—an Oxford, 1727 imprint bound with a London, 1725, edition of the New England Psalm Book—are metal fittings. Modest copies of a 1640 Bay Psalm Book and a 1642 copy of Ainsworth’ s psalms have fitting remnants. Clasps structured Thomas Weld’s commonplace book; the remains of a leather fastening exist on the front cover, metal hinges for the catch sur vive on the back, and four arrowhead-like protrusions elevate the leather around the furniture. A commonplace book kept by Samuel Sewall retains brass clasps. The records of the First Church of Cambridge in the Houghton’ s two volumes include ties and a flap on

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one binding, and evidence of clasps on the other .54 Bookseller invoices and inventories list “261 pr . Clasps for Bibles,” “200 Pare of Clasps for writeing books,” and “10 Oxford Bibles 8o Ca Clasps” and “50 Oxford Testaments Breuer 12o sh. Clasps.” 55 With reference to this assembly, certain godly writers draw on the relative inaccessibility of the codex format to figure human neglect, divine knowledge, and worldly sin. Swinnock urges the reader to “Now unclasp the secret book of Gods decree, and look into it as far as the word will warrant thee.” Flavel admonishes those who would commonplace scriptural providences: “Take heed of clasping up those rich treasures in a Book, and thinking it enough to have noted them there: but have frequent recourse to them, as oft as new wants, fears or difficulties arise, and assault you.” Smith notes that the closed codex is a punitive reminder as well. He argues that men “feele not the wounds of conscience because now their Bookes be clasped, they be shut up, their seared Consciences bee now asleepe: But the day will come that their Bookes must bee opened and their secrets declared; and then conscience will accuse them, condemne, and torment them.” Likewise, Vincent obser ves that “The Sentence of the damnation of such as are not saved will be dreadful; when the Books are opened where your sins are recorded, and you are convicted by the Judge.” Disciplines punish. But disciplines also permit, and one can conjecture that the unclasping of a sacred text as part of a reading discipline authorizes the subject, carr ying the devout gesturally to the book’s world of redemption. If the book artifact at one level impedes navigation, it surely enables entr y as well. Indexicality makes the codex relatively accessible, and godly writers use the assembly of the written word to value the material record and offer hope. For John Downame, a book’s utility and access overcomes the restricted time and space of listening: “wee may use it as oft as wee will. . . but the other can be had but at certaine times, nor then neither in every place.” Finally, John Fox understands the handling of written sur faces in comparative terms, worr ying about “What time is spent in Carding, Dicing, Dancing, Interludes, Stage-Plays, Bear and Bull-baitings, Hunting, Hawking, and reading Romantick Books . . . The turning of the Bible, or some good Book is more becoming a Christian, than turning a pair of Cards.” “Immoderate recreation” is framed by “Carding” and “reading Romantick Books,” and the good turn of Bible reading is coordinated with the page turn through which we operate books. 56 Tactility makes the codex phenomenologically felt, and a final binding example suggests how godly readers use the assembly of the written word likewise to value the material record and offer hope. In Joseph Sewall’s octavo copy of Richard Alleine’ s Heaven Opened, a 1699 colonial reprint of a favored steady-selling divine, the full binding in sheep fea-

Figure 12. Joseph Sewall’s 1703 copy of Richard Alleine’s Heaven Opened (Boston, 1699). A heart image is tooled into each corner of the board’ s leather cover . Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department.

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tures tooling that represents the pious operation and sensor y affect of devotional books (Figure 12). As with Grace Tilley’s copy of Flavel, there is tooling at the leather’ s turn-in over the board edge, making the user sensitive to textural contrast at the liminal moments of opening and orchestrating a book. But what speaks power fully to the materialist elements of lived religion is the figure impressed in the sheepskin: a heart, found in each of the four corners of front and back cover . Hand and heart are interdependent in Sewall’ s copy, reminding us of “record”’ s philological relation to both the documentar y and the immaterial. The heart records a book’s content, and the book stores the pious affect of a devout pilgrim’s heart. The hand piety of tactility and indexicality—respectively per haps the most and least obvious qualities of book artifacts—are folded into the customs of devotional reading in the Reformed tradition. Thus both book structure and steady-seller imagery participate in the religious socialization of readers.

Eye Piety The heart is felt on Sewall’s copy of Heaven Opened; but of course it is also seen, an image communicated through the eye. It is fair to say that visual spectacle is the second target of puritan repression that comes to mind. But, like sex, it was not images themselves, but rather the improper use of images that fired the wrath of iconoclasts. The more zealously ascetic within Protestant culture still availed themselves of graphic inter faces— such as eschatological gravestones, illustrated Bibles, and, of course, the emblem tradition—for devotional meditation and imaginative transformation, in what made up a visual dynamic of the thick style. The frontispiece and title-page illustrations that accompany many steady sellers combine word and image in ways that complement the emblem tradition while exploiting their own power ful graphic sense. 57 Readers trained within Western conventions of literacy move across and down a page, from left to right, from top to bottom; word and image are followed in a prescribed, continuous, and even inexorable sequence, with the upper left-hand corner an attention-grabbing point of entry and the lower right hand corner heaviest because of the drift of the eye. In the illustration that conjoins word and image, however , this linear movement can always be disrupted by the nature of the composition. The eye’s gravity is defied by visual and verbal information that moves it elsewhere, by virtue of, say, the direction of a line of text or the sight line of a human figure in the image. This discontinuity is of course expressive. It is the way that words and images work within the sequential logic of Western literacy that will be of interest. The title-page engraving of Lewis Bayly’ s The Practise of Pietie—an

Figure 13. The engraved title page of Lewis Bayly’s The Practise of Pietie (London: Printed for John Hodgetts, 1617). Courtesy, Newberry Library, Chicago.

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image that, by conser vative estimate, existed in at least fifty thousand copies in seventeenth-centur y England alone, an image dispersed so widely as to make it, along with Bible illustrations and the portrait of David in the Sternhold-Hopkins psalmbooks, one of the most published English visual icons of the early modern period—is an excellent case in point.58 Originally engraved by Renold Elstrack, the image models proper worship per formance, ventriloquizes supplicant and divinity , and engages both continuous and discontinuous reading styles through its visual layout (Figure 13). The Bayly illustration is a triptych, divided horizontally, its upper plane featuring a “Pious Man” worshipping, its middle tier an architectural support with the figures of Death and Grace surrounding the book’s title, and its bottom pedestal a recreation of the battle scene from Exodus 17 where Joshua fights the Amalekites. Reading continuously, we begin in the upper -left corner with the imperative “Read” and the image of a lectern and open book. A series of verbal commands—“Pray,” “Redeeme the Time,” “Watch”—are, along with the centered text of the title, absorbed conventionally across the top and middle horizons. In this process, the ritual act of devotional reading is given initial priority; not surprisingly however , this act has been interrupted so that the Pious Man might kneel and pray . Beginning with “Baptisme” and “Exod. 17,” the bottom panel features a horizon that moves from “Joshua” and “Spirit” to “Flesh” and “Amalek.” Found in the lower-right base of the image, Amalekites and the flesh make up the antagonists for a sacred reading, and their presence here certainly propels the viewer to the next page, taking up once again the act of pious reading privileged initially in the upper -left corner. The gravity of this continuous reading is as well a form of preparator y humiliation, a proper abasement for the pious reader , pulled downward as the Pious Man, Aaron, Moses, and Hur are pulled down to kneel. Yet the title-page image deliberately works against this continuous literacy, moving our eye upward, to the top right corner of the page and its simulation of heaven through an angelic chorus and the T etragrammaton. The majority of human types in the image look this way , beginning with the Pious Man, but including the figure of Grace and the characters Aaron, Moses, and Hur; only the skull symbolizing Death stares outward, not insignificantly, at the actual reader. The veer upward and rightward is pressed with equal force by the format of words; lines of text disrupt the visual continuity of traditional reading as well. Functioning like a speech balloon in a comic, the language of prayer—“A broken heart, O Lord, despise not”—emanating from the Pious Man is drawn from Psalm 51.17 and is directed graphically to God in its slant. The names of devotional dispositions, ideals, and acts likewise drift upward and rightward: “Faith,” “Hope,” “Charitie”; “Aaron,” “Moses,”

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“Hur”; and “Faith,” “Prayer,” “Fasting”—all incline to heaven. The eye of the learned reader is redirected again, once in this heavenly corner , as the Hebraic naming of the Lord moves right to left of course.59 The goal of this discontinuous reading is movement away from the fleshy base of this world of strife and toward a hoped-for salvation, glimpsed but never fully represented in the upper-right corner, a promise of heaven opened perhaps neared—and only neared of course—after a series of page turns in the book’s interior.60 The story of Exodus 17.8–15 deepens a reading of layout in the illustration, for it re-creates the mode of supplication and the action of ascent that continuous and discontinuous experiences of the page suggest. In the wilderness, the Israelites’ young warrior Joshua leads them in combat against Amalek. Israel will triumph, but Joshua needs help. Moses, Aaron, and Hur climb a hill; when Moses holds up his hands, Israel prevails and when his hands are lowered, Israel falters. Moses is wear y, and Aaron and Hur assist in an act of ritual obeisance by holding up Moses’ hands with theirs: “so his hands were steady until the sun set” and Joshua is victorious. As with the gaze of the characters, the ascent up the hill reinforces the upward movement of the reader’ s eye; and as with the solemn contrition of the Pious Man’ s prominently folded hands, the figure of Moses supplicates before God with hands aloft in the page’s design. Indeed, the image typologically looks backward to an idealized piety in Moses’ open arms— contrasting with the Pious Man’s closed fold—while looking forward to redemption: the name “Christ” heralds a pedestal on which Moses’ arm rests, the letters ascending vertically in the sole perpendicular layout of words on the page. The Lord’s response to this victor y is, as well, a lesson in reading: “Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” (Exod. 17.14). God, being God, broadens the discussion, but notice that the consequences of inscription and literacy replay the ideal effects of a discontinuous reading of the Bayly image: the blotting out of that final lower -right corner where the flesh and Amalek exist and a renewed attention to heaven in the upper right, the home for the eye of the truly pious reader.61 The Bayly image is an emblem of the prescriptive literature, where the external form of the word—its sonic range, its anchoring format, its tactile permanence, its visual appearance, its nonlinear handling—is sacred for devout readers. Such performative reading complements the modes of internalization that also characterize literacy in the period. The Pious Man’s heart piety is evident: he incorporates the text on the lectern and immediately acts on its message of supplication by kneeling and praying. But the image reminds us of the oral and aural qualities of the written record, whether voiced through the Pious Man’s speech and its apostro-

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phized “o lord” or remarked by the Lord’s command to recite the battle history’s lesson within the hearing of Joshua. Sight and touch are equally features of the theater of literacy conjured by the illustration, such that the materiality of the book—rather than its effacement through speech or internalization—compels a per formative reading. The visual iconography of the image communicates meaning, and the layout requires the eye to move against the grain of the format. Similarly, the collative activity signaled by the allusion to “Exod. 17” and the bared interior of the book on the lectern are figuratively echoed by the solemn fold of the Pious Man’s limbs and the open arms of Moses’ genuflection: the tactile handling of books, the performance of opening and closing sacred texts for practical guidance. The steady sellers generally indicate that nonlinear reading does not mean arbitrar y, capricious meaning. Rather , for the devout—whose identity is shaped not by the question “Who am I?” but “What must I do to be saved?”—Judeo-Christian myth presents, in, say , the case of the three-leaf book, the possibilities of redemption, heaven, and hell. Typology is anchored by Christ, looking back to Hebrew figures and for ward to contemporar y histor y; biblical scenes promise, in Acts, the joyful transformation of the Ethiop and announce, in Revelation, the panic-inducing uncertainty of judgment; the steady sellers alternate between discourses of mercy and discourses of admonition. It is the sequence in which these languages of consolation and judgment are experienced that will give the fragments point. The individualism that reading presumably develops—and that seems implicit in the Protestant vernacular tradition of sola fidei and sola scriptura—is likewise qualified by the disciplinary norms of Reformation literacy . The physical properties of texts similarly regulated readers, the book an object ser ving to subject the individual. As with the collection of transcriptions by Joseph Tompson discussed in Chapter 1, the collation of passages from text to text structures subjectivity, referring not to a creative appropriator of meaning but rather to an anxious sinner seeking God’s mercy. Indeed, the codex and anxiety—with its mixture of promise and pain—might be mutually constitutive, the reader roaming among passages that both assure and unnerve, console and punish. In a provocative aside, Hugh Amor y argues that the textual experience of the devout alternated between, on the one hand, a fragmented sampling of biblical passages in worship ser vices, cut up by the preacher and sprinkled into text, doctrine, and uses; and, on the other hand, a continuous form of literacy at home, based on regular, linear, family reading of the Bible. The conduct literature reveals that the discontinuity carries over to the world of reading, and is assumed of both the learned and the ordinary. But what are the reading modes associated with worship ser vices? To this topic, we will now turn.

Chapter 3

Ritual Fasting

On November 21, 1678, Joseph Rowlandson preached a fast-day sermon just two days before his death. Entitled The Possibility of God’s Forsaking a People, it reached memorial publication in 1682, as both separate title and as appendix and frame to his wife Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative. To berate an audience in perceived declension, the minister quotes a textual crux from Jeremiah; chapter 2, verse 31—“And you, O Generation, behold the word of the LORD!”—has mystified biblical editors, since the final phrase is guesswork from a vague Hebrew original. 1 This doubt is Rowlandson’ s opportunity: “ Oh Generation of what? of what you will, God leaves a space that you may write, what you please, generation of Vipers, or Monsters, or any thing rather then Generation of Gods people. See ye the word of the Lord behold your face in that Glass.” Familiar as second-generation jeremiad, the repent-and-reform moral and its castigating tone in fact typify many steady sellers. What is striking is the almost vertiginous recreation of reading rituals during the worship ser vice. The minister of course guides interpretation by glossing scripture; and Rowlandson places this gloss at the sermon’s “Use” section, which self-consciously directs audience behavior. The preacher draws on the thick style, on the multiple meaning found within language—note the metaphors of “Vipers,” “Monsters,” and “Glass,” or the polyvocal quality of God, Jeremiah, and Rowlandson himself—and within bibliographical format—the textual crux gleaned from marginalia, annotations, or cross-referenced commentaries on Jeremiah. 2 Strong too is the deliberate ambiguity of Rowlandson’s double-bind communication: he offers the audience interpretive options, and then sternly prohibits their use. But per haps most pressingly, acoustic patterns thicken the minister’ s discourse, mediating the word through sound: Oh Generation of what? of what you will, God leaves a space that you may write, what you please,

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generation of Vipers, or Monsters, on any thing rather then Generation of Gods people. See ye the word of the Lord behold your face in that Glass. The questioning tone is augmented by the repetition of the vague “what,” a pronoun expecting definition. The oral emphases—delivered through curt, accented monosyllables in lines 2–4—give way to an accretive syntax that extends Rowlandson’ s definition of the generation as “Vipers, or Monsters, or any thing rather then Generation of Gods people.” The imperative form of the final verbs (“See,” “behold”) completes the humiliation of the auditor y.3 But from the churchgoer and reader’s perspective, we have the potential empowerment of auditor-scribes, who are to reread the Bible and figuratively “write in” an answer . Because note-taking in response to the sacred text of sermons was encouraged, these reading styles became real as well. As I will argue at chapter’s end, readers could avail themselves of a thick, bibliographical aesthetic in such sermon notebooks. Indeed, as the Rowlandson passage invokes the “will” and pleasure of the responsive audience, we might even conjure that favorite of reception studies, the resistant reader or creative “appropriator .” But the humbling context of the passage warns us against this portrait. Instead, we have the scriptural citation from Jeremiah, discontinuously dropped into the “Use,” which readers are asked to isolate and apply to their lives. Readers were expected to choose textual fragments to humble the self, to customize scripture and sermons in order to arrive at a particularized abasement. The Bible crux here is simply an especially fragmented fragment, and its gap is an especially liberal form of customization; readers can nominate themselves as “prideful” rather than selecting an analogue in, say , Ahab. Implicit in citations peppered throughout sermons and explicit in the conduct manuals on fast-day worship, nonlinear reading protocols reinforced this individualized awareness of sin. If the Rowlandson passage mirrors the textual experience of readers during occasional worship, the abjection invokes the practices of fasting, which was the bodily experience of the devout on the days of humiliation that prompted many of the second-generation jeremiads. Fast days made public the individual’s meditations on sin, through external customs of bodily denial. The assertive humility of the fast day—symbolized in Rowlandson’ s invitation to write—articulates a central tension of puritan devotion: the problem of “will-worship,” of routinized ceremony overtaking the movement’ s spiritualizing impulse, of voluntarist zeal conflicting with pious passivity. Rowlandson’s clever reprimand helps us further to construe a reader based literar y histor y of early New England. By foregrounding the audi-

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ence’s experience of texts, the Rowlandson passage rethinks the jeremiad tradition of literary scholarship, substituting its abstract national myth with a focus on the worship practices of devout congregants. 4 As it emerges from the “Use” section of a fast-day sermon, it reminds us of the essentially transformative nature of reading in early New England: the conduct literature of steady-selling sermons and manuals directed the body , rather than diverted the mind. Fast days were especially dramatic examples of altered conduct, for they entailed not only the physical performance of public worship but also willed changes in diet, dress, and intimacy . As a means of grace, ritual fasting was per haps definitive of the devout subject’ s spiritual life: by way of a per formative humbling of the self, the abstaining and purged body was then available for both holy fulfillment and intensified anguish. The pilgrim’s progress was often measured in these recursive acts of abjection, recalling that the life of piety was as cyclical as it was teleological. As one divine put it, “whenever a Fast recurs, we should go the whole Work of Conversion over again!”; and that the glor y of conversion can fall back into humiliation is implied in Rowlandson’s punitive instruction.5 Thus redeemed subjectivity—the coexistent experience of consolation and affliction—must be reckoned into a portrait of the devotional reader . The Rowlandson gloss alerts us as well to the role of the written record within practical piety; the imaginative resources of the thick style’s verbal content are matched by the documentary aesthetics of the textual crux and the sermon notebook. Reading rituals on the fast day depend on the bodily performance of worship and they use the materiality of written words in order to discipline pious readers; literacy customs thus enriched the reader’s spiritual life—and deepened his or her anxieties. The transaction implied between preacher and auditor in the Rowlandson passage signals a broader set of textual rituals, beyond the sermon itself, on days of worship. Fast-day devotion was a daylong affair , and reading habits included common Sabbath practices and distinctive fasting customs. Devotional discipline on fast days involved both private and public worship—Bible reading, psalm singing, and prayer—and was mediated through expressions of both the body and the W ord. Fast-day worship consisted of preparator y humiliation, a devotional exercise practiced by the converted and a spiritualized subjection potentially felt by the unsure. Experienced throughout the life of even the most assured as they readied themselves for the true glor y of salvation, preparator y humiliation took social and public forms on the fast day. Internal humiliations—meditation upon sin and a renewed commitment to reformation—were accompanied by external humiliations, wherein worshippers abstained from food, work, regular dress, and sexual activity; and, “by consequence, all other Delights of the Senses, are . . . to be avoided.” 6 This austere ceremony defined part of the fast day’s public ritual, as con-

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gregants marked their body with signs and feelings—for themselves and for others—of preparatory humiliation. To be sure, a sermon such as Rowlandson’ s significantly disciplined congregants, by managing and interpreting biblical reading matter while enjoining behavior. But an understanding of readerly experience on the fast day must place Rowlandson’ s jeremiad against the backdrop of early New England sermonizing. The era’s well-known sermons—Cotton’s “God’s Promise to His Plantations,” Winthrop’ s “Model of Christian Charity” with its famous “city upon a hill” image, and various ministers on election, lecture, and fast days—were occasional, a kind of preaching responsive to a particular context and concerned with social order. Their topical urgency or learned declamations make them relevant to place-based or author -based versions of literar y history. But this “canon” of American literature makes up a fraction of the vast bulk of unpublished Sunday sermons preached on a regular basis, often in a serialized, continuous treatment of scriptural text for evangelical purposes. The second-generation fast-day jeremiads were a tinier fraction still. They have drawn inordinate attention because they were printed, because this printing took place in the colonies, and because they express—in tones always attractive to modern academics, who convince themselves of their secular enlightenment through uncannily similar cries in the wilderness—ministerial panic. From the devotional audience’s perspective, however , the day’ s crisis was not necessarily structured by anxiety over public order. For listeners and readers, the fast-day sermon was on a continuum with the Sunday evangelizing. The occasional sermons equally were capable of “imparting the grand truths of eternity,” truths for the pious subject that were both punitive and consolatory, precipitating a productive spiritual crisis for the reader . So while the fast-day texts do differ in important ways from Sunday sermons, their shared service in the time zone of piety deser ves acknowledgment.7 For the ordinary churchgoer, these sacred rhythms obtained; and the sermon form itself presents specific uses of time and textuality, such that topical references to historical circumstances—which rarely appear and are usually imputed—seem even less relevant to the devotional audience’s experience. The sermon genre sustained the alternating modes of continuous and discontinuous reading described in my previous chapters. The plain style division into “heads”—biblical “T ext,” derived “Doctrine,” and applied “Use”—meant that the sermon operated in disjunct textual registers. For Hugh Amor y, public worship further exploited this fragmentar y style; ser vices dictated that scripture itself was “hierarchically doled out in small, incoherent, anxiously scrutinized portions.” Consider as well printed versions of the plain-style sermon, which almost uniformly feature altered font and layout for the heads, making

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the sermon visually navigable as readers cross-referenced Use, Doctrine, and Text. Even the time schemes of the sermon oscillate, with the sacred temporality of biblical text butting up against the worldly now of practical application. Like meditation, the commonplace, and typological collation, the sermon form promotes a nonlinear relationship to textuality. Yet the sermon was equally a phenomenon experienced continuously . Contra Amory—“We must distinguish, I think, the Bible as a continuous text or story, as it was read at home, from the Bible as chapter and verse, as it was read in meetings”—the serial continuity of regular preaching on Sundays provided a linear , if deep and slowly paced, sequence of scripture (and, as I hope to have shown so far , home reading is nonlinear in many respects). And though there were incoherent portions of sacred text dolloped throughout, individual sermons themselves progressed, as Teresa Toulouse explains, from Text to Use, a movement from the sacred to the worldly , wherein scriptural models are to culminate in action at the contemporar y moment. Like reading in one’ s course from Genesis to Revelation, like typological narrative more generally, the sermon form encourages an experience of textuality where temporal progression matters. 8 Sharing these reading habits with public and private devotion, the fast day was nevertheless distinctive as a worship ritual. This chapter examines the fast day’s reading practices, not through the public rhetoric of the jeremiad but rather through the crisis of piety that fasting entailed. Textual experience was radically discontinuous on the fast day: not only was the sermon’s biblical Text chosen, unlike the Sunday serial sermon, out of sequence, but reading protocols directed the sinful devout to select passages from godly books particular to the reader’ s humiliation. Fasting highlighted the supplicant’ s per formance, with abstinence making the purged body receptive to divine presence. It is perhaps an especially vivid illustration of the means of grace, whereby the worshipper’ s activity creates a conduit for the spirit, though that action neither propels nor merits the Lord’ s visitation. 9 For this reason, however , the fasting ritual was deeply problematic for the devout. The prescriptions for fasting’s “external humiliations” consistently threatened to stand as ceremony , creating anxiety for a voluntarist creed. At the same time, the exercise of fasting was a willful assertion on the part of the devout, taken up occasionally rather than routinely , a sign of puritan difference and thus consistent with a voluntarist creed. This problem of “formality in religion” was a staple of the steady-selling manuals and sermon literature, pre- and postdating second-generation anxiety over declension, and thus deeply structured in the more zealous of the Reformed tradition. The impact of fasting as both a transformative ritual of change, whereby the pious mark growth in grace, and a recursive restatement of unworthiness, whereby

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the pious remind themselves of sin, is borne out by evidence from settler diaries and confessions. The bodily customs, reading practices, and sermonic form of fast-day sabbatarian worship coalesce to emphasize the devout subject’ s active participation in the life of humiliation: efforts at supplication—through bodily denial, scriptural self-examination, or sermonic calls to application of text and doctrine—indicate exercises of will in a model of subjective life that is only to wait passively for God’ s grace. After an overview of Sabbath practices and fast-day customs, I will explore fasting as a specific instance of a classic contradiction of worship theory within the Reformed tradition. With particular attention to reading practices and bodily conduct during public worship, I begin by describing the Sabbath within a Reformed church calendar . Rituals of the text on worship days derived from the Protestant ideology of literacy , at once vernacularly open and hierarchically closed. I then survey conduct literature, scripture, and life-writing for the social expectations and the lived experience of fast-day worship, as distinct from Sunday devotions. The godly books anxiously prescribe both internal and external humiliation, warn against resting in such worship “formalities” while suggesting the formalities are efficacious, and intimate that such rituals enable both spiritual communion and continued abjection. Thomas Thacher’ s sermon on fasting conduct, A Fast of God’s Chusing (delivered 1674, published 1678) and auditor notes by Mary Rock from a fast day provide exemplary expressions of these contradictions. Rather than a two-step process of purgation and fulfillment, whereby fasting allows a linear growth in grace, I argue that fast-day rituals inseparably condense feelings of humiliation and glorification. Drawing on the thick aesthetics of fast-day discourse—its attention to the written record, its uses of sight and touch—I argue as well for the strengths of book-histor y methodology to explain these godly customs. Because note-taking is both an implicit and explicit mode of reader -response in Joseph Rowlandson and Mary Rock, I will conclude with a brief assessment of methods for readership history: the voluntarist zeal of the pious overlaps with the concept of “appropriation,” and the ambiguity in Rowlandson invokes the concept of “interpretive play”—both concepts are key to reception studies. Yet the humble congregant’s relationship to sacred text operates across a vector of affect, quite different from the cognitive and conscious resonances of the term “appropriation,” while the freedom implicit in “interpretive play” requires investigation in the light of Rowlandson’s strategy.

The Puritan Calendar Fast days were ritualized in part by their role in Anglo-American puritanism’s reconception of the church calendar; Reformers made the Sab-

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bath the summa of the puritan week, and made sabbatarian practices crucial features of occasional worship. Seeking to abolish the numerous saint’s days, festivals, and fasts of traditional Christianity , Reformers organized temporality according to a weekly schema and stressed the spiritual work required of Sabbath obser vance. New England in particular could avoid both the annual, irregular cycle of traditional Catholic practice and the tolerance of Sabbath rest and recreation afforded by the Church of England. The weekly work of the Sabbath consisted of the ordinances of public worship, including the per formance of prayers, psalms, scripture readings, sermons, and the sacraments. These sabbatarian practices were rituals that confirmed the worldview of the devout, functioning as means of grace that engaged worshippers in the drama of salvation on a weekly basis. The emphasis on regular Sunday worship should not obscure Reformed variations on the Christian calendar, variations such as the weekly Lecture sermon and the annual Election sermon that amounted to “holy days” in early New England. 10 The fast and feast days were occasional ceremonies, which could be called by local churches or by the regional council and which were held during the week. These days of humiliation and thanksgiving were irregular like Christian holy days of old—but in no sense were they arbitrar y. With God’s active Providence the guide, fast days were called in response to divine judgment while days of giving thanks answered to God’s blessings and mercy. All featuring the conventional ordinances associated with sabbatarian devotion, these days were “so many Sabbaths more” in the Reformed calendar of puritan worship. 11 A weekday Sabbath, the fast ritual in early New England was also distinguished, in theory, by the motivations for its institution and its observance. As a response to crisis, the fast day was spurred by the moment of providential punishment, and its calling signaled the awareness ministers had of the community’s worldly sin. Bay Colony records reflect this motive of crisis when magistrates saw, as reasons for a fast, the “Lords displeasures against us in the sad divisions in several churches, the arrogance and boldness of open opposers of the truth and ways of the Lord, unseasonable rains, and mortality in diverse places.” Since fast days were in part a ceremony to demonstrate to the Lord a sensitivity to divine “displeasure” and human sin, they were not to be routinized as part of a “set” calendar. Thomas Thacher explains that fasting should not be a constant course—such would be “will-worship”: “a Fast is not a standing duty, but occasional,” when there is “some notable and eminent publick Danger,” “some great sickness lying upon those that are near and deare to us,” or when “people are fallen under some great transgression.” These crises required quick and authentic responsiveness on the part of the devout.12

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Yet fast days were ultimately both occasional and regular within the yearly calendar; they were appointed and practiced throughout the first one-hundred years of New England colonization and constituted part of the larger patterns of puritan worship in seventeenth-centur y AngloAmerica. William D. Love documented their occurrence in colonial New England, itemizing six hundred instances of fast-day worship held locally in individual churches or proclaimed regionally over the period 1620–1720. A restricted sample from the Massachusetts Bay Colony between the years 1632 and 1686 shows that this region averaged three public fast days a year. Times of crisis raised that number to roughly six times a year. Second-generation fears over declension, England’s monarchial restoration, King Philip’ s War, charter revocation, and witchcraft saw an increase in days of humiliation over the latter half of the century. Times of crisis, however , could also lead to a routinization of the holy calendar; Parliament called for fasts to be held the last W ednesday of each month in Interregnum England (a schedule met from 1643 to 1649), while the colony of Connecticut similarly held a rotating set of weekly fasts during King Philip’ s War, with each town averaging twelve fast days a year. More generally, Love accounts for the return of a regular springtime fast by the end of the centur y; complemented by a yearly thanksgiving celebration, the calendar of New England puritans settled into the traditional rhythms of an agricultural cycle, while mirroring the practices of Lent in the Catholic calendar . Hence, as the centur y progressed, early New England juggled both regular fast daysand occasional days of humiliation, indicating that public fasting was formalized and immediately responsive, routine and special. 13

Sabbath Practices To understand fast-day worship’ s general contours, we might note the routines that overlapped with Sunday ser vices. The holy ordinances of Sabbath worship are well known, but how might the rituals of prayer , psalm singing, and sermonizing be understood as ceremonial in congregations that critiqued what they saw as the impure formality of the traditional church and its Anglican derivative? The steady sellers provide a context, suggesting that the culture of public worship made the sensor y experience of the ser vice central to devotion. For instance, conduct books direct the posture of the devout in ser vices. Lewis Bayly recommends to worshippers “As thou entrest into the Church . . . prostrate with thy face downeward, being come to thy place, [and say] O Lord I have loved the Habitation of thy House.” The advice in A Garden of Spirituall Flowers elaborates on this prostration, indicating that the gesture helps the pilgrim think of his or her physical and moral direction: “When thou

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art entring into the house of God, into the Church, the place of publique meeting, looke unto both thy feet (saith Salomon) that is, considering whither thou art going, and what to doe for the place thou art going into is Gods house; there thou goest to heare God speaking unto thee by his Minister; and also to speake unto him by prayer .” Downame indicates that the devout have God “outwardly in our bodies”: “our inward graces and vertues live and flourish, when they have the outward vent of corporall obedience, and externall workes of piety and righteousnesse, but soone languish and are extinguished, if they never put foorth themselves in these outward exercises.” Appropriate exercises of “religious adoration” include “externall signes and gestures, [such] as prostrating the body, uncovering the head, bending the knee, lifting up the hands, which being considered as religious gestures, are proper and peculiar to God alone.”14 Many of the sensor y registers through which the devout worshipped were organized around the minister’ s body, the leader of the verbal rituals of prayer, sermon, and psalm. “Ministers should preach with a warm sense of what they preach,” argues Thomas Vincent: “they should get their hearts affected more and more with words which they preach, that they preach the more feelingly; that they may speak as if they were in earnest, as those that believe and know those things to be true which they deliver unto others. Cold or lukewarm preaching usually makes little impression upon the hearers; when the W ord doth little affect the heart of the Minister , it doth seldom affect the heart of the people.” Bayly describes the Sabbath’ s permissible “ bodily labor” and celebrates the minister’s efforts on the day of rest: “And the Preacher , though hee laboureth in the sweat of his browes, the wearying of his body, yet hee doth but a Sabbath dayes worke.” True to the model of heart piety , the ear was to be an especially sensitive organ for the pious according to the conduct literature. “Be neare to heare” counsels one steady seller, “that is, bee attentive, hearken with reverence to that which shall be delivered ... Continue in thy attentive hearing, without wearinesse, from the beginning unto the end of the Sermon.” Another directs the churchgoer: “in hearing, apply every speech as spoken to thy selfe, rather by God then by Man & labour not so much to hear the words of the Preacher sounding in thine eare, as to feele the operation of the spirit, working in thy heart.” Matthew Mead similarly warns worshippers not to take pleasure in the “eloquence of the Preacher”: there is a hearing developed from grace, a pleasure “when the word comes close to the conscience, rips up the heart, and discovers sin, and yet the soul delights in it notwithstanding.” For Mead, gracious listening is transformative, where the heard Word of Vincent’s felt preaching results in a “delight to do it.” Paul Baynes makes the auditor responsible: if preaching fails, it is because the worshipper

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“is not attentive and reverent in hearing, he is not prepared before to heare.” Behavior at the ser vice entailed visual fascination with the minister. Webbe insists that the congregant “have thine eyes fixed most commonly on the Preacher, that so thou mayst keep it and thy thoughts from idle wandering.” Similarly, The Practise of Pietie expects that “Whilest the Preacher is expounding and applying the Word of the Lord: looke upon him; for it is a great helpe to stirre up thine attention.” 15 Worship habits on the Sabbath orbited about the written word as well, with books a prop in devotional rituals before, during, and after services. While New England pietists critiqued, say, the Book of Common Prayer as a ceremonial text, they valued the book artifact in key terms of the Protestant ideology of literacy: the written record is a transformative discipline and a tool of memor y. Prior to churchgoing, Bayly counsels, “if thou hast the charge of a Familie; call all thy Household together, read a Chapter, and pray as in the weeke days, but remember so to dispatch these private preparations and duties, as that thou and thy Family may be in the Church, before the beginning of Prayers.” “Between the publike exercises, as also when both of them are finished,” W ebbe similarly instructs, “conferre with them what they have learned at the Sermon; instruct and catechize them, read, or cause them to be read somewhat of the Bible, or some other godly booke unto them.” The conduct manuals also encourage retention of the sermon by “marking” it, which can mean recording it both mentally and in written form. Bayly supplies seven steps for listeners to “marke” a sermon’s text, doctrines, and uses. A Garden of Spirituall Flowers conjoins noting and dog-earing for the ideal sermon auditor: “marke the Text, observe the division; marke how every point is handled: quote the places of Scripture which he alledgeth for his Doctrine proofe, fold down a leafe in your Bible from which the place is recited, that so at your leasure after your returne from the Church, you may examine it.” While aural retention is championed, so also nonlinear access to scripture is secured through a book’ s physique: and not by way of a separate bookmark but instead via the hand-folded corner, indicating that godly writers assumed a sturdy self-sufficiency to the Bible’s structure. Moreover, such a system of access operates not by seeing the extension of a bookmark but by touching the interior of a book, finding the user’ s fold among the folded gatherings within Christ’s fold: hand piety’s intimate navigation. 16 The written record itself became an instrument of critical exchange about ministerial practice during the Sabbath, derived again from the literacy politics of early modern Protestantism. V arious dissenting Reformers and later Nonconformists debated the use of books, notes, or extemporaneous per formance for the preached sermon, with defenses of both the composed and written (preser ving an archive of Protestant

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doctrine) and the oral and unprompted (signaling a felt ministr y of authenticity).17 Further, the conduct books occasionally express skepticism about the ministr y, asking readers to test the sermon through crossreferencing scripture: reading the Bible “enable[s] you to try the Spirits and Doctrines delivered” at a ser vice or to “examin[e the minister’ s] doctrines according to the touch-stone of [the Bible’ s] T ruth.”18 A Thomas Vincent steady seller reproves ministers in England who purchase not only “Manuscript Sermons” from booksellers to deliver as their own, but also “have been so audacious as to preach out of the Printed Books” of others. Or a congregant’ s written notes could be a source of discussion: John Sill’ s confession for Thomas Shepard reveals that “diverse people came to [Sill] to hear the notes read” because Sill’s “heart was against” Shepard. In the minister’ s transcript, Shepard explains that Sill “read over the notes and reading them over to them, the Lord let him see there was more in them than [Sill] apprehended,” which convinces Sill of the “sin” of opposing Shepard. 19 The practice of note-taking at sermons, often in shorthand “characters,” made the written record part of Protestantism’ s ideology of literacy on the Sabbath as well; it secured for posterity a means of visual access to godly preaching, while ser ving to discipline readers. Used for family and private devotions and occasionally retransmitted (even “pirated”) for publication, sermon-notes maintained a body of Protestant doctrine for practical application. As W . Fraser Mitchell explains in his study of English pulpit orator y, Anglo-American puritanism nurtured this form of active literacy . While note-taking was certainly available to churchgoers at, say , a Donne sermon, the practice became a selfconscious mark of identity for the more zealous in the Reformed tradition. Puritan educational manuals such as John Brinsley’s Ludus Literaius encouraged young students to transcribe sermons: “For the Sabbaths and other dayes when there is any Sermon, cause ever yone to learne something at the Sermons. The ver y lowest [i.e., youngest] to bring some notes.” Brinsely’ s method required note-takers to follow the contours of the plain style; students were to copy “1. The T ext, or part of it. 2. To marke as neere as they can, and set downe ever y doctrine, and what proofes they can, the reasons and the uses of them.” Shorthand manuals such as Peter Bales’ s The Arte of Brachygraphie (1597) and Thomas Shelton’ s Tachygraphy (1647) and Zeilographia (1650) call on users to preser ve the sermon tracts of Protestant divines; for instance, Shelton writes of the “ the benefit that many thousands enjoy by the works of many worthy Divines, which had perished with the breath that uttered them.”20 Adults carried for ward this practice, as the scattered collection of sermon notebooks in the early New England archive suggests. Crammed with manuscript writing to use efficiently the precious paper bound

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within them, such notebooks are usually arranged sequentially covering weekly Sunday sermons. While scholarly treatments have aligned this practice with simple repetition of ministerial authority , note-taking can operate across many vectors. As in the case of John Sill, the notes could become a means of questioning a minister; or, as I will argue at this chapter’s end, they can be a sign of spiritual affect and a measure of the thick style. But in all of these cases, the practice marked an extreme of literate discipline, at once empowering the individual through command over the W ord and subjecting the reader to a powerlessness proper to the pious Christian. An anecdote entered in Thomas Weld’s commonplace book dramatizes the tension felt within devotional disciplines that used sabbatarian texts. He relates a story “Concerning a heedless minister,” where the preacher exploits the serial nature of Sunday worship to discipline the pious: I have heard of a certain minister, who after other duties being performed would have preached also, but had forgotten the place yt he preached at the last lords day. therefore he rises up, and thus frames his talk viz. I think I preach a dayes to the heathenishest peopler that are again in the world, I don’t think that ther’s one of you that can tell when the text was last Sabbath day . thereat up stood an old man, and asked him why he thought so? Because you do little mind, much less practice what I say to you, and you that are so brisk to ask where was it? Can you tell? and so then he told him where it was and then he could preach thô before he had forgot it. 21

Gently irreverent, almost archetypal, the anecdote nevertheless deserves scrutiny, for it captures the degree to which auditor memor y and emancipatory literacy were caught in a hierarchy of devotional practice. The old man volunteers knowledge based on attentive listening or notating, an ideal reader within the Protestant myth of access to the vernacular Word. Yet the old man’ s per formance is solicited from a jeremiad-like question and the interaction more generally is of course in service to the minister’s authority. The “heedless” label is less moralizing than it seems; the anecdote is from Weld’s collegiate years, one of a handful regarding wit in church that precede the alphabetical commonplaces. That W eld would debunk a divine is mitigated by his future career as a minister. For Weld, it is probably not better to be clever than to be good—but not by much. While the schoolboy mockery leavens our view of worship habits, it also sharpens our sense of the disciplinar y consequences of devotion.

Fast-Day Worship If ordinances for Sunday worship were mediated by gestural signs, sensory experience, and the written record, the sabbatarian fast day only in-

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tensified the role of body and word during public devotion. And while preparatory humiliation was regularly present in the life of the devout subject, its practice on the fast day was the worship occasion’ s raison d’être. This intensification of preparator y humiliation is spelled out in the conduct literature: abstention modified the body further for the purposes of supplication, and written texts were to be used in order to deepen the subjection of readers, so that they might be readied for grace. And indeed, the fast day was felt equally in the language of spiritual transport, by both godly writers and ordinary laity. Furthermore, the subtext of ceremony within the regular Sabbath was more manifest on the day of humiliation, when the self-presentation and scripted behavior of fasting can be construed as “formality in religion.” At the same time, the devout understood the ritual as irregular and unscripted, as a voluntarist action in response to God’s judgments. While the danger of involuntary worship lurked, the ritual called on the willed efforts of the pious to humble themselves. This assertive humility presses the logic of the means of grace and contributes to the existential crisis of the day for the devout. Cotton Mather’s thick hyperbole explains the ceremonial dynamic of preparatory humiliation and potential fulfillment, in a sermon preached a week before a colony-wide fast day in 1697 and subsequently published by the Boston press. Beginning with a stor y of punishment among the Israelites, Mather obser ves that criminals would be whipped “13 x 3” times before three judges. The punishment would end when the third judge would read aloud from scripture held before the speaker, his oral presentation citing three passages that would ask the criminal, first, to obey the laws written in this book (Deut. 28.58); second, to keep the word of the holy covenant (Deut. 29.9); and third, to remember forgiveness and tolerance (Psalm 78.38). In this drama, Mather imaginatively recreates for afflicted listener -readers their place in the theater of fastday reading, a parallel he immediately foregrounds for the audience: “scourges of Heaven have long been Employ’d upon us, for our Crimes against the Holy and Just and Good Laws of the Lord our God . . . It is but proper, while we are thus under our Punishment, for us to have a Text of the Sacred Oracles, agreeable unto our present State, Read unto us. Behold, an Agreeable Text, now singled out, for our Entertainment; & I do the rather single it out because the next W eek, a General HUMILIATION is to be attended among us; for which, I cannot easily do a more Useful Thing, than to give you a Preparative.”22 Using the “composition of place” aesthetic, Mather has translated the fast day’s focus on human sin and willed affliction (visited by God and acted out by man) into a visceral scene of preparator y humiliation organized around the per formance of sacred text. 23 The uses of literacy are, however , “done . . .

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partly for the Admonition, partly for the Consolation of the Chastised Criminal.” Especially noteworthy is, first, Mather’ s concentration on bodily punishment and textual “Entertainment,” apt for fasting’ s mixture of castigation and communion; and, second, his interest in biblical fragments, collated by the judges or “singled out” by Mather as means to discipline readers through penitent self-examination. His manual even collates scriptural references to fasting as an index for readers. As we shall see, these bodily and textual rituals help distinguish the fast day from regular Sabbath practice. 24 Conduct texts such as the Westminster Directory encouraged worship to begin at home, with each family busy “prepar[ing] their hearts for the solemn work of the day.” A full day of services followed, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. 25 The preparation’s most marked feature was self-denial, of course; the Director y, fast-day sermons, and manuals of piety promoted bodily abstinence. Typical is Henry Scudder’s advice. Following precepts from Esther and Luke, The Christian’s Daily Walke instructs the devout to “ forbeare all meate and drink,” to “ Abstaine from all worldly labour,” and to “abstaine from all other worldly delights, as . . . from fine and best apparell, also from all sports and pleasant musicke, from the marriage bed.” While these “outward forms” were merely to be a complement to the internal humiliation expected of the worshipper , certain conduct books detailed the bodily effects of such practice. Downame explains that “the body being less dulle & heavy , is made a more fit instrument unto the soul for spiritual exercises.” Lewis Bayly routes the self-denial through the senses; supplicants “must endeauour to make our Eies (as at all times, so) especially on that day to fast from beholding vanities: our Eares from hearing mirth or musicke, but such as may mooue to mourne.” Again, this is not puritan repudiation of the worldly senses— Bayly has earlier advised the devout to look avidly at the minister and here he promotes affective hearing that will help the pious mourn for their sins. Moreover, the steady sellers comment on the public display of affliction, the ceremonial effects of fasting on fellow congregants. Invoking the symbolic value of the sackcloth among the ancients, The Practise of Pietie argues that “The equitie hereof still remaineth; especially in publike fasts: at what time to come into the Assembly , with starched bands, crisped haire, brave apparell, and decked with flowers or perfumes, argueth a soule that is neyther humble before God, nor ever knew true use of so holy an exercise.” While exempting them from private fasts, Scudder even recommends that children be used in a theater of worship: “Inpublike Fasts, if Authoritie thinke fit, little children may be caused to fast, that the Parents, and others of understanding may (as by objects of misery) be stirred up to a more thorow humiliation.” Bodily denial results

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in bodily expression that vividly builds on the routines of gesture, sight, and sound functioning more generally in worship ser vices.26 Like the regular Sabbath, the fast-day services were themselves lengthy dramatizations of the Word in its preached, sung, and prayed forms; but unlike Sunday ser vices, the fast day’ s reading rituals were, as suggested by the steady sellers, particularly targeted to humble the congregant. Noting June 1680 services held in response to the illness of the church’s minister, visiting Dutch Labadist Jacob Danckaerts commented on the attention to the W ord in fast-day customs: “W e went into the church, where, in the first place, a minister made a prayer in the pulpit, of full two hours in length; after which an old minister delivered a sermon an hour long, and after that a prayer was made, and some verses sung out of the Psalms. In the afternoon, three or four hours were consumed with nothing except prayers, three ministers relieving each other alternately; when one was tired, another went up into the pulpit.” Through the ordinances of sermon, prayer , psalm singing, and Bible-reading and through the expressive media of sound, gesture, and writing, churchgoers per formed the verbal texts of puritan worship. According to the Directory, the minister was, to conclude the ser vices, “in his own, and the people’s name, to engage his and their hearts to be the Lord’ s with professed purpose and resolution to reform whatever is amiss among them.” Covenant renewals usually took place on fast days, the renewal being a public version of the private bond signed by Joseph Tompson, as discussed in Chapter 1. The gathered church would renew their commitment to one another and to the Lord by restating or rewriting their covenantal bond; it was at the ser vice ceremony’ s end when such renewal would take place. 27 The written record was structured into the day of humiliation as well. Scripture readings at home preceded the ser vice, as with regular Sabbath worship. Because awareness of sin was the principal psychological effort of the day, Scudder presses readers to “set before you the glasse of the Law for your Light and Rule”: “And if you have not learned, or cannot beare in minde the heads of the manifold duties commanded, or vices forbidden, then get some Catalogue or Table, wherein the same are set downe to your hand, which you may reade with pausing, and due consideration, staying your thoughts most upon those particular sinnes whereof you find your selfe most guiltie.” The “setting down to your hand” can mean “handily accessible” or “written out by hand,” but in either case Scudder highlights the written record’ s humbling potential. His manual then supplies such a record—a twenty-seven-page “Examinatorie Table” of commandments and laws designed for self-examination on the fast day. Like Scudder’s pause to consider “particular sinnes,” Bayly recommends customizing one’s reading of scripture on the fast day, in a

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navigable mode specific to the user’ s humiliation: “T o helpe thee the better to per forme . . . penitence; thou maiest dilligently reade such chapters and portions of the holy Scriptures, as doe chiefly concerne thy particular sinnes: that thou maist see Gods curse & judgement on others for the like sinnes, and be the more humbled thy selfe.”28 In the steady sellers’s instructions for fasting, the written record permits selective, nonlinear access to fragments of godly text, the text’ s information then applied to the individual reader . Note taking on a fast day gathers together the heads and collates varied passages from scripture, as it would on a Sunday; but fast-day notes within the auditor’ s notebook either interrupt the serial sequence of Sunday notes or are found on separate leaves or endpapers so as not to disrupt the Sabbath order .29 Indeed, the textual experience of the fast-day sermon reproduced the reading structure promoted by Scudder and Bayly . First, unlike the “heedless minister”’ s serial preaching, the fast-day sermon was occasional; nor did it have the weekly or annual rhythms of, respectively, the Lecture or Election sermon. The fast-day sermon was thus a potently discontinuous, fragmented experience of the holy W ord, its biblical text chosen in response to a crisis but also equally in hope of individual, spiritual transformation. Because we are accustomed to seeing the fast sermons as public texts responding to social crises, with Sunday sermons perceived more broadly as evangelizing, we miss their impact on the ordinary churchgoer. Second, the “Use” component of the sermon is precise to the devout’ s per formance on the fast day: worshippers have self-consciously altered their behavior through voluntar y abstinence, such that applying the sermon’ s text and doctrine might be reinforced by the exercises of willful abjection immediately experienced through fasting. In other words, the fast day has demonstrated to the devout the use of the will and thus encouraged the worshipper’s ability to apply the self to the activities of repentance and reformation. The reading practices of the fast day—the concentration on fragments of scripture and the heightened attention to application—combine to make the ritual an especially powerful discipline. The fast day per haps encapsulates the fundamental tensions of puritan piety, whereby the experience of the spirit collapses into recursive acts of humiliation. In order to understand the fast-day ritual, it is tempting to follow the two-stage model of spirituality eloquently explained by Charles Hambrick-Stowe: a process of purgation and fulfillment is engaged through the day’s worship, whereby the body is denied and emptied in order then to be infused by a mediated likeness of the spirit through the sensor y qualities of the preached and read W ord. As Downame puts it, “our bodily hunger . . . may make us more sensibly conceive our soules emptinesse of saving graces, that we may hunger and

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thirst after them, and use all good meanes whereby we may be filled and satisfied.” T estimonies from the devout in part confirm this thesis: Samuel Sewall’s decision to become a church member is enabled by a fast, and a number of Shepard confessors speak to how days of humiliation prompt the Lord’s visitation. Steady sellers corroborate these sensations. “By religious Fasting,” Bayly argues, “a man comes neerest the life of Angels, and to doe Gods will on earth, as it is done in heaven.” George Swinnock supports the ritual as a means of grace by encouraging the reader to think of a biblical type: “When Daniel was fasting his body, an Angel is sent to feast his soul.” 30 Yet the compensator y model wherein the pious cope with affliction and grow in assurance does not match the experiential anguish of the day. Nathaniel Sparrowhawk’ s conversion narrative is representative of this struggle: “on the fast day morning, desiring to be alone and to bewail my condition and there entreating reconciliation, the Lord revealed Himself so as never before with abundance of the sweetness of Himself, which rejoicing made me to break out to weeping and hardly could I refrain from speaking to others to let them see what Lord had done. But that day [I] found least of God and heart locked up most when [I] thought to find Lord nearest. And so the Lord after this made me see more and more my follies.” 31 Humiliation is often maintained through the stages of ritual fasting. We return here to the general paradox of puritan piety , that “none are fitter for comfort than those that think themselves furthest off.” Sparrowhawk’ s abjection suggests not a plotted sequence of growth, but rather a nonlinear recursion bespeaking a deep and sustained uncertainty about the state of the soul. That anguish was felt not only through a productive paradox, but also through a practical inconsistency. The fast ritual conspires to draw attention to the exercise of the will: the meditation on sin and the urge to reform are managed through a bodily enactment of this internal humiliation and an application of scriptural fragments specific to the reader. This exercise of the will hints at an efficacy to the means of grace. Doctrinally, effort would never merit’ s God’ s presence, and a heightened attention to the devout’ s active participation only intensifies the worshipper’s anxiety. The steady sellers pursue this double bind.

“Cloathe Your Selves with Humility” The conduct literature details the psychic consequences of the fast for the devout. Directions from scripture, from steady sellers, and from fastday sermons stress that worshippers focus on internal humiliation; yet the bodily customs of fasting—its external self-fashioning—raise questions about the sincerity of the devotional practice. Routine and cere-

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mony seem to structure the ritual of fasting—what ministers would call “formality in religion”—such that the authenticity of the worshipper’ s behavior was always in doubt. Vincent’ s The Wells of Salvation captures this ambivalence in its advocacy for fasting as a means of grace: “labour to afflict your Souls for sin; meet God with weeping and supplication; cloathe your selves with humility , lie in the dust, cover your selves with shame; loath and abhor your selves in his sight for your iniquities, mourn for your own sins, and for the great dishonours of his Name by the sins of others: And seek to the Lord both for your selves and for his Church.” To “labour,” to supplicate, to “cloathe your selves with humility”: these are outward actions that compromise true penitence. The conduct literature is similarly conflicted about the efficacy of fasting. Doctrine would hold that fasting, like all other rites of grace for puritan worship, was an effectual means, not an efficient cause, a channel for God but not a meritorious behavior . Consistent with the processual image of redeemed subjectivity, Baynes’s manual presents this view: fasting, along with thanksgiving, “draw[s] our hearts to more love and obedience to God; wee must needs confesse them to be effectual meanes for the setting us for ward in a godly life.” While the direction is “for ward,” the godly life’s end is never certain; the emphasis in Baynes is as much on motion (“setting us for ward”) and process (through “meanes”) as it is on closure. But the Baynes passage hints at the contradiction for worship practices. The guides to conduct propose both that fasting will not merit God’s presence in the worshipper’s life and that God is responsive to the activities of self-denial and supplication required of the day . The performance of fasting thus tests the logic of the means of grace, highlighting the anxious convergence of voluntarism and passivity at the heart of puritan piety.32 Images from scripture are a source for this paradox. They suggest that humbling the community and the self through fasting was a means of reconciliation and a mode of dedication to the Lord; but they also entailed anxieties about the performance of the fast, regarding its authenticity and ceremony . Fasting in scripture denoted both personal and public expressions of piety. The models of David, Ahab, and Nehemiah sought the pity of an angry Lord (2 Sam. 12. 16; 1 Kings 21.27; Neh. 1.4), while other figures who fast prepare for divine communication: Moses before receiving the Decalogue or Daniel’ s self-denial before the vision of last things (Exod. 34.28; Dan. 10.3, 10.1–12.13; see also Saul in 1 Sam. 28.20). Fasting could also become a corporate mission, a response to public crisis and a collective means of group definition as evidenced in the historical books of the Hebrew Bible.33 While not designating fasting precisely, Levitical law established self-denial as a ritual ceremony , observed annually on the day of atonement (Lev . 16.29, 23.27–32). In the

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Christian scriptures, the establishment of churches by evangelical apostles was accompanied by fasting (Acts 14.23). Biblical models for fasting also raise, however, anxieties about such ritual worship, insofar as it was subject to insincere motivation or bodily display; the reproofs of the prophets and the teachings of Christ stress this point. Through Isaiah, the Lord inveighs against the self-interest of His people’s fast, their wish to have Him notice them through willed affliction. In Jeremiah, the Lord rejects fasting that comes only when His followers suffer, for these same people have forgotten Him during times of prosperity. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector similarly criticizes the use of fasting to impute righteousness to one’ s self (Luke 18.9–14). The expressiveness of dress and gesture on the day of fasting intensified this concern for authenticity . The wearing of sackcloth (Psalm 35.13, 69.10; Joel 1.13; Neh. 9.1) may cleanse the self of worldly ostentation, but it is also a kind of theater, which Joel captures in his in34 junction to “rend your hearts and not your garments” (Joel 2.13). While David prays with chin on bosom (Psalm 35.13), and, when grieving over his ill child, lays prostrate on the ground (2 Sam. 12.16); and while Ahab “fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly” (1 Kings 21.27), Isaiah again doubts this outward expression, with a mocking question from God: does the proper fast feature one “bow[ing] down [the] head as a bulrush . . . ?” (Isa. 58.5). In one of Jesus’ only comments on fasting practice, he critiques this bodily insincerity: “hypocrites . . . disfigure their faces that they may appear unto men to fast.. . . But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly” (Matt. 6.16–18). Embedded within the biblical representations of fasting is thus a concern with its proper practice and theatrical expression that will sur face repeatedly in the conduct guides of seventeenth-centur y New England. If preparatory humiliation is the kernel of puritan piety , then fasting as a rite might be the essence of that kernel; the performance of the fast is intended for the devout to arrive at “true humiliation.” Y et as steadyseller titles like Mead’ s The Almost Christian Discovered or Shepard’s The Sincere Convert suggest, this inner abjection is always suspect, with an overriding sense of the “almost” or a thorough troubling of the “sincere.” The ideal per formance was for the external customs to facilitate an authentic, inward drive to repent and reform. Scudder describes this psychic process in precepts for the day offered just before his “ Examinatorie Table”: after especially fervent prayer, “apply your selfe to the maine worke of the day, which hath these parts, (1) unfained Humiliation, (2) Reformation, together with Reconciliation, and (3) earnest Invocation”: “The Soule is then humbled, the heart rent, and truly afflicted, when a man

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is become vile in his owne eyes, through conscience of his owne unworthinesse, and when his heart is full of compunction and anguish, through feare of Gods displeasure, & with godly sorrow and holy shame in himselfe, and anger against himselfe for sinne. These afflictions stirred doe much afflict the heart.” “[A]wakening your Conscience” to the Law’ s punishments and the Gospel’s mercy furthers this inward humiliation, as do the practices of self-examination, self-accusation, and self-judgment. Reconciliation, reformation, and a final prayer emerge from this process of humiliation, but they receive relatively scant attention in fasting’s conduct literature. Instead, in the balance of the inner and the outer forms of humiliation, godly writers worr y insistently over a disjunction between the two. “The Lord hath alwaies rejected the outward fast as hypocriticall and superstitious, if the inward fast were not joyned with it,” argues John Downame. Without true affliction of the soul, fasting “is else but a meere bodilie exercise which profiteth little, nay , it is but an hypocritical fast abhorred and condemned of God.” While Mead can resolve these tensions in a general discussion of pious practice—for the “altogether Christian is known by his sincerity in all his per formances . . . [where] there is a connaturalness between the Word of God, and the Will of a Christian; his heart is (as it were) the transcript of the Law”—his titular subject cannot: the “almost Christian fails in this; for though doth much, prays much, hears much, obeys much, yet he is an Hypocrite under all.” 35 The sermon and steady-seller emphasis on authentic internal humiliation, on the duties of repentance and prayer that proceed from the principle of an obedient heart, is thus intertwined with a negative denigration of external form, the “bodilie exercise” of formal worship. “For men to think, that they Serve God, by a Fast from Corporal Sustenance,” says Cotton Mather, “and they draw not near to God in Devotions all the Day long, ’tis a piece of Ignorance.” As with many of the steady sellers, Increase Mather asserts that fasting is not “in it self any part of Religion; when it is called worship, it is by a T rope” and notes “ver y few even amongst those that outwardly obser ve Fasting Dayes, are acquainted with the inward, spiritual, & acceptable part of the duty.” Formality in religion is a general lament of the conduct literature, as Joseph Alleine puts it: “Many stick in the bark, and rest in the outside of religion, and in the external per formance of holy duties; Mat. 23.25. . . . They hear, they fast, they pray , they give alms, and therefore will not believe but their case is good: Luke 18.11.” The steady seller War with the Devil—Benjamin Keach’s colloquy in couplets—puts it this way: For Men may Pray, Read, Hear, and Meditate; And yet be in an unconverted state.

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They outwardly may many Truths profess, But not in heart the pow’r of them possess. Scudder worries in particular about the routinization of fasting as a ceremony: “Though I cannot but justly complaine of Christians seldome fasting; yet I dare not alow you to make this extraordinarie exercise of Religion to be ordinar y and common; for then it will degenerate into meere Forme or Superstition.” As developed from scripture, a common rhetorical strategy among godly writers is to compare their audience to the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible or to “Pharisees” and “Papists,” groups similarly perceived as bound to ceremony.36 Given the extended attention to fasting as a means of grace within devotional practice, however, the outward customs are occasionally endorsed and the combined humbling of body and soul is understood as efficacious. Lewis Bayly defends generally “externall reverence”: “And as God detects the service of the outward Man, without the inward heart, as Hypocrisie: so hee counts the inward ser vice without all externall reverence, to be meere prophanesse; hee requireth both in his worship. In prayer therefore bow thy knees, in witnesse of thy humiliation: lift vp thine eyes, and thy hands, in testimonie of thy confidence: hang downe thy head, and smite thy breast, in token of thy contrition.” Cotton Mather argues that a fast day is called not only to let believers practice spiritual employments, “but also to Show, and Speak, the Humiliation of our Souls in those Employments. Tis a Ceremony of Gods Appointment, a Symbolical Ceremony, which God Himself hath appointed, and a part of Worship, whereby we are to Signify , That we term ourselves utterly unworthy of all those Blessings, which we now Deny unto our selves, and therefore of all other Blessings whatsoever. And the First Sin of man, which Lay in Eating, is to be considered, as ver y particularly herein referred unto.” Further , fasting in the conduct literature is motivated not exclusively by repentance. Richard Rogers explains that fasting is also “to turne away some sore calamity from us, or for obtaining some especiall blessing.” The promises of God illustrate for Bayly, that “indeede no Childe of God euerconscionably vsed this holy Exercise, but in the end hee obtained his request at the hand of GOD: both in receiuing graces which he wanted, . . . as also in turning away Iudgements threatned or falne upon him.” Scudder presents a similar principle of efficacy, though he also cautions readers to “Thinke not to merit by your Fasting, as Papists doe.” And steady sellers present evidence for God’ s beneficent response, such as a ministerial fast during a plague after the London fire that “caused some abatement of the disease.” Based on scriptural advice and conduct books, the fast’ s ethical challenge for the worshipper is per haps best put by Cotton Mather: “the Right Performance of this Duty, is a thing of

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great Consequence in Christianity; ’ tis what is frequently required, and much Weal or Wo will follow upon the management of it.” 37

“Will-Worship” On the face of it, Thomas Thacher’s sermon A Fast of God’s Chusing seems neither a steady seller nor a work to rethink the literary history of colonial New England. It went through only one edition, was printed in Boston, and its 1678 publication date places it squarely in the literary campaign of the second-generation, whereby occasional sermons became “jeremiads.” But while, say , Danforth’s Errand into the Wilderness or Increase Mather’ s The Day of Trouble is Near have loomed large in cultural historiography, we might first note that these texts too only went through one edition. Further, the more famous jeremiads exist in the time zone of crisis, a world responsive to perceived social panic, a world attractive to latter-day literary scholars hoping that they , like their selected texts, have had a public impact. Resembling the steady sellers, Thacher’s work exists in the time zone of piety, responsive to spiritual crisis but not topical in its composition. And like many of the steady sellers, Thacher’ s sermon is explicitly dedicated to conduct taken up routinely over time: to, in this case, the proper performance of the fast. The publication context and reception history of Thacher’s work in fact elucidate the temporal world of the devout reader. Delivered in 1674, the sermon was not published until 1678, a time lag that resists the immediacy associated with topical jeremiads. And while a part of the literar y campaign was to revive older fast-day sermons for second-generation audiences, Thacher’ s emerges directly from pious readers. Increase Mather’ s preface explains: “Some that were affected in hearing the Word preached, and that did in shorthand take what was delivered, have Importuned the Reverend Author to give way unto its publication.” Mather’s labor in the preface is to make the sermon—“delivered some years agoe, even before our late troubles”—“fall in with [the Lord’s] providential dispensations”; but reader marginalia presents an alternative legacy (Figure 14). A sur viving copy features on its title page, in the rule between author name and place of publication, “Jo. Baily’ s Booke, N.E. March 10 84/5,” a signature of ownership typical in content though emphatic in location. While suggestive of my general efforts to rethink author and place in favor of a reader-based literary history—Baily’s name sits equally on the page with “Thacher” and “Boston”—I stress here its temporal stretch: the inclusion of 1684/85 with 1674 and 1678 as dates of relevance, the calendric fusion of old style and new style dating, its Lent-like month of record, mirrored in the old style “1.26.74” of Thacher’s original delivery—all connote an experience of time distinct from human histor y, one cyclical in its rhythms and sacred in its reach. 38

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Figure 14. The reader’s signature: the title page to John Baily’ s copy of Thomas Thacher, A Fast of God’s Chusing, plainly opened . . . Preached on a fast called by publick authority, on 26.1.74 by Thomas Thacher, Pastor of a Church in Boston (Boston: Printed by John Foster, 1678). Courtesy, Massachusetts Historical Society.

As conduct literature about preparator y humiliation, A Fast of God’s Chusing exemplifies the anxieties around ceremony and efficacy that define the fasting ritual for a devotional movement at once voluntarist and passive. The politics of piety were not solely concerned with God’s judgments against a backsliding generation, but more precisely with worship behavior: according to Increase Mather, the intention of Thacher’ s sermon was so that “the Lords people amongst us may be awakened and

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warned against resting in any lifeless Formalities.” The sermon’s biblical text—Isaiah 58.5–6, where God asks “Is it such a Fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul”—inspires the publication’s title, naming the problem of agency and will for the worshipper. But while human choice, as an overt contrast to God’ s choosing, is never admitted in the sermon, the fast clearly devolves on the subject’s proper conduct, on the exercise of “formalities.” Indeed, doctrines derived from the text immediately direct behavior, listing what kinds of abstention are expected on the day, in advice parallel to the steady sellers’ s information. With the what of fasting both critiqued and endorsed, the when and how pose further problems. Fast days are not a “standing duty” or “will-worship,” but instead are to be obser ved on special occasions, in response to “eminent publick danger” and in terms of the Gospel’ s abrogation of ceremonial Law. The “spiritual per formance” of the fast should be a “real Profession”; the language of authenticity is contrasted with the Israelites, whose outward profession indicates that “their hearts were not engaged in it, it was but a L ye a flattering of God.” Y et the sermon and conduct books present a set of externally motivated duties, in a calendar that is both reinvented—the puritan innovation—and reritualized—the March holy day, implied as well in “Jo. Baily”’ s 1684/85 signature. 39 Thacher deepens his study of true humiliation, distinguishing between the false and the authentic fast in a bodily r hetoric that announces the pressure of the ritual’s anxieties. After itemizing the necessar y steps for internal humiliation, Thacher quotes Psalms to argue that any worship “otherwise [is] . . . but a mocking of God, a flattering of him with your lips, a lying unto him with your Tongue.” If the worshippers pursue a fast not of God’ s choosing, Thacher, with a direct, acoustic vigor felt when parsed for oral delivery and attentive to the spondaic repetitions, asks: is this all that God requires, to put on a sad face and sad clothes, and sad thoughts for a day, or to fetch a sigh or two in your Closets, and pray in your Familyes In a fast-day sermon similarly concerned with worship conduct, Urian Oakes borrows stock terms from puritan ministerial tradition, naming the problem of formality as “lip-labour and the carcass of duty .” So too, Thacher later describes the “secure sinner that is covered under a form of godliness” as one who “stops his Ears with his Tongue, and becomes as the deaf Adder.” Yet the body and individual will on the day of humiliation could be a register of authenticity . Thacher follows this condemnation of “external performance” by presenting a list of criteria to determine “what

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is the Fast which God hath chosen.” His index includes “when a holy trembling seizes upon such a man” and when “a warm impression of love” is felt. Increase Mather’s fast-day instruction lets the body trump his own preaching: “And here if I should leave off speaking, and we should all of us joyn together in weeping and lamenting, it would be the best course that could be taken.” In Thacher’ s sermon, this affect is coupled with agency , with being drawn to God “forthwith”: “delaying souls do not keep a Fast unto God: when you resolve a Fast you must resolve to begin and prosecute this work of turning unto God that ver y day and carry it to the end.” 40 But why will God respond favorably to the proper performance of a fast? Why will correct worship see the “benefits of the Lord’ s accepting”? The problem of “will-worship” is sharpened when Thacher addresses the question of efficacy. Indeed, the minister lights on the day’ s ethical anxiety for worshippers at this point. He initially denigrates outward form, denying that divine blessing is returned because of the devout’ s bodily show: “not for any inherent excellency in their fastings and prayers, or ser vices, for what benefit hath God by our humbling ourselves, layng aside our Ornaments, & so humbling our bodies, or by our diligent attention to external actions.” Nevertheless, proper worship can lead to “an admirable, misterious Communion between God the Father , Son and holy Ghost, and the right Suppliant.” Thacher fashions the trinity as a conduit for verbal exchange, as he describes both a deep piety and a communications circuit: there is not an holy prayer put up unto God, but its Original is God the Father , that prayer of Faith which proceeds from the heart of a Christian, was 1. In the heart of God the Father, and he through the Intercession and Mediation of his Son, sends it down by his holy Spirit into the heart of a poor sinner , and so stamps the Image of it upon the heart of the poor sinner that he believes, and then the Holy-Ghost that stamped it there, takes it from thence, and presents this through Christ unto the Father, & then the Fathers heart is to give forth the answer through the Intercession of the Son, and to give notice of it to the Soul of a Christian by his holy Spirit.

God the Father’ s dispensation prompts yet further communicative action on the part of the penitent: “And when thou hast received the answer, the same Spirit works in thy heart to return praise and Thanksgiving by the Son unto the Father , so there is a mar vellous spiritual & mysterious Communion in this, between God the Father, Son and holy Ghost, & the poor believer , & therefore such fasting cannot be in vain.”41 This almost unlimnable description of spiritual experience in part justifies the worldly exercise of fasting—such communion is a reward of authentic fast worship. The reward recalls the spiritual union felt by the fasting Daniel, by Bayly’s ideal suppplicant nearing “the life of Angels,” or by the Cambridge confessors.

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Yet material communion is equally important to Thacher . While this passage’s subtext represents mediations such as the per formance of prayer and the rhetoric of impression (“stamping the image”), the minister is elsewhere more concrete about the role of the auditor’ s written record. In fact, he offers shorthand “Characters” as means to comfort worshippers on their day of deprivation. Thacher truncates and abbreviates central terms from his discourse—punishing afflictions represent a “ Goe from God,” “Commission” becomes “ Com,” “work to do” becomes “ Do”— and in so doing invokes Matthew 8.9, when the centurion impressed Jesus with his faith. That faith was signaled by the centurion’ s obedience of the commands “Go,” “Come” and “Do,” which the minister recommends as shorthand symbols, similar to the script abbreviations found in manuals by Shelton: “I shall give you some general Characters for help of your faith and raising up your expectations as first, when the evil of affliction hath done its work . . . Math.8.9 afflictions came not forth without a Goe from God, and as it hath its Go from God, so it hath its Commission, it hath a wise work to do, its Do thus also, now when it hath done its work it shall have its Com, it shall be called off again.” 42 Learned in ancient languages and renowned for his hand reproduction of Syriac, Thacher enacts a manuscript consciousness directed to the lay listener . But as he consoles through scribal cues, he also deepens the ethical uncertainty of the ritual. “Commission” profoundly captures the ambivalence of the day, connoting both the voluntary action of the fasting exercise and the expected reward of such duty. The passage suggests that auditor notes can record the spiritual plight of the day , rendering as a documentar y artifact the “mysterious Communion” experienced by the “right Suppliant.”

The Writing of Piety A record of such material communion is arguably found in the sermon notes of auditor Mar y Rock from her attendance at Joshua Moodey’ s September 2, 1687, fast-day sermon. Daughter of first-generation minister John Wilson and mother -in-law of the merchant Edward Bromfield, Rock most likely maintained a set of notebooks. But the one surviving document dates from sermons heard at the South Church in Boston from July 28 to October 7, 1687. The practice of note taking marks an extreme of New England piety. As a use of literacy , it expresses a psychological and emotional commitment to scripture and the sermon, a belief in the immediate significance of the texts’ oration and the long-term benefits of the notes’ rereading, privately and with family . Transcribing the scriptural citations made by the minister during the sermon, Rock has a reference system to the Bible. Discriminating between emphases in the preacher’ s oration, Rock edits for meaning and creates a sensor y book out of evanescent

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speech; the visual and victual metaphors—of the W ord as “mirror,” “cud,” or “milk”—become immanent in the pious use of a notebook that is recorded for the eye and is intended for sustenance. A few scholars have discussed note taking within New England worship, arguing that it reflects puritan practicality and rote subjection to the W ord; and, to be sure, the simplicity of the plain style’s divisions and the need to preser ve and to privately study the “heads” motivated auditor -scribes. To reduce the notes to simple dictation, however, is to neglect the depth of feeling that such notes can convey; similarly , to assume that true feeling must emanate from an original and independent response to the sermon is to mistake puritan spirituality for Romantic autonomy. To be sure, an isolated transcript may be overburdened here, given that neither quantitative nor comparative analysis is offered. At the same time, desire for pattern across a set of notebooks would blind us to the singular qualities of this specific artifact as a measure of reader response. Knitting the notes’ version of the W ord into experience—indeed, making the W ord experience—an auditor such as Rock gave material form to spiritual transcendence. 43 Her fast-day notes on Moodey’s sermon of September 2 refer to many of the ritual’s meanings, such as the heightened attention to sensory experience, the nonlinear use of biblical fragments, and the conjoined experience of humiliation and communion. This aggregate of features is condensed in the presentation of the notes, in what is an exemplary version of the thick style. By measuring spiritual affect in the notes, we also achieve special insights into the power of bookish artifacts and the function of readerly activity . To explain devotional feeling as expressed in Rock’s document is, first, to indicate the written record’ s qualitative difference—its conjunction of the tactile and the visual, of hand piety and eye piety, as distinctive features of an auditor’s notes. It is also to acknowledge that note-taking by an ordinar y congregant is a particularly taut articulation of the willful humility expected of fast-day worshippers. On a day of humble passivity , the practice of writing bespeaks a voluntarist zeal, active piety on a day that endorses and condemns such outward action; it signals a submission to ministerial language, but presumes to capture God’s Word. This discussion of will and submissiveness in Rock’s practice opens out onto broader questions of readership study, particularly its interest in readerly “appropriation.” With attention to literal content, bibliographical form, and the writerly act, we can find in these notes clues to the paradox of afflicted consolation that helps define the pilgrim’s fast-day spiritual life. On September 2, 1687, Rock’s spiritual life of consolation and affliction was mediated in part through the four -page transcription she took in her roughly 3-inch by 4 3/4-inch notebook (bound at its width and thus comparable in form to a reporter’s paper notebook). Rock’s text is thickened

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through visual themes and visible formatting, and it suggests that the fasting ritual can both re-create the “work of Conversion” and intensify the worldly pilgrim’s humiliation. The Moodey sermon’ s Doctrine is generated by the immediate conditions of fast-day suffering: “Doc that to prevent fainting under afflictions / Ether felt or feared - is to look to thinges not seen.” It is of course also built from the Text of Moodey’s sermon, the famous passage from 2 Corinthians 4.17–18: “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” For the devout, visual activity provides succor and prepares for redemption; it is a “Cuer” for fainting under affliction and, for Moodey, a devotional premise: . . . by looking[:] the Salvation of a belever Comes by the Eye. look to me and be ye Saved.44 The text continually underscores the spiritual quest as primarily a visual one. Naming three “thinges” to paradoxically look for (“what are the thinges not seen . . . the invisabel god/2ly the unacompleshed promises/3ly the unseen providences”), Moodey oscillates between maintaining the incapacity of flawed humanity’s vision and embodying the divine in Christ’s form. Moodey denigrates the ability to perceive God’ s work through human sight (“god is at work for our good / tho we Cant see it”); yet Christ becomes the way to see the “invizabel God” (“the son has reveled the father”). The minister uses a theatrical figure from Acts 7.55–56 as a “cordial” to comfort the afflicted: . . . turn our Eyes to the invizabel glory. that wil lighten or burthens Cuer all paynes - Steven was dieing god gives him 7 acts a Cordial. god drawes heavens Curtain he ses Jesus X at ye right hand of god For Moodey and Rock, Stephen’s vision is importantly organized around the hand, implicitly by God’ s pulling back of the curtain and explicitly by the placement of Christ at God’ s “right hand.” “Cordial”’s etymology clarifies the tactile and ocular meanings here, for , as we have seen, it is related not only to “the heart” but also to “the record,” a physical document that can be seen and felt. As a form of sensor y consolation, Moodey urges the auditors to open their eyes to the search for the Lord;

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yet in a characteristic double-bind communication, the minister makes the object of that quest “invizabel” and “unseen.” Rock’s text itself is significantly indexical and visual, and a continuation of the paradoxical themes that Moodey pursues. She formats the notes so that scriptural citations appear left justified, but embedded in the main content of the sermon; see, for example, “7 acts” in the passage on Stephen. Such a system allows for discontinuous cross-referencing, the mode of hand piety encouraged by the steady sellers and perhaps especially felt on a fast day when nonlinear reading is promoted by Bayly

Figure 15. Mar y Rock sermon notebook, September 2, 1687. From the Edward Bromfield sermon notes. Courtesy, Massachusetts Historical Soeicty.

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and Scudder and when fragmentary, rather than serial, sermon texts are chosen. Moreover, notice the gaps left in Rock’ s pages: . . . by looking[:] the Salvation of a belever Comes by the Eye. look to me and be ye Saved. Especially powerful is her opening note at page top, transcribing the sermon Text from 2 Corinthians (Figure 15): 2 Cor. 4 16. 17. 18. by Mr Mody at a fast 2 Sept 87. while we look not the things which are seen but at Auditor notebooks are consistent in one respect: they usually feature a cramped hand that seeks to conser ve costly paper by filling the blank pages with script (and, occasionally, shorthand). Why is Rock’s transcription thus blank? Inattentive, weak and tired, sure in her memor y of 2 Cor. 4.17–18, enthralled by the preacher’ s sound, rushed to transcribe other aspects of the sermon, prosperous enough to ignore paper waste—her choice not to record the entire scripture text suggests many possible explanations. But the visual space is exactly expressive of the content not transcribed: the things unseen are literally not mediated on the page in writing. There is evidence for interpreting this textual absence as a decision not to limn the spiritual; the rest of Rock’s notebook features pages full of notations (though the hand is relatively uncramped). And she is equally circumspect later in these notes when listing the objects of a spiritual gaze, leaving the items in a field of weathered paper: what are the thinges not seen 2ly what look ing & what yes [these] thinges not seen are. the invisabel god 2ly the unacompleshed promises 3ly the unseen providences Similarly, when recording the attributes of this spiritual vision, she allows divine virtues space on the page, resisting a finite containment of their power. . . . he that lookes on god turns a way his Eyes from descouragement ther he sees in finite power goodness faith

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Again, such gaps may be explained by extratextual conditions—a noisy pew, a thunderstorm—not available to present-day historians. Y et we might also trust the sur face, the bibliographical details that tell tales in their own right. If conditioned by the weakness from fasting and by the fast-day anxieties of a worldly sinner -scribe who should never represent the divine, it is plausible that the gaps are precisely expressive of the fastday’s spiritual meanings: a consoling communion with the divine is conjoined to a ner ve-wracking reminder of one’ s worldly distance from God. In terms of writing practice, Lewis Bayly corroborates such a challenge when he comments on the regenerate man’ s salvation: “Here my Meditation dazeleth, and my Pen falleth out of my hand: the one being not able to conceive; nor the other to describe, that most excellent blise and eternal weight of glory.”45 In terms of reading practice, the effect of such anti-notation for Rock as she goes over the heads with family is both to meditate on the invisible and eternal, and to remember one’ s worldly inability to record such a divinity . At these moments, the infusion of textual grace and the continuation of textual punishment are rhetorically inseparable.

Affective Appropriation and the Play of Control Rock’s behavior and Joseph Rowlandson’s ambiguity help rethink methods of readership study as well. The reigning paradigm argues that reading habits exist within a dialectic of freedom and constraint, of interpretive play and interpretive control. Readership studies founder when isolating either the imposition of social authority—constraint—or the independence of the reader—freedom—as sources for the understanding of textual reception. Readership history must attend instead to ways that socially authorized texts subvert themselves and to ways that actual readers are hemmed in by contexts, genres, and traditions. Given this dialectic of freedom and control, of play and constraint, readership historians advocate, when turning to individual readers, a sensitivity to conscious uses and appropriations as means to measure the creative, critical, or submissive habits of readers. 46 My examples overlap in important ways with this program, but I would like to spell out differences that might enrich methods for studying readership. First, the notion of “interpretive play” itself needs historicizing. In the Rowlandson passage, ambiguity and multiple meaning are seen as deeply structured in ministerial communication. It is not that learned discourse dominates passive auditors or readers, nor is it simply that a socially authorized text is self-subverting, thus permitting oppositional readings. Rather, ambiguity, irony, and play—these potentialities of readerly freedom—are themselves employed as forms of social con-

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trol, as techniques of conversion and rationales for subordination. Rowlandson suggests that Jer. 2.31 is an indeterminate text and that this indeterminacy is God’s intention. Rowlandson proposes that his audience supply multiple descriptive labels for their generation and that these labels be suitably punitive. In this light, “interpretive play” does not stand at one end of a generalized schema that transcends histor y; instead, the uses of ambiguity—whether Romantic symbol, postmodern novel, or puritan double bind—need to be situated in time and place. Second, the portrait of the reader within the paradigm might be nuanced through attention to Mar y Rock. Rock is constrained by discursive frameworks, such as the genres of sermon, psalm, and Bible verse, and by ideologies, such as the ministerial hierarchy of learnedness. And certainly within these constraints, Rock finds exempla, stresses passages, and extracts meanings, in what can be construed as acts of appropriation. Yet this humble bee reader—steadily active but cognitively quiescent—seems directed less by “appropriation”’ s selective aggression and more by the warp and woof of spiritual affect. The r hetorical charge of “appropriation” derives from its sense of conscious transgression, whether in claiming literary property as one’s own (Michel de Certeau’s “poaching”) or in redesignating the meanings of imager y (art theor y’s détournement). Early New England’ s devotional readers are surely active, but hardly transgressors. W e might term the pious reader’ s activity “affective appropriation,” which retains the notion of conscious process behind aggressive reading, while wedding “appropriation” to the emotional reach inherent in devotional literacy , thus arriving at a mouthful of abstraction for the historian of reading. Y et the language of “affective appropriation” helps capture the drift of feeling in Rock’s notes: a focus on readerly affect allows us to see rapture and abjection as modes of assertion. The “will” in the “what you will” of Rowlandson’ s admonition suggests a readerly struggle best mapped according to the idea of affective appropriation. More generally, affective appropriation enables study of less cognitive dynamics of response, such as ones motivated by sentiment, bodily feeling, and the unconscious. 47 Fast-day reading rituals illustrate this mode of readerly affect, and the disorienting consequences of interpretive play . Such rituals entailed a communicative act that was neither simply an unremitting jeremiad nor only a comforting means of grace. The rituals often invoked both of these goals, in a delicate dialectic that structured worshippers’ spirituality. Auditor-readers found in fast-day worship expressions of body and word that sent conflicting yet coexistent messages. In the ordeal of devotional piety, such contradictions created both spiritual distress and spiritual fulfillment for early New Englanders. Examining another site of affliction—where death made the anxiety of spiritual experience most likely even more intense—uncovers a similar dynamic of fulfillment and loss.

Chapter 4

Ritual Mourning

When Cotton Mather appended to the margin of a prefator y poem on Urian Oakes the anagram “BOSTON / SOB NOT,” he knitted together a number of interpretive concerns and behavioral mores prompted by the New England elegy: its address to a collective, Bostonian audience; its commanding imperative that enjoined readers to cease indulging selfish emotion; its displacement of the work of mourning to an unspecified, and thus anxiety-inducing, project. All of these issues mark the text as conventionally puritan in its concentrated attention on the reader . But its power over the reader must also be measured in terms of the physical expressiveness of the material language itself. Its epigrammatic intensity derives in part from the assonance that oral deliver y gives the phrase (“sob not”). Likewise, the anagram’ s rearrangement of letters to invent a thematic statement about mourning depends on the visual perception of those characters formed on a page or in the mind’ s eye. Mather’s use of printed marginalia further complicates a model of interpretation that would see the plain style as a transparent medium. The marginalia requires readers to shift their frame of reference, to move from centered text to “marginal” explanation—a cross-referencing common, as we have seen, to devotional reading. But this paratextual movement is especially vexed. For when the marginalia is restored to the verse it centers, we learn that “ Since Oakes (as Homer) has all Places Claim; / Let Boston too forget its Anagram!” Forget to sob not? Such shifts in elegiac reading practices are more dramatically registered in the uses to which verse like Mather’ s was put; indeed, we are per haps lucky to have Mather’s bound poem in the archive, since scripted or printed elegies were often buried with the coffin of their subjects. 1 Itself a variant on Luke 7.13, Mather’ s anagram thickens the devotional text, through both the sensor y effects of sight and sound and through the double-bind language of its message. The larger textual condition of the New England elegy—with its proplike role in the ritual of mourning and theater of burial—similarly invokes the socializing function of written artifacts, the phenomenological impress of objects on their devotional subjects. As an aesthetic form, the elegies indeed

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have much in common with the steady sellers sur veyed so far. Prior to the expansion of press production in the 1720s, elegies were composed throughout the first three generations of settlement by ministers and laity, governors and merchants, established writers such as Anne Bradstreet and humble versifiers such as Roger Clap. Like other types of funeral elegy ,2 these poems of commemoration, mourning, and eschatological prophecy are didactic, positioning the reader or readers to experience the text personally and communally. Intimately related to behavior, the poems were often written for funerals, where they were used in highly ritualized ways. Crucially, this verse has been textually performed: composed, published, transcribed, memorized, posted, spoken, engraved, and buried. Widely encountered; intently prescriptive; performatively experienced; aesthetically thick—the elegies share the discursive world of the devotional steady seller. The bias toward the elegy in early American literar y historiography, however, has tended to suppress the dynamic and experiential nature of the form, while almost wholly neglecting the comparable imaginative sensorium of the devotional steady sellers. The elegies of a Bradstreet or Edward Taylor loom large in the early American literar y canon for understandable reasons: they are easily aligned with authorship; their genre is recognizably classical; they are pedagogically useful; and they humanize the image of the dour puritan. And like the topical jeremiad, the occasional elegy promises a historical referent to a particular moment in chronological time. Yet the transmission history of elegiac verse moves us away from the confines of single, colonial authors or atomized temporal instances; and it moves us toward the sociological account of a reader-based literary culture over the long durée of early New England. The first step in organizing this transmission histor y came in the 1920s, when Worthington Ford compiled a bibliography of broadsides— a favored medium of elegiac publication—and when Ola Winslow’ s facsimile reproduction edition of early New England broadsides featured fifteen extant elegies from the first century of settlement.3 With the publication in 1927 of Handkerchiefs from Paul, Kenneth Murdock collected the consolatory verse of Benjamin Tompson and John Wilson as copied in the early eighteenth-centur y journal of Joseph T ompson.4 In 1943, Harold Jantz completed a bibliography of the first centur y of New England verse; arranged by author , the bibliography enters numerous elegies and presents thirteen of them. 5 Of the two 1968 collections of early American poetry, Kenneth Silverman samples seventeen poems in a section devoted to elegies while Harrison Meserole edits thirty-one elegies in his author -organized anthology .6 More broadside elegies have appeared since the Jantz catalogue. 7 None of these editions are devoted solely to elegiac verse, taking their organizational basis to be medium,

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author, or period. Yet there were over 220 poems devoted to the individual deaths of community members, and this is a conser vative minimum number. Jantz’s documentation demonstrates that the elegiac impulse was featured throughout the textual space of early New England: colonists jotted them in account books, printers published them on broadsides, scholars like Mather and Morton interpolated them in their regional histories, stonecar vers inscribed them for grave-sites, ministers sent them to grieving husbands, church officials copied them in recordbooks, friends recited them at funerals, mourners pinned them to the hearse during processions and buried them with the coffin. The acts of describing, reproducing, and anthologizing by Jantz and others help canonize the genre, of course, and give Bradstreet and T aylor a literary context. Yet the range described by these scholars also illustrates the audience-driven nature of the elegiac impulse and its widespread use across the first three generations of English settlement. 8 If this textual scholarship invites sociological inquiry, literary criticism of the texts of mourning has skewed attention away from the devotional manuals and toward matters of literar y value and ministerial r hetoric.9 Anthropological treatments of death widen our view of the culture of mourning; the work of the T ashjians, David Stannard, Gordon Geddes, and David Watters provides a context through which we can understand the artifacts of loss. Yet these approaches slight the literary qualities and physical properties of the elegiac texts themselves. 10 Syntheses of the literary and the anthropological advance methods for appreciating the devotional steady sellers. Mitchell Brietweiser provides a deep study of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative in order to discuss the grief taboo in the colonies. For Brietweiser , ministerial prohibitions on mourning are designed to produce social consensus by controlling individual affect. Sob not: private grief must be channeled into a vision of the public commonweal, a move that was used propagandistically in the context of King Philip’s War. Within this worldview, Rowlandson’s efforts to find a place for the full range of mourning—to counter the grief taboo—is a critique of puritan ideology. More recently, Jeffrey Hammond’s study of the elegy smartly combines the anthropological and the literary, though only gesturing to the devotional manuals as a relevant context for the poetry. For Hammond, the occasional quality of elegies obstructs the modern reader’s appreciation and Hammond’ s valuable effort is to recreate this topical, synchronic moment for literar y delectation.11 In suggesting that we see the devotional steady sellers—which are replete with prescriptions on mourning—and the elegies on a continuum, as equal forms in a literar y culture, this chapter will give the conduct literature and the elegiac verse their due as expressive forms. If on the one hand the imaginative richness and thickened effects of

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the steady sellers deser ve literar y scrutiny , on the other the elegies themselves work through an aesthetic specificity that the critical tradition has mostly ignored. For instance, literary analysis that conflates biography and elegy evades the crucial formal differences of verse and prose; so too, genre study has underplayed distinctive, thickened conventions such as broadside publication, anagrams, acrostics, and ritual oration. The elegy and the devotional title ser ved in the gift economies—undertreated by the anthropological tradition—of bur ying the dead, whereby the textual object accrued meaning through its extraverbal traits. Also omitted from literary and anthropological studies is the light shed on the grief taboo through reference to these expressive forms. Recall Mather’ s anagram: he ultimately permits emotional release, as readers should forget the imperative to “sob not.” The shared discourse in the elegies and steady sellers on the conduct of mourning indicates that a range of sensor y feeling was engaged when contemplating loss. Grief might be punished, but, as Hammond notes, it was also sanctioned, and glorified visions of redemption and the afterlife gave mournful meditation a positive value. 12 Profoundly moving, Rowlandson’s narrative keens, then, not as a counter to the grief taboo but perhaps as an articulation of the options laid out in the steady-seller discourse. If a spectrum of affect is available to the grieving devout, attention then must be turned to the uses of mourning. Elegies and steady sellers participated in the life of piety characterized so far as redeemed subjectivity , a processual experience of anxiety only intensified under circumstances of loss, where textual experience became a search for solace, transformation, and reintegration. Elegies and steady sellers negotiated the social crisis and personal possibilities of loss, judgment, and restoration that death in early New England entailed. The death of a member of the community was read providentially, a sign of God’ s disfavor with the colonists and yet another opportunity for introspection; at the same time, death, for the visible saint, promised an eternity of bliss in heaven, and the departed spent time imagining, through the elegies and steady sellers, the aesthetic pleasure of this afterlife.13 Death rent the fabric of the tribal community, creating a gap that needed mending for the integrity of the social body . Death, the cost of sin, also reminded readers of their own fallen nature, the gap within themselves that needed the suturing of Christic salvation.14 Specifically, redeemed subjectivity as it is articulated by the experience of death is structured by an intense awareness of the body , both as sensory agent and incarnated perceptual object. This emphasis on the body stretches from the deathbed ritual, where the words of a minister would orally encourage imaginative visualization of God with “eyes of faith,” to the materiality of the corpse and the necessary methods of han-

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dling it, to a lived theology that made the glorification of the soul a sensual experience where eyes of faith became “bodilie eyes” beholding the body of Christ, the divine incarnate. 15 The reading of signs at the moment of death and in the lifelong mode of preparator y humiliation is thus an epistemological and experiential problem, and the elegies and steady sellers are a response to this multiply determined notion of emotional loss and corporeal feeling. The imaginative function of death and mourning has implications for book phenomenology and literar y histor y in early New England. The melancholic body of white English settlers generated by the culture of death was itself displaced on to Native Americans, a way of seeing that helped rationalize colonialism’s effects. A representational strategy that attributed to Amerindians perpetual grief and savage physicality provided a cultural explanation for Native American disappearance to layer upon the facts of disease and war fare.16 From an English perspective, such imagined behavior, associated with primitivism, resisted the development of an enduring archive. This image of loss and illiteracy had its obverse in the restorative efforts, associated with civilization, enabled by white mourning and white reading. The politics of the archive means that cultural preservation is taken up by human agents: stonecarvers and grave-site guardians; librarians and binders; collectors and critics. Grief can fuel such activity , whether through memorial tombstones in cemeteries, through protection from looting—the intact grave good of a broadside elegy differs markedly from the ransacked burial mounds of Amerindians in the early modern period—or through “national” literary histories ascribed after the fact. The canonization of “American” puritan elegies reacts to a conjured loss in the cultural origins of a nation. Mourning can fuel destructive activity also, and the elegiac discourse, as we shall see in one poem, served the purpose of retributive violence. Yet this broadside’s content was only transmitted to us in full through the preservative function of a bound, personal miscellany. Within this preser vative activity, the steady sellers and elegies can be differentiated, permitting further specification of the codex’ s role in early New England while sharpening our focus on their artifactual condition. The ephemerality of an elegy’ s sheet and the durability of a steady seller’ s stitching bespeak format differences that matter . To be sure, the tubby bricks were read to tatters and single poems have been conserved for their literar y value; yet it is equally true that broadsides have been saved through the strenuous exertions of Jantz and others, that this salvation has been managed by way of book platforms (encased, folded structures), and that steady-seller volumes—though neglected by literary critics—can be found readily in almost any English-based special collections of any librar y with pre-1800 holdings. The book format con-

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serves texts. When we account for the single-sheet job printing that has constituted the bulk of press production since Gutenberg, the preser vative function of the codex format, seemingly obvious, takes on weight. As Roger Stoddard argues, authors do not write books; nor , adds Hugh Amory, do press workers produce books (they print sheets); instead, books—via the processes of folding, gathering, stitching, and covering— are made by binders. From a user’ s perspective, this activity is when, arguably, a book is first endowed with value: it can be appreciated because it can be operated. The activity of readers, collectors, and scholars further imputes value to the text. In this sense, the elegies and steady sellers diverge. Its status as sacred grave good and as canonical literar y expression has preser ved the elegy; its status as old, rare book, stitched and bound—and then curated by careful librarians—has preser ved the steady seller. Though these systems of value differ , the elegy and the steady seller share a common textual life in that they advert to their material existence over time. By foregrounding their mechanisms of preservation, the elegy and steady seller warrant study as “artifacts,” a term that has currency in ever ything from traditional bibliography to academy satire, but that benefits from study of its cross-historical and crosscultural valences. In this light, I argue that archival endurance and white survival are bound up in the book culture of early New England. This chapter will begin by reversing the terms of Hammond’s comprehensive study, suggesting that the elegiac verse provides a context for understanding the devotional steady sellers. Examining the ritual uses of elegies at New England funerals and the discourses of vision and orality that formally and thematically constitute the poems, I will explain how such meanings emerge from the aesthetic sensorium and ritual piety nurtured by the steady sellers. The emphasis on sensory meaning in the elegies and steady sellers articulates what the New England discourse of death fundamentally considers: the body, its loss to a sur viving community, its status as mortally decaying, its capacity for physical stimulus, its potential for glorification and resurrection. The thematic concern for loss and restoration redounds on the textual situation of the elegies and steady sellers themselves. Through their role in a gift economy for mourners at funerals, elegies were both memorial keepsakes and sacred grave goods, while steady sellers such as Edward Pearse’ s The Great Concern were fashioned as textual legacies to be preserved by survivors. After exploring the implications of this gift economy, I consider the term “artifact” as a synonym for “text”; “artifact” knits together bibliographical, historicist, and intercultural meanings, and thus sheds light on the archive’s construction. With attention to elegiac artifacts, I then turn to specific uses of grief. With the sensibility of grief in early New England permitting emotion and admitting written records into its modes of af-

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fect, the politics of mourning require study in this light. If Breitwieser overstates the grief taboo, he rightly locates mourning in the contact zone between Anglos and Amerindians. Images of melancholy and the body helped structure reductive perceptions of Amerindians among white colonists, a form of projection that disavows colonization’ s consequences. Through attention to three elegiac texts—a 1680 gravestone, a broadside elegy by John Wilson on Joseph Brisco, and an elegiac fragment from King Philip’ s War restored through Samuel Sewall’ s miscellany—the chapter concludes by measuring the ideological function of loss and sur vival, as it is imbricated in the texts and bodies of southern New England populations.

Elegiac Performance Like the personal miscellany , the conduct manual, and the fast-day expressions, elegies were per formative texts: highly self-conscious of readerly behavior, the verse participated in a theater of literacy through a thick style of oral, gestural, and visual meaning. The direct address that the elegy’s audience often receives manifests this style of readership explicitly. On one level, the community of readers and listeners are to learn of the virtuous saint and model themselves after him or her .17 More fundamentally, the community is asked to examine its behavior through the poetry’s questions, exhortations, and admonitions. The tenline anagrammatic poem sent to Thomas Dudley (“ah! old must dye”) in 1645 epitomizes this form of elegiac r hetoric: “What shall younge do, when old in dust do lye? / When old in dust lye, what N. England doe?” Similarly, Nicholas Noyes’ s elegy on Mar y Gerrish enjoins readers and listeners to respond properly to her loss: Then let us Wait, and Pray, and all Combine To Bend, and Bow Our Wills to the DIVINE. Silence becomes us, and Submission; For we should come to this; Thy Will be Done! The voice of the poem often speaks collectively with the survivors, defining the settlers as a tribe. John Fiske develops the theme of his elegy on Samuel Sharpe through an anagrammatic address: “Us! ample-share.” The first-person plural voice is repeated in the opening lines of the first five stanzas, the anagram’ s “Us!” recurring three times and most heatedly bemoaned in the elegy’ s seventh line: “oh! who shall us! us! comfort, hope, helpe, give?”18 Additionally, the town of the elegiac subject is referred to by name, and communities are personified as mourners. 19 Biblical intertexts function similarly: as David worried that Jonathan’ s

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death would rejoice the Philistines, so too Daniel Henchman feared what Gov. William Phips’s 1695 death would mean to the French and Indians: “Rejoyce, Messieurs; Netops, Rejoyce; ’Tis T rue; / Ye Philistines, None will Rejoyce but you.” The son of a King Philip’s War hero, Henchman renders the Native American “netops” and French colonials as Others to English identity , as “Blind Heathen” whose threatening force would be empowered by the New Englanders’ loss. 20 The communal voice also establishes the boundaries between the living as a group of worldly readers and the deceased as an individual saint or as part of a cohort of glorified saints. This technique is featured in the number of poems that imagine the voice of the deceased speaking to survivors, and in burial grounds when the “LAMENTING STONE DOTH SPEAKE” to passersby.21 Stones from 1737 in a Middletown, Connecticut, graveyard display typical warnings: “You are but dust / And dye you must” and “As you are so Was we / As We are you must be.” William Pole’ s Dorchester epitaph strives for “A RESEMBLANCE OF A DEAD MAN BESPEAKING YE READER” and similarly includes “A DEAD MANS LESSON”: “J W AS WHAT NOW THOU ART & THOU SHALT BE / WHAT J AM NOW.”22 All of these memento mori rhetorical strategies implicate readers, relating the texts to behavioral norms and tribal identity . The social setting that most dramatically staged this implication of the reader was the New England funeral. Read aloud before the procession, bestowed as gifts to mourners present at the funeral, pinned to the hearse as the casket and attendees journeyed to the graveyard, and buried in the ground with the coffin, elegiac texts were at the heart of a displaced form of puritan theater . The Reformers’ funerals were ostensibly civil affairs that omitted liturgical and oratorical rites. Stipulated in the Westminster Assembly’s 1644 Director y, doctrine rejected kneeling, praying, and singing as part of the funeral ceremony; meditation was tolerated, and ministers could be present to encourage this duty , but the funeral in New England was officially a civil function with burial at public grave sites. Thomas Lechford’s 1642 report of New England practice corroborates this account: “At Burials, nothing is read, nor any Funeral Sermon made, but all the neighber hood, or a good company of them, come together by tolling of the bell, and carr y the dead solemnly to his grave, and there stand by him while he is buried. The Ministers are most commonly present.”23 Yet New England funerals, through religious and secular means, participated in a symbolic economy that circulated rites and icons, that asked the gathered audience, as elegist F . D. did, to “Read [the deceased’s] tear-delug’d grave.” Ecclesiatically, doctrine encouraged meditation during the funeral, a practice that emphasizes the state of the living rather than the state of the deceased’s soul, and that corresponds

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to the introspection called for by the elegiac address to the reader outlined above and by the steady seller discourse, as we shall see below. This reformulation of the memento mori tradition also permits the imaginative activity that the New England discourse about death promotes. The minister’s presence, even without a verbal communique, is itself significant, as it “intensified the fact of death as the final act of this life.” In terms of secular ceremony, there was an intensification of ceremonial funerals and customary versifying under the Protectorate in England, and the ritualized quality of New England funerals, particularly after 1650, is even more strongly apparent. Gloves were sent to invite guests to the funeral, while rings etched with mortuary symbols and the name of the deceased and date of the funeral were given to attending mourners. Mourners altered their dress for the day , wearing black and white and adorning special scar ves, cloaks, and ribbons set aside for the ceremony.24 Elegies were at the heart of funereal theater , and the many elegies that mention the funeral site in their titles attest to their presence.25 Their place on the hearse was occasionally shared by scutcheons and death’s heads, with the coffin often covered by a dark “mort-cloth.” Their inked, iconic display is linked to other funereal symbolism in a line from a 1653 English Protestant poem entitled “Elegy at the Funeral”: “thus late my verse, / In black and white attends your sacred hearse.”26 The ritual role of the elegy’ s visual and oral per formance at the funeral is documented by evidence from the verse itself; while staging devices are traditional to the elegiac form, such conventions also argue for the deeply structured place held by the verse in New England conceptions of death. Indeed, Anne Bradstreet speaks to the difference between moral imperative and super ficial routine, in her elegy on her father Thomas Dudley: By duty bound, and not by custome led, To celebrate the praises of the dead, My mournfull mind, sore prest, in trembling verse Presents my Lamentations at his Herse. Cotton Mather mentions the practice in the Oakes preface (“And Norton’s Herse do’ s Poet-Wilson trim / With V erses”); in a poem on Nathaneal Collins, Mather worries over burdening the hearse with “ bad Funeral verses.” 27 The popular “verse/hearse” r hyme is repeated throughout the body of elegiac poetr y, here used by John Saffin to start his 1683 elegy on John Hull: “Arise faint Muse bring one heart-melting verse / To drop upon his sweet Embalmed Herse.” Mather’ s poem on Collins figures the pinned elegies as the “Paper Winding Sheet to lay him

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out.” Contemporary observation bears out this practice; Samuel Sewall indirectly admits that, at Thomas Shepard’ s 1685 funeral, “It seems . . . there were some Verses; but none pinned on the hearse.” The ritual of burying the text with the coffin is glimpsed in the subtitle to the Collins elegy (“FUNERAL-TEARS At the Grave of the much Desired and Lamented mr. NATHANEAL COLLINS”) and in a r hyme from Mather’s Oakes elegy: “Oh! but a V erse to wait upon they Grave, / A V erse our Custome, and thy Friends will have.” 28 Though sermons, prayers, and other oral liturgy were prohibited in the Reformers’ funereal theor y, they were gradually allowed into burial practice by the end of the seventeenth century. Elegies, which were usually read aloud at the house of the survivors before the procession, seem to have substituted as eulogy for the deceased when theory was strictly in force. Samuel Danforth begins an elegy by dramatizing this situation: We do assemble that a Funeral With grief and sorrow we may solemnize. Whereat ’tis proper, that to mind we call The Greatness of our Loss; the qualities And Usefulness of our deceased Friend, Whose Pilgrimage on Earth is at an end. These public per formances, with the elegies read for those in the audience who might not see them or might not be able to read, establish the poems as oral texts. 29 The poems themselves develop the thickened aesthetics of sound and vision dramatized by the funeral ritual; both the format and the matter of the verse refer to the reading habits prompted by the elegiac mode. Broadside publication, a favored medium for the New England elegy , foregrounds visual and acoustic forms of literacy , while de-emphasizing the tactility of books. A broadside’s sheet enables more immediate visual access to its information than does the folded, gathered, bound, and covered sheet or sheets of a book. For seventeenth-century Anglo-Americans (as for other Western Europeans), the broadside medium conveyed sensational stories of monstrous births, natural devastations, and unnatural deaths, as well as proclaiming the latest political and social developments; this discourse of sensationalism and immediacy attaches to the broadside format, playing to the visual imagination of its readers. Images and illustrations often accompanied the broadside, and broadside elegies were no exception; visual mortuary symbols appeared in many of the later poems of the period, with images of death’s heads, hourglasses, and shovels framing the text and continuing a tradition that began for reformed Protestants during the Interregnum. The earliest extant Cam-

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bridge Press broadside elegy features a thick border of black ink. 30 That broadsides were posted of course contributes to their role as visual texts, but this public function also explains their status as oral communication. As announcements to the public, broadsides were no doubt read aloud, a form of literacy crucial for those not trained to read in the traditional sense. Verse itself is an especially conflicted discursive form, depending on visual and aural reading modes to convey its meaning. The age of Herbert needed neither modernist art-practice nor contemporary language poets to understand the iconic patterning of lines, words, and characters. And, as Richard Bradford argues, the poetic line—what fundamentally distinguishes verse as a textual categor y—is crucially a visual phenomenon, especially in the blank-verse strategies of a poet such as Milton. The meanings readers generate from poetr y depend in part on the visual materiality of language, on the processing of line breaks (as they create variable connections of sense and syntax between words) with the eye. Only one New England elegy is written in blank verse, but many employ acrostics, which alter the reader’ s relationship to the line break, and anagrams, which toy with the visual patterning of names and characters. The clarity of known conventions and plain descriptions also distinguish the elegies as aurally legible poems. Indeed, most New England elegies are written in rhymed couplets, and some feature a ballad stanza form.31 Such conventions situate the elegiac verse form as a communal rhetorical strategy, appealing in its memorizable simplicity to a broad base of listeners; moreover, the verse creates specific aural meanings that derive from other oral forms, particularly sermons. The elegies thus conjoin visible and acoustic media in their dissemination of spiritual messages. This deployment of sight and sound is mirrored in the dramatic content presented in many of the elegies. The orality of the elegiac texts is accented by the necro-ventriloquism of poets like John Saffin, John Wilson, John Cotton, and Benjamin Tompson, whose poems often embody the voice of the deceased subject. 32 The many elegies on ministers mention the power of sermonizing. Peter Bulkeley describes Thomas Hooker’s abilities: “Each ear that heard him said, He spake to me: / So piercing was his holy ministr y.” The trace of Samuel Arnold’ s skill is lamented through the opening figure of the echo in Ichabod Wiswell’ s broadside: How solitary seems that Place Which Arnold’s Presence late did grace? What Eccho from that Pulpit sounds, Whence Arnold preach’d Christ’s bleeding wounds?

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An image from the English broadside on the death of Rev . John Rogers humbly attests to the basic duties of ministers: From weeke to weeke, from day to day , he cryed in our eares: And this he did without delay, the space of thirty yeeres. Voice is also foregrounded in the rhetorical apostrophes that punctuate many elegies. The anagrams “O, Honie Knott” (John Cotton) and “o a map’s thresh’d” (Thomas Shepard) structure poems by Fiske and Wilson repsectively.33 To this end, Thomas Shepard II’s elegy on Wilson slyly exhausts anagrammatic technique: JOHN WILSON Anagr. JOHN WILSON Oh change it not! No sweeter name or thing, Throughout the world, within our ears shall ring. 34 The oratory lamented and invoked by these poems is complemented by an ocular theme, an attention, on the one hand, to capacities for sight and, on the other, to sensory details. The visual motif is indeed visionary, as it in part describes the imper fect vision of the fallen world while alluding to the revelatory vision of the afterlife. The theme is built into the drama of mourning through references to the tear ful eyes of sur vivors. The opening line of Nicholas Noyes’ s elegy on Mar y Gerrish addresses female readers by emphasizing their (in)ability to see: “FAIR Ladies see, (if you can see for T ears).” G. H.’ s elegy on Richard Dummer uses the motif repeatedly: Widows and Orphans Fingers in their Eye. Who do need no Welch Leeks to make them cr y. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scarce had we dry’d our Eyes from one sad Stor y, Before we hear the Loss of this Towns Glory. If that our heads were Waters, and each Eye A fountain were now may we weep them dr y. F. D.’ s rendering of Mitchel’ s “tear -delug’d grave” and Mather’ s “FUNERAL-TEARS” also exemplify this interest in the corporeal production of the eye. It is obviously a natural subject for elegiac poetry; but

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in a culture where worldly sight is through a glass darkly , the representational figure anxiously raises the problem of the sur vivors’s fallen vision. The work of this motif becomes especially clear through the recovery of another visual theme in the elegiac verse, the celebration of “bodilie eyes.” The glorified perceptive faculties of the saint in heaven are frequently imagined in the elegiac verse, and the close of Bradstreet’s “As W eary Pilgrim” per haps best explains the concept of resurrected, “bodilie eyes”; she hints at the aesthetic perfection of heaven and the vision of Christ through a subtle dismissal of worldly forms of oral communication: A Corrupt Carcasse downe it lyes A glorious body it shall rise In weaknes and dishonour sowne In power ’tis rais’d by Christ alone Then soule and body shall unite And of their maker have the sight Such lasting joyes shall there behold As eare ne’r heard nor tongue e’er told Lord make me ready for that day Then Come deare bridgrome Come away. Roger Clap’s humble elegy on Increase Nowell alludes to this visual code as well: The soule of blessed nowell now is fill’d with glory bright and sees the face of his sweet christ Oh that’s a blessed sight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . take us lord unto thy selfe thy blessed face to see In the Lydia Minot anagram elegy (“Dai in my Lot”), the dark, shadowy life on earth and, implicitly, of nighttime, is contrasted with the glorious, revelatory light of heaven, her immortality making the “Day my Lot which aye shall be.” 35 Materially engaged by the textual image of many elegies and ritually involved by the uses of elegies at funerals, vision is also deeply structured in the imaginative action of the poetr y itself. As they characterize the relationship of the deceased to the sur vivors, the poems juggle representations of the word in its material media. Benjamin Woodbridge’s noted elegy on John Cotton epitomizes this dialectic.36 The poem includes the famous image of Cotton’ s “translation” to

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heaven, which embodies the minister as the print artifact of early New England: A living, breathing Bible: Tables where Both Covenants at large engraven were; Gospel and Law in’s Heart had each its Columne His Head an Index to the Sacred V olume. His very Name a Title Page; and next, His Life a Commentary on the Text. O what a Monument of glorious worth, When in a New Edition he comes forth Without Errata’s, may we think hee’ll be, In Leaves and Covers of Eternitie! (ll. 29–38) Eschatological images of Cotton’ s resurrection coincide with a densely iconicized symbol of the Word, articulating, for the reader, the relationship between visible texts and the funeral’s liminal possibilities for transformation. But this startling figure has per haps overwhelmed attention to Woodbridge’s representation of speech, for the poem immediately moves to praise Cotton’s voice: A man of Might at Heavenly Eloquence, To fix the Ear, and charm the Conscience, As if Apollos were reviv’d in him, Or he had learned of a Seraphim. Spake many Tongues in one: one Voice and Sense Wrought Joy and Sorrow, Fear and Confidence. (ll. 39–44) These images speak just as strongly to the acoustic power of the W ord: the potency of Cotton’s “Eloquence” steadily fixes and magically charms, while the number of languages at his command further concentrates his authority. Mediated through sound and image, Woodbridge’s poem regulates conduct and channels affect, embodying the phenomenological experience of elegiac texts for devotional readers in early New England.

Death and the Steady Seller If the elegies ser ved a ritual function and produced an aesthetic sensorium in their address to the experience of loss, they shared this cultural work with the steady sellers. The moods of the occasional verse emerged from the mores of the durable book. Format distinctions are telling. While tempered by the celebration of sound, for instance, the remarkable book imagery in the Cotton elegy does name those nonsonic qual-

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ities of the codex that differentiate it from other modes of early modern communication such as the broadside. The paratexts of “ Title Page” and “Commentary” and the navigational aids of “Columne,” “T ables,” and “Index” remind us that books are handled objects, randomly accessed. Further, the imagery stresses the storage potential of a “Volume” and the bound series of “ Leaves and Covers”: while visually present like a broadside, the codex features an expansive sequence that enables continuous and discontinuous reading. The tubby steady sellers of course exploit the codex’s navigability. Lewis Bayly and Henr y Scudder point to their passages on death and mourning through indexical reference. William Perkins in A Garden of Spirituall Flowers uses five pages to list—rather than, say, narrate or sermonize—directions for dying. Thomas Doolittle’s Mourner’s Directory combines the standard manual on grieving with the reference system expected of one of the more encyclopedic guides. The steady sellers also advise users to customize their reading of scripture in the contexts of death and dying. In Time, and the End of Time, John Fox recommends discrete passages from Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Psalms, while encouraging in particular the consideration of hell’ s torments in Psalm 11, Matthew, and Revelation. Bayly suggests that, among others, chapters from Isaiah, Deuteronomy , and Revelation should be read to the sick. This steady, ready reference alludes to a constellation of books, generating modes of hand piety missing from broadside publication.37 But, further, the steady sellers promote habits of mind around the experience of death whose rhythms match the durée of a human life, rather than the immediate crises of illness and loss. This sustained ritual renders grief a subdued but ever -present mode of daily existence, death a subtending force in devotional consciousness, and the afterlife a structural feature of meditative practice. Moreover , the steady sellers call on thickened aesthetics and imaginative routines for these daily rituals, such that we can comprehend them as a literary culture coextensive with the elegies. The volume of the pious mind was full, a mental world preparing for death, meditating on the end times, contemplating the state of the body, and engaging the senses to these purposes. The affective experience of death informed day-to-day living for devotional readers. The pilgrimage metaphor for the devout found its deepest meaning in comprehending the spiritual journey as preparation for death, and godly writers call on the thick style to guide readers on this path. “[I]t is plainly said,” chants Thomas Doolittle, “that thou art going to thy Grave: Thou art upon thy Journey to thy Grave: Thou art upon thy way to the dust: Whether thou art sleeping or waking, thou art going to thy Grove [sic]: Whether working or playing thou art going to thy Grave; Whether

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drinking or sporting, thou art going to thy Grave: In this Journey , thou never standest still; The Child is going to its Grave as soon as it is born.” John Fox directs readers to “ Maintain always a holy fear upon thy heart of coming to the end of time before thy work be done. Live continually in an expectation of your great changes. Buy , Sell, Converse, Read, Pray , Hear, and do all as dying men, and passing to receive the recompense of endless Joy or W o.” In urging contemplation of the afterlife through anaphora and syntactic balance, William Dyer exhorts his audience: “Eternity is a sum that can never be numbered, a line that can be never measured. Eternity is a condition of everlasting sorrow or everlasting joy, Oh think of this & prepare for this ever y day, before the night Death comes.” “A believers dying day ,” Dyer states, in language that narrates the pilgrimage’s climax, “is his Crowning day.”38 As the essence of ritual behavior , preparator y humiliation in the steady sellers is framed as preparation for death. In conventional personification from Corinthians, Perkins counsels that “Before death come upon thee . . . pull out his sting, and take from him his power and strength by humbling thy selfe in the time present.” “If thou knowest thy self a sinner,” harangues Dyer in more heated tones, “and grievest not for it, but art therewith content, neither repenting of, nor reforming from it, I cannot say, the sting of Death is taken away for thee; but if thou dost truly repent of thy sin, and endeavour with thy heart to forsake sin, the sting of Death is taken away for thee.” Swinnock makes consciousness of sin a form of mourning as well, but, quoting Zechariah 12.10, redeems the conjunction of sentiment and sight so typical of the elegies: “God hath made the same organ for seeing and weeping. ’Tis the eye of knowledge which affects the heart. They shall see him whom they have pierced and mourn; sight of sin doth precede sorrow for sin.” 39 Death was to permeate the daily imagination of the pious, with worship practices marking the day’ s time and the devout’ s space. John Fox directs readers to set apart “a little time every day on purpose to think of your latter end. Do it so frequently , until death and you become familiar; ever and anon put thyself into a posture of dying, converse with thy winding sheet, Coffin, Grave, let thy great change be so upon thy heart, that thou mayst ever y morning or evening walk a turn or two with death.” “[M]editate upon death,” Dyer explains; “the meditation of death will put sin to death. . . . death to the godly is the out-let to sin and sorrow, and the in-let to peace and happiness.” In a section entitled “Things to be meditated upon, as thou art putting off thy clothes,” Bayly elaborates the sheet imager y and provides a cyclical ritual for day’ s end: “When thou seest thy bed, let it put thee in minde of thy grave; which is now the bed of Christ: For Christ, by laying his holie body to rest three daies, & three nights in the grave; hath sanctified, and as it were warmed

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it for the bodies of his Saints, to rest and sleepe in, till the morning of the resurrection . . . Let therefore thy bed-clothes represent unto thee the mould of the earth, that shall cover thee: thy sheets, thy winding-sheet: thy sleepe, thy death: thy waking, thy resurrection.” Dyer echoes this figure: “When you are putting off your cloaths, think of the putting off your Tabernacles; be going to your beds as if you were going to your graves, and so close your eyes in one world, as you would open them in another world; when you are creeping between the sheets, then think of your winding-sheet.” With private space and temporal flow recast in aesthetic language, the steady sellers make customs around dying a daily outlet for the meditative imagination. 40 The body, both corrupted and glorified, was a central object of this imaginative contemplation, giving sensory weight to the meditative routines: the pilgrimage toward death was complemented by rumination about mortality. The learned distinction between sarx, soma, and pneuma did not sur face in the steady sellers, and only occasionally did theological debates about the state of the translated body, which were central to divinity students and free-grace controversialists, appear , as when Samuel Smith worries about the resurrection of dead seafarers, whose bodies are eaten first by fishes, and then by humans who eat the sailor laden fish. But godly writers did spend time creatively displaying the body for ordinary readers. “You see the dead Corps in the Coffin laid in the Grave,” Thomas Doolittle writes punitively , “ . . . fixing your thoughts how they putrify and rot, how they consume and moulder away, and this pierceth your heart. . . . in this your sorrow is defective as you are a Christian.” Thomas Vincent’ s memento mori is rendered through the London fire and plague reportage of Gods Terrible Voice in the City, a title reprinted in Cambridge for its timeless measure, rather than its topical message. Vincent positions the reader to view the dead— “you have seen so many go down into the Pit before you”—and derives from it devotional lessons based on biblical maxim and divine signage: “it should inscribe the remembrance of Death more deeply upon your minds, the Record of which you should look daily into: the Gates of the City in the year of the Plague, seem’d to have this Inscription upon them, All Flesh is Grass; Let that word sound ever y day in your ears, and remember your bodies are exposed to the stroke of death everie day .” Sensational rhetoric about the body is presented through visions of hell, of course. In Wells of Salvation Opened, Vincent recreates the scene of Judgment Day and thus the need to “labour after the salvation of your Bodies . . . if you would not have those faces scorched, those eyes and tongues and hands rosted, and that flesh broiled and fear fully tormented in the flames of Hell fire, labour after your salvation.” 41 Steady sellers stress an alternative to the rotting body, however: escha-

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tological themes where spirit and flesh are unified in heaven create a redemptive object to contemplate. Again in his recriminatory vein, Doolittle advises that, because readers see “the dead Corps in the Coffin,” they “do not meditate as one that believes they shall live again, and be glorious Bodies.” More affirmatively, godly writers hold out promise of the afterlife’s restoration. In a more constructive tone, Doolittle adjusts learned categories for the devout’s physical resurrection, contrasting the “natural body” with the spiritual, glorious, and Christlike body of the redeemed, which will be “ perfect and beautiful,” like the book of Daniel’ s “glittering stars” and the testament of Matthew’ s “shining Sun,” spotless bodies, “Beauty . . . their Cloathing all over .” Communion with the divine deepens the affective experience: upon resurrection the bodies will be disposed with “no interruptions nor intermissions in [the] praising of God, in [the] Loving of him, and delighting in him,” while the redeemed’s corpse will “be made like to the Body of the glorious, exalted Jesus.” George Swinnock enthuses about both the image of God—“If the Picture or Image of God be so comely in its rough draught here below; Ah, how lovely a piece will it be in all its per fections, when Gods Novissima manus his last hand shall come upon it above! 1 John 3.2.”—and the visual and acoustic pleasures available to the saved in heaven. Edward Pearse’s treatise on dying, The Great Concern, takes as its doctrine the need to maintain communion with God as the devout prepare for death. With special emphasis on prayer and meditation, Pearse renders the means of grace, as the conduit for this communion, in the language of bodily intimacy. The means “are Galleries wherein Christ and his People do take sweet turns together: The green Beds wherein they lie down in the bosom of each others Love: Therefore keep up a constant and diligent attendance on God in these. And in all your attendances on him, look after converse with him, let it be your solemn aim to converse with him, and see his Face, to have a visit, a smile, a descent of Love from him.” Preparing for death involved both a positive and a punitive erotics about the body.42 Echoing the rhetoric of the elegies, the steady sellers suggest that the immediate context of death likewise involved a heightened sensor y experience of sight and sound for mourners and the dying. Doolittle presents ocular priorities, drawing on the association of tears, vision, and reading evident in the elegies: “Let such as are immoderately weeping for their dead, stop their Tears that they may read, compose their minds for a while at first, that they may consider what is said, and command their Sorrow to give place to Reason and Religion.” He similarly regulates the visual behavior of mourners, as they find succor in those who survive: “In kindly sorrow for our dead, our Eyes are more clear to our Mercies in our Affliction, and what God continueth to us, as well as what he taketh away from us.

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So when Children thus mourn for their dead Mother, they can see Mercy in a Living Father; or for a Father taken from them by death, can read (tho with T ears in their Eyes), God’ s sparing Mercy in continuing their Mother.” John Flavel in A Token for Mourners allows the grieving an image of their loved one’s revived physique: the “same body which was so pleasant a spectacle to thee, shall be restored again . . . at our next meeting they shall be so unspeakably more desirable, sweet and excellent.” Further, Flavel thickens the conduct book’ s discourse by recreating the voice of the deceased speaking to mourners. Bayly has the dying implore Christ “Oh sound that sweet voice in the eares of my soule” in emulation of the penitent thief from Luke. Doolittle names and voices the sensor y work expected of proper mourning, imagining how devotional vision constructs a spiritual presence and recreating how the reader’ s speech might sound: “if you had an Eye of Faith, which makes things to come as if they were present, you might say, Methinks I see their Bodies raised; methinks I see how beautiful, how powerful, how glorious they be; methinks I see them Shining as the Sun.”43

Gift Books and Grave Goods The devotional steady seller and the elegy shared an aesthetic ritual for mourning achieved through both content and form. The steady seller was also a material token that, like the elegy , circulated in funeral settings; its status as gift prop carried extraverbal meanings illustrative of early New England’ s book culture. With twenty-five English editions by 1729, two colonial reprints in 1705 and 1711, and regular appearances on the extant bookseller invoices for late seventeenth-centur y New England, Edward Pearse’ s The Great Concern is a typical devotional steady seller, with a particular focus in the main text on the art of dying. Its paratexts dramatize, however, the discourse of death in early New England, evoking the experiential crisis of readerly mortality, the lifelong ritual of preparatory humiliation, and the gift economy of Christ’s offering that might restore bodily transience. Pearse’ s letter “T o the Reader” draws on customar y authorial deprecation—“ I make no Apology for its plainness, nor am I at all solicitous touching the Censures I may fall under for publishing of it”—but then reminds us that this formulaic voice ser ves a specific circuit, whereby authorship gives way to both readership and divinity as the crucial poles of meaning: “ If thou wilt read it with an upright Heart, I question not but through a Blessing from above, it may do thy Soul good.” The preface likewise draws on the genre of dying words, the affective charge of deathbed language. “ God has kept me for a full half Year by the Graves side” writes Pearse, “one while lifting me up, then casting me down, and now he seems to be speedily finishing my days.” But, in a divine address,

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Pearse uses the formula to express the gift register that redefines mortal worry: “to whom, through the infinite riches of free Grace, I can with some comfort and boldness say, Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly, Amen.” Pearse concludes with a leave-taking that models the humbling rituals expected of the devout in daily and weekly inter vals: “ And now farewel vain World, farewel Friends and Relations, farewel Eating and Drinking; and, blessed be God, farewel Sin and Sinning; within a few days I shall sin no more, nor ever be in a possibility of sinning, but shall be like my Lord, and shall see him as he is. And lastly, farewel Reader.” Pearse’ s figurative departure is a climactic statement of the disciplines of removal subtending devotional life. Pious readers entered a sacred time zone, saying farewell to the temporality of the “vain World”; they entered a space of meditation and introspection, saying farewell to “Friends and Relations”; they abstained from “Eating and Drinking,” a farewell per formed through fasting disciplines. These sacred acts took readers away from “Sin and Sinning” and prepared for the greater farewell of death, a farewell that can be a reunion, where readers became “like [the] Lord, . . . see[ing] him as he is.” 44 In this sense, the preface itself is rhetorically purgative, permitting the emptied reader then to be filled by the main text. But the title page and advertisements in The Great Concern allude to social rituals of mourning; these paratexts locate readers in a worldly exchange of book artifacts. London and Boston editions feature on their title pages versions of the phrase “Recommended as proper to be given at / FUNERALS” (Boston, 1711). Further , the English editions present a three-page discourse by printers Robinson and A ylmer adverting to multiple titles that should be bestowed to mourners; the 1705 colonial reprint mimics this gesture with a one-page ad listing and describing “Death Made Easie and Happy” and “Meat out of the Eater” as titles “proper to be given as a T oken at FUNERALS” (Boston, 1705). These are sales tactics of course, but the language, especially of Robinson and A ylmer, reflects as well perceptions of the material economy of books in light of mourning rituals. Entitled “A Proposition for the more profitable Improvement of Burials, by giving of Books,” the advertisement bemoans the “great stupidity” of humans toward their mortality. Conduct at funerals especially illustrates this flaw . “ Those Opportunities are usually spent,” write the printers, “ in unprofitable Chat, in Mirth, in Eating and Drinking, and that sometimes to excess: and thus the House of Mourning is turned into the House of Mirth and Feasting.” Thus they propose that in the exchange of gifts at funerals, books should replace “Rings, Gloves, Biskets, Wine &c.” The shift from secular tokens to sacred texts is to occasion a reform of funeral behavior as well: “Reading and Meditation would be much more decent at such Solemnities, than Eating and Drink, and putting on of Ornaments.” The printers then list devotional titles on the art of dying well,

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targeting purchasers with different means through the use of high-, middle-, and low-end categories. 45 If its injunctions to reform match the steady-selling conduct literature’s rhetoric more generally, the ad’s culminating turn captures the intersection of Christian grace and thickened art that the devotional canon seeks: We may say of a Book given at Funerals, what the Divine Herbert says of a Verse, viz. A Book may find him, who a Sermon flies, And turn a Gift into a Sacrifice.

Disciplinary poems for daily consultation, George Herbert’ s “The Church Porch” is the source for the ad’ s variants. The context for Herbert’s couplet—“A verse may find him who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into a sacrifice”—is the opening of the stanza sequence, and it calls on poetr y’s pleasure as a means to turn young readers to Christ. Dropping the internal r hyme of “verse” and “sermon,” the consonance of “verse” and “flies,” the assonance of “-light” and “-fice,” the ad follows its own, musically impoverished aesthetic. The diction of “Book” speaks to the meanings of the thick style: unlike an oral sermon or fragmented lyric, a codex is located in the dispersed circulation of durable books, “find[ing]” and anchoring a reader; and it finds its power for the audience not in evanescent preaching or poetic delight, but rather in the volume’s preser ved and sequenced leaves, which can be read serendipitously—it “may find him”—or continuously . The diction of “a Gift” shelves the compressed reversal of “delight”-“sacrifice” in favor of a continuum, a shared sense of offering. The parallel indefinite articles undergird this sense, but “a gift” and “a sacrifice” are also distinct. Christian grace trumps the worldly gift of the book, and the book’ s recipient is obligated to give in return. Indeed, while “sacrifice” implies the devout’s obeisant surrender to God, it aspires to a gifting equal to the crucifixion, reminding pious readers of puritan worship’ s impossible economy. As distinct from a steady seller present, the contrast between “gift” and “sacrifice” names the particular tension felt by recipients of a broadside or manuscript elegy distributed at the funeral. While not experienced as a heart-rending double bind, the elegy artifact invoked the behavioral mores of volition and obligation animating gift economies. Should the elegy be retained as a memorial keepsake or should it be offered to the next world as a ritual sacrifice? The status of grave good and the occasion of death shift a bit the logic of the gift: grave goods literalize the devotional gift circuit, providing worshippers with a material form of reciprocity, and the event of dying makes the elegy gift, in its col-

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lapsing of person and thing, partake of both the donor and—more intensely—the deceased. If the grave good, as a literal countergift, allows the worshipper a way into piety’ s economy, the elegiac keepsake maintains a worldly circulation of both the artifact and its content. Both kinds of disposition serve modes of preparatory humiliation. To keep the text is to incite reciprocation in this world by circulating it among other readers and by emulating the virtues—in excess of the recipient’s lack— modeled in the poem. To offer the text as countergift is to sacrifice the emulative relationship, bur ying it as a grave good that effectively humbles the mourner, distancing the recipient from the deceased ideal and recalling the survivor’s abjection in this world. The vertical axis of pious New England’s gift economy is especially dramatized in the grave-good ritual, the object of which descends below ground in appeasement to a deity hierarchically above a worldly surface populated by mortal sinners, an axis of transformative ascent followed by Christ and ideally by the deceased. The hierarchical logic of these mainly unconscious mortuar y practices is clarified through contrast to early modern American Indian burial grounds: the horizontal vectors of under world appeasement, the coastal direction of goods placement, the excessive gifts seeking to obligate deities—all point to nonvertical axes of address. But this cross-cultural contrast also reveals the steps taken to preserve, archive, or violate expressive traditions. In their contemporary moment, devotional steady sellers did not have the status of grave good and were operative in the fallen world of potential redemption. This worldly existence allowed steady sellers to survive, an existence due in part to the relative durability of the book format. Their bearing on literary history has been obscured by their nontopical, enduring rhythms: religious content that is no less historical than topical content, of course. Now , hidden in plain sight, the devotional steady seller is available to us due to the curatorial work of collectors and librarians, though such scholars have not, in the main, been motivated by concerns for literary merit. In their contemporary moment, New England elegies were both worldly good and otherworldly offering, operative in secular and sacred zones. Their fugitive existence—buried in graves and scattered across the archive—is due in part to the ephemerality of the single-sheet or single-leaf format. While fragile in this world, the elegy , as grave good, was preser ved for the next world; paradoxically, burial protected copies from the stigma of secular existence. Elegies of this world were social goods that were transmuted into memorial objects, benefiting from their association with, as Michael Warner argues, inheritability’ s sacredness. 46 The elegies’ bearing on literar y histor y has been magnified by scholars—from Morton and Mather to historical bibliographers to twentieth-centur y critics—interested in the topicality of a community member or loved one’ s death,

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a topicality that ser ves descriptions of a literar y culture organized around author, region, or nation. Now , they seem self-evidently to constitute a recognizable literar y tradition: appreciated, anthologized, taught. In their contemporary moment, Native American material cultures— wampum, bows, furs—were objects of utility and reverence for the Ninnimissinuok; they were objects of fascination and trade for the English; such objects were entangled with European items; this mixture of objects also served spiritual purposes in mortuar y practices; and such burial sites have been subject to W estern inspection. Life and ways of life among Amerindian populations in southern New England were destroyed, though the survival of goods and peoples, in the face of disease, warfare, and relocation, speaks to the strength of indigenous peoples. But ways of death have been disrespected as well. The politics of exhumation deser ve comment here, for while current archaeological study valuably recovers and maintains Native American traditions, the histor y of violated grave sites has not always been this considerate. Further , the exhumation is one-way: we do not dig for English grave goods in the hallowed cemeteries of white New England. 47 Given their varied embodiments, mortuary status, and contingent survival, such texts might best be conceptualized as “artifacts,” a term that bears on book studies while maintaining a critique of one-way anthropological knowledge. Book historians have cast texts as artifacts in order to defamiliarize categories such as “source,” “document,” or “literature.” 48 “Artifact” suggests a text that is intended, crafted, and used, thus articulating the key nodes of authorship, production, and readership taken up by book histor y’s “communications circuit.” Further , the term’ s purchase is to connote a rich historicism derived from textual format. The word recalls a text’ s moment of discover y, rather than its stable setting in a collection. As such, artifacts are witnesses from the past. They exist contextually or synchronically in their past moment; and they exist durationally or diachronically , over time. Their endurance means, of course, that they are with us in the present, but through processes of preservation that are by no means guaranteed and thus themselves become objects of study. According to the OED, “artefact” entered the English language in 1821 through Coleridge, in published correspondence appearing at the cusp of widespread industrial printing, and in language that values the practice of inscriptive technology, as well as the desire of Romantic archaeology: he used the term to name an object that embodied “the Ideal of an Ink-stand.” The word itself is a witness to materialist histories of language. In this sense, “artifact” might also ser ve as book history’s methodological address to certain blind spots of both poststructuralist theory and traditional textual scholarship. “Artifact” names a ma-

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terialist study that, as Roger Chartier has pointed out, Derridean criticism gestures to while always already falling back on r hetorical abstraction (“arche-writing”; “difference”) and that bibliographical criticism works relentlessly with, only to ser ve an immaterial vision of the ideal copy-text. Moreover, “artifact”’s archaeological valences broach the cross-cultural contestation noted through the politics of exhumation. To this end, the OED defines its technical usage: it is “applied to the rude products of aboriginal workmanship as distinguished from natural remains.” Calling texts “artifacts” might then also ser ve to defamiliarize the historical or ethnic othering implicit in the primitivist language of “rude” and “aboriginal.” The term “artifact” recognizes that, say, the literary grave goods of “civilized” devotional settlers conform to the archaeological usage imputed to “primitive” societies. Finally, the term helps measure the sheer contingency of textual sur vival, the continuum from destruction to ephemerality to preser vation that affected both archives and populations in southern New England. Book histor y unstiffens “artifact”’ s Romantic and technical usages, turning attention to the role human agents play in situations of contestation and cooperation over such archaeological remains.

Elegiac Artifacts The virtues of “artifact” as a descriptive and critical term for book-studies investigation are clarified through a return to select elegiac works. Applying the general category of “artifact” to a subset of textual formats will help illuminate the continuum of preservation and destruction that affects archival holdings. Further, the durability, portability, and navigability of the book format can be arrived at indirectly by discussing the elegiac verse, as it is featured across a variety of writing sur faces. In the following cases, gravestone, broadside, broadside fragment, and personal miscellany are formats featuring elegiac verse; their degrees of permanence and ephemerality indicate ways that lyric expression has or has not been preserved. As such, the examples can illustrate ways knowledge about New England mourning has or has not been preser ved. The cross-cultural uses of mourning can also be apprehended through study of select elegies. Because of archaeological politics, the entanglement of the Reformed tradition’s funereal practices with the material culture of Amerindian life is less measurable than its opposite.49 But the psychic intimacy of devotional consciousness and New W orld Other can be gauged. The elegies help reveal the proximity of English and Indian in the pious mind and point to culturally specific uses of mourning in the puritan settlements.

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Indeed, if the steady sellers and elegies foreground the role of sensory affect in puritan culture, certain poems explain the displacement of this bodily discourse on to Native Americans. An example of gravestone verse indicates both differentiated and shared forms of thick communication across cultures; it suggests how the public display of English signage connotes both attitudes to landscape and modes of protective archiving. In John Wilson’s elegy on Joseph Brisco, mourning practices build from the affirmative meditations on the afterlife offered in the steady sellers, while crippling the audience with punitive reminders of their sorrowful pilgrimage. But this latter categor y—the melancholic nomad—is one through which the English perceived Amerindians. In Joshua Moodey’ s elegy on John Reiner, the extremes of devotional abjection are mediated through merciful portraits of divinized humanity and hostile representations of Native Americans. Prompted by war fare, the bodily discourse derives from a deeper structure of devotional anxiety that in part propels and justifies cross-cultural violence. In light of the Moodey poem, mourning is seen not inherently as a therapeutic response to the grief taboo, but rather as the motive force for retributive violence. Interestingly, such knowledge only emerges for us through a sensitivity to the artifactual histor y of this poem; its material existences—in broadside, fragment, manuscript transcription, and scholarly recover y—dramatize the contingencies of preser vation, ephemerality, and destruction that define archival boundaries. Were an unassimilated Podunk tribe member to encounter in 1680 the Windsor, Connecticut gravestone of BW recovered for cultural historians by David Watters, we can imagine a response across many registers: laughter at the static deposit of a stone marker; anger at the property claim implied in the stone’s placement; and perhaps mourning for natural space, which has been so reconfigured as to bespeak ownership and exclude the Ninnimissinuok. “Potaunck,” “Potunk,” or “Podunk” names the small tribe inhabiting the Windsor area before Connecticut’ s first English town was settled; estimated at three hundred to four hundred, the Podunk population was decimated by the end of Metacom or King Philip’s W ar.50 Like other Ninnimissinuok, their seventeenth-centur y subsistence habitus meant many migratory shifts of location with little accumulation of goods. What artifacts they possessed had to be light to accommodate the seasonal moves. Although the aboveground burial marker was in use among the Ninnimissinuok, it, like the animal skin coverings of housing structures, was ultimately impermanent. However opaque the tombstone is for the hypothetical Podunk, there is an environmental message communicated in the sheer placement of the marker. Conceivably, for the Podunk, the gravestone is like Stevens’s jar: it took dominion everywhere. Extending this thought experiment to in-

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clude comprehension of the gravestone’ s verse, the Amerindian might find the language both kin and alien to his or her mental world: BW DIED SEP 12 1680 WHAT ONCE WAS WRIT BY ONE UPON THIS STONE HE HEARS IS NOW WASHT OUT AND LOST AND GONE TWAS WRIT HOPING IN TIME HE MIGHT IT FIND NOT ON THIS STONE BUT ON THE REDERS MIND 51 The presence of visual signs in public spaces would be familiar , a practice seen in seventeenth-centur y pictograms and in the petroglyphs of Dighton Rock or Ekonk Hill.52 The Podunk would register the subtle endorsement of aural knowledge, whereby the car ver “hears” his visual message has been lost, a message which has in fact been preserved in the spirit world by both listening car ver and reader . For Amerindians and white Europeans, orality maintained tradition, rendered permanent otherwise transient information. The anxiety about language’ s visual permanence would be less felt, an anxiety that begins to reveal English modes of valuing communication. For while orality is acknowledged for its preser vative power , the car ver cannot but admit to the potential ephemerality of inscription: “W ASHT OUT ,” “LOST AND GONE,” words are written with hope, not certainty . This worr y underscores that there is no ontology to textual formats; instead, human agents manipulate media to archive relevant knowledges and to sustain a spectrum of human feeling in the past, its moments of mirth and mourning, reverence and rancor. For the English, such worr y is recuperated by the Protestant reading mode of sacred internalization, wherein the Word’s worldly mediation is devalued, its message instead impressed “ON THE REDERS MIND.” Yet for the English reader , the anxiety about writing and the aural subtext reveal devotional investment in the externalization of the W ord, for the verse’s self-consciousness about media suggests that the phenomenological interaction of the reader with the text is the verse’s subject. Notice that it is remarkably empty of biographical information and homiletic content: epitaphic conventions of “dye you must,” even simple identification of the deceased, give way to a meditation on the time zones of writing, hearing, and reading. Although voice and speech persevere in the sermonic and folk culture of white New England, they do so, for this

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text, in an imagined afterlife, where the car ver hears of his lost work. This temporal leap to the sacred—this “HOPING / IN TIME”—complements a communication that is intensely local and dyadic: the car ver hearing, the reader incorporating. Against the verse’ s sense, the stone endures as well, in a worldly time zone preserved by individuals who regulate the cemetery space and by technologies of inscription that sur vive as physical artifacts, confirmed by the stone’s continued presence on the Windsor landscape as a message for posterity . The textual record organizes time and space, a phenomenological reach that both conser ves and extends the Christian promise. While the implicit English reader posited here is consistent with the thick style of the steady sellers, my hypothetical Podunk reader gestures to a range of affect not granted Amerindians in the contemporar y discourse of colonization. Pictured flatly—demonized as heathen, or romanticized as Hebraic, or sentimentalized as vanishing—Amerindians were also cast as mourners, as melancholic figures maladjusted to loss, and as illiterate bodies, unreasoning figures unrelated to civilization. If white English selfhood is defined generally against and through these representational strategies of savager y and sentiment, white English devotional selfhood turns on the image of the melancholic nomad, an identity the abject immigrant lives and disavows. For mobility and mourning of course characterize pious settlers, distant from the heritage of England’s rural home or London’s metropole and grief-stricken by the fall from Edenic plenitude. Whereas specific debates over preparationism and antinomianism have propelled scholarship on the first generation and its legacy, discussion of popular piety has featured a more general tension pertinent to descriptions of the melancholic nomad. On the one hand, Patricia Caldwell and Andrew Delbanco have stressed the dislocation and despair associated with pious immigrants; on the other, Charles Hambrick-Stowe and Charles Cohen have found in the practice of piety disciplines of love, labor, and assurance that hearten the devout reader . If melancholy and movement subtend the immigrant experience, hope and stability animate the anchored worshipper . Rather than resolving this debate, studies of devotional experience might acknowledge both frameworks as formative: reading practice was structured by exile and settlement, loss and hope. In the language of this study , the pilgrim might move toward grace, assurance, and restoration but has moved away from inherited tradition; the bee finds promise and succor above the flower and remains stuck in the hovering stasis of the fall. 53 The relational nature of devotional identity meant that the range of meaning in the figure of the melancholic nomad structured, in part, English perceptions of the Amerindian. The perceptions ser ve ideologically, as this vision projects the devout English immigrant’ s anxieties

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Figure 16. A broadside elegy: John Wilson, “A Copy of Verses . . . on the sudden Death of Mr. Joseph Brisco, Who was translated from Earth to Heaven / Jan. 1. 1657” (Cambridge, Mass., [1658?]).

about loss and exile, provinicialism and podunkism, on to a convenient Other. I will turn to the function of these reductive images in the fundraising literature of missions in the next chapter , but its bearing on the Windsor tombstone glimpses this role. Comparatively read through the lens of devotional ideology, the stonecarver’s Christian hope is the emotional converse of Amerindian despair . The gravestone is the civilizational antinomy to nomadic illiteracy, a sacred marker that memorializes in this world what was lost to the next. Hope and the gravestone represent the devout’ s self-perception, as an answer to their immigrant

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fragility and as a distinction from transient and lost populations subject to colonization. Especially fraught around rituals of death—where the pious reach, paradoxically, the heights of preparator y humiliation—devotional identity for English settlers is captured in the earliest extant broadside elegy from the Cambridge Press: the emotional resources of hope and the physical resources of writing palliate the despairing nomadism of mourners. In John Wilson’s “A Copy of Verses . . . on the sudden Death of Mr . Joseph Brisco, Who was translated from Earth to Heaven/Jan. 1. 1657,” representations of the glorified saint, reminders of deprivation in the fallen world, and thick conventions of epitaph, anagram, broadside, and figuration combine to portray piety’ s abject subject (Figure 16). 54 In the first-person voice of Brisco—a drowned man of ordinar y status—the elegy dramatizes the ascent of his soul; and its instructional purpose is to preach the salvational role of Christ the mediator . But a four-line epigraph heralds the broadside poem, and functions on a continuum with gravestone verse, a self-contained, commemorative record that also begins the work of mourning: Not by a Fiery Chariot as Elisha was, But by the Water, which was the outward cause: And now at Rest with Christ his Saviour dear, Though he hath left his dear Relations here. (ll. 1–4) The epigraph-as-epitaph calls on imager y typical of devotional elegies; Elijah’s ascent to heaven by chariot is a topos of the period to figure the soul’s resurrection. Elijah’ s fier y pilgrimage is contrasted with Brisco’ s watery descent, creating a vertical axis aligned with the hierarchical imagination of death prompted generally by preparator y humiliation and specifically by the grave-good ritual. Further, Brisco’s death at sea is a fate that renders the body unretrievable, a loss that brings special force to these textual remains and their contents. The third line answers to the body’s absence, locating Brisco with Christ, while the couplet returns us to the middle ground of the vertical axis, the fallen world, with the “dear/here” rhyme accentuating the difference between Brisco’ s heavenly rest and the situation of his sur vivors on earth. The figurative permanence of the epitaph and the successful restoration of Brisco construct the registers of hope and durability sought by humble mourners. The elegy proper is generated by an anagram, which builds thematically and typologically from its wordplay. Two of its terms suggest the oscillating moods of faith and anguish, and the third names a biblical protagonist embodying these moods:

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Joseph Briscoe Job cries hopes The anagram refuses simple syntactic sense, enabling the writer to improvise on “cries” and “hopes,” as actions and substantive nouns which the speaker Brisco (now also rendered as Job) experiences. There is no Job but cries to God and hopes, And God his Ear in Christ; to cries he opes, Out of the deeps to him I cr y’d and hop’d, And unto me his gracious ear is op’d: (ll. 7–10) The aural meanings of the terms are immediately given thematic purchase in the listening per formed by God, through the bodily “Ear in Christ” (an ear that is indeed “gracious” by line 10). Mediating between the divine and the human, Christ is also interposed between the Hebrew Bible and contemporary history; his presence resolves the parallel typological conditions of Job and Joseph Brisco. Rhetorically, the sound patterns and sequential order of the language match what has taken place thematically: fallen man’s acceptance of grace through Christ is communicated through the thick style. Acoustically , the repetition of the anagram’s terms and the use of “hope” as a r hyme word exemplify this treatment of the spoken word. The assonance of J oseph/Brisco/Job/ hopes/opes further accents the chantlike quality of the broadside’ s oratory. Paronomasia, the r hetorical term Cotton called “the repetition of like sounds, yet somewhat differing” is also deployed: “cries to” modulates into “Christ,” which is extended by the subsequent words “to cries.”55 Sound and sense conjoin: the acoustic intensities of the spoken word amplify the incarnational message of the verse, that God in human form has intervened to save the willing mortal. This sensory language of hope is further recorded in the anagram, which calls attention to visible letterforms rather than immaterial referents. The transformation of the actions themselves—from needy crying and plaintive hoping to achieved communication (the Lord’s “ear . . . op’d”), from an eternal uncertainty (“Job . . . hopes,” “he opes”) to the conclusiveness of the past tense (“I cry’d and hop’d,” “his . . . ear is op’d”)—makes Christ’s mediation a fulfilled promise, a hoping-in-time that offers closure to the devout. The enduring hope that is sealed through the play of the anagram is undermined by the procedure of the poem afterward, which widens the gap between speaker and reader . Addressing the audience in the second-person, Brisco speaks impatiently and commandingly; readers are chided by this authoritative voice. At the same time, Brisco’ s heavenly ascent is delivered in sensor y terms: looked upon by God’ s “gra-

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cious eye” (l. 16), the departed speaker rests in the Lord’ s “Bosom” (l. 20), taking comfort and pleasure in eternity: He that from nature drew me unto Grace, And lookd upon me with a Fathers face: When in my blood upheld me to the last, And now I do of joyes eternal tast. (ll. 26–29) The visual quality of Christ’ s physical form appearing before the resurrected is here underscored by the “Grace/face” r hyme. And the “blood” trope names the fragile mortality of fallen life—mortals are “upheld” in it by God—while subtly referencing a communion ritual (Luke 22.20, 1 Cor. 11.25) transformed into a tasted joy in the afterlife. The bliss of salvation conveyed in these lines seesaws with rhetoric and imagery that figures the pain and anguish of worldly mortals. The audience is positioned as doubtful and censorious, bewailing their loss and its inexplicable suddenness (“Doubt not of this ye that my death bewail, / What if it did so strangely me assail” [ll. 11–12]) or presumptively judging divine will, like “Job his Friends” (ll. 21–22). The poem concludes with references to biblical deaths and the suffering that surrounds these figures. Alluding to the abrupt loss of life (Job’ s children dead in a windstorm; Josiah killed in battle; Ezekiel’s wife struck down) and the painful project of mourning (Job’ s trials are compounded by Ezekiel’ s, who was forbidden to lament the death, by the Lord’ s hand, of his wife [Ezek. 24.15–18]), the speaker emphasizes the uncertainty of the worldly audience. Not sobbing alternates with emotional release, in language that punishes and glorifies. The poem’ s homiletic coda—“No matter how or where the Lord doth bring / Us to our end, in Christ who live and die / And sure to live with Christ eternally”—emerges from a classic version of the paradox of piety: the elegy humbles worldly mourners while giving them sensory images and thick aesthesis to hearten them along their pilgrimage. The Wilson poem exposes, however , the rift in devotional consciousness, the degree to which the sad pilgrim—unmoored to hope—might devolve into the melancholic nomad: a fleshy body of corrupted blood, ill literate (if not illiterate), wandering in despair , unreasoning to the point of heathenism, savage in its affect. If Christ’ s merciful hope and durable eternity supplies a lighter answer , figures of the Amerindian could purge this darker potentiality from the pious mind’s experience of the fall. This latent structure of feeling emerges in Joshua Moodey’s 1676 “Lamentations Upon the Never Enough Bewailed Death of the Reverend Mr. John Reiner . . . ,” an elegy on a minister who died in the field during King Philip’s War. The elegy is extant as a published broadside from 1676, most likely set and printed at the press in Boston. 56 This version is

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Figure 17. Joshua Moodey, “LAMENTATIONS Upon the never enough bewailed Death of the Reverend Mr. John Reiner” ([Boston?]: [John Foster?], 1677). The surviving broadside copy is missing sections at the base of the two columns.

now a fragment, however; a poem of at least 110 lines formatted in 2 columns, the extant broadside is missing its bottom third, and thus lacks in each column at least 12 to 14 lines of verbal text (Figure 17). But other forms of the elegy survive. Samuel Sewall kept a miscellany where he tran-

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scribed late seventeenth-centur y elegies, and Moodey’ s on Reiner is featured in his text. Sewall’s copy retains the sections of the poem lost from the broadside columns, a fact Harold Jantz detected and which enabled Jantz to edit and restore the missing verbal text for his 1943 bibliography of early New England verse. The propagandistic traits of a war fare text may seem to stack the deck in arguing for devotional psychology’ s proximity to the imaginar y Indian. But to write off the poem as propaganda evades the central questions. Why this form of propaganda? Why this degree of violence? How does mourning enable such violence? The submerged mental world of nomadic melancholy in the pious subject surfaces in the Moodey poem, expressed through discourses of the body and expiated through retributive violence. Feeling itself the sting of death, the bee wants honey, and the bee wants blood. The missing verbal text is a clue to understanding both the contingencies of archival knowledge and the function of bodily affect in puritan culture. On the former point, recall that critical consensus has held that the genre reprimands readers about worldly lack. Elegies stifle emotional release due to the grief taboo; or they follow the portraiture and exhortation pattern of funeral sermons and religious biography , whereby the poem represents the idealized virtues of the deceased saint and then admonishes the audience to imitate the dead; or the poems ser ve to indict a collective self, as readers—because of the absence of both the poem’ s idealized subject (now dead) and material text (now buried)—turn inward, toward introspective punishment. 57 This critical consensus deduces an interiority and anxiety that is certainly consistent in part with devotional aesthetics. 58 Wilson’s elegy on Brisco ver y much illustrates these modes of abjection. And when studying the extant broadside fragment of Moodey’s poem from 1676/77, we indeed see mirrored this conventional interpretation of the New England elegy. Yet the missing verbal text, when restored to the broadside poem (as it is in Sewall’s transcription and Jantz’s edition) qualifies this interpretation and bears on the role of the corporeal in pious modes of feeling. A comparative study of the textual versions—the broadside fragment and the complete edition with the once-missing supplements—establishes the themes of embodiment central to the elegiac mode; motifs of sensory feeling, Christ’ s humanity, and Amerindian threat come to the foreground, revealing the importance of the body to mourning in the period and reflecting the complex ways in which death was encountered by early New Englanders. A restored version of the broadside fragment allows us this picture, rendering present these other wise absent corporeal markers. The first supplement invokes Christ’ s mercy; the second supplement imagines a heathenish, Amerindian readership. The supplements consequently describe the antithetical bodies of Christ and the colonial Other , helping us explore the politics of mourning in the contact zone. 59

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An uncanny entr y into the work—and into the issues of textual transience and permanence that it raises—is provided at the broadside’s first textual “defect.” The extant broadside’s first column breaks off by referring to Reiner’s pulpit skills in words that allude, with unintended irony, to scripture while also commenting on the ephemerality of discourse from the past: In’s latest Text too true a Prophet found, (Not one of Samuels Words fell to the ground) 1 Samuel 3.19 (“As Samuel grew up, the LORD was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground”) alludes to the young Israelite’s realization and acceptance of his role as prophet, and the youthful Reiner’s virtues as sermonizing prophet are hence being praised. (Reiner’s “latest Text” might be a recently per formed sermon series, oratory now lost to us.) The sacred language of Samuel is figured through a civilizational value, whereby prophetic words uphold a culture. But spiritual ideals and material facts are oddly wed here, as the rest of the words to the Moodey broadside text have fallen, like many of the elegies buried with coffins, “to the ground.” Up until this point, the poem has been unremittingly bleak, ser ving to admonish readers with the conventional language of divine judgment. Moodey plays on the sensational response of the speaker’ s body to the news (“when that doleful word REINER is dead, / I heard, Lips quiver’d, Belly trembled, / My Spirits fail’d, Corruption seiz’d my Bones, / My Face grew pale, my heart cold as Stones” [ll. 9–12]); the poet describes the providential damage of recent fires and storms that have befallen sur viving readers (ll. 19–20; l. 25); he fears that a “Famine . . . [of the] Bread of Life’s our threatned Lot” (ll. 27–28), ultimately intoning “Sure God a way for further Anger makes / When such a Man out the way he takes” (ll. 41–42). Jantz’s recover y of the Sewall transcription for the editor’ s 1943 bibliography completes the first column. The new material initially carries forward the discourse of ominous declension that informs the extant verse of the first column, didactically addressing the reader: In’s latest Text too true a Prophet found, (Not one of Samuels Words fell to the ground) . . . . . . renew’d against us are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elisha dies, what then? why you will hear That Moabs Bands invade the land next year, God could prevent if any one would be A making up the Hedge, but ah we see

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Hedge-breakers and Gap-makers do abound, Hedge-makers and Gap-menders rarely found. 60 The restored section at first highlights Reiner’s loss, and punitively holds colonists responsible for God’s “Anger.” Reiner’s death is represented as a gap in the tribal community , a break in the hedge that could be mended were wayward settlers to follow Christian duty. Moreover, the vehicle of Moodey’ s jeremiad figure—“Hedge-breakers and Gap-makers” (Ezek. 13.5)—carries the overt sense of civilized life’ s ruination. The restored lines from this first missing section that then follow invoke the divine mediation of Christ, a means to close the gap offered to fallen readers: When God his worthy Father from us took We for a night of Darkness thick did look; But that Sunsets and yet no night ensues: His Son a second Sun brought better news. 61 This is the first mention of mercy in the poem, and the only mention of Christ, a glimpse of comfort for the Christian believer in this context of rhetorical admonition. Significant as well is the imaginative activity that death prompted for mourners; as the steady sellers tell us, meditation on reuniting with Christ in the afterlife was one mental exercise during mourning, death being anticipated with pleasure as well as fear . For instance, Anne Bradstreet’s “As Weary Pilgrim” creates just this type of imaginative space. In suturing the text back together, Jantz restores for current readers a more merciful view of the culture of grief in early New England. The redemptive tenor of the first restored section enables readers to move to the second column—a conventional portrait of Reiner’s Christlike virtues: A precious Soul he was, not old but sage, Grave, wise and prudent far above his age, Chearful but serious, merry too but wise (Sour Leven pleases not for Sacrifice) (ll. 59–62) His “Courtesie” (l. 63) and “Innocence” (l. 64) are lauded, as this “blameless” (l. 73) “faithful friend” (l. 77) is held up as an exemplum for twenty-one lines. The instructional role of the portrait is affirmed at the end of these lines, when Moodey writes, “Study what should or we would wish to be, / And say ’ twas here, fear no Hyperbole” (ll. 79–80). While the broadside reverses the sequence of portraiture and admonition that Robert Henson argues the elegy shares with sermon and biography , it

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holds to the more general critical consensus about readerly lack, given the virtues of the deceased saint and the worldliness of the survivor. The broadside fragment’s second column thus explains one function of the New England elegy: to exhort readers to imitate the traits of the now absent subject. A larger political context of social crisis hovers over the poem, one alluded to through the threat of “Moabs Bands” and more pressingly disclosed by the situation of Reiner’s death and the editorial completion of the poem: the reverend was a chaplain in the field during King Philip’ s War, and he died from “cold and fever” after an expedition to the Indians in 1676. When turning to the second column’ s restored section, we see that Christian ideology is put to more suspect uses than what the portrait of Reiner conveys, as the poem martially concludes: But Lord while we thus weep our Foes grow [bold.] We sigh, they sing, we mourn, Blaspheme . . . . . . of Vengeance and the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Pagans know this Blood shall charged be To your Account, and you ere long Shall see Saints Blood is dear when dregs of wrathful cup Shall be your share to wring out and drink up. Gods heart was toward him who willingly Oferd himselfe to greatest jeopardy ’Gainst you the Lord to help, he hath his Meed, His ready will’s accepted for the deed. When his blest head a Martyrs Crown shall wear You guilt of shedding Blood shall bear 62 There is precedent in the poem for this vehemence: the first line establishes similar tribal boundaries (“When Heathen first assail’d our peaceful Land” [l. 1]), while the allusion to 1 Samuel 3.19 also draws a biblical parallel for 1670s colonial war fare: the beginning of Samuel’ s prophetic activity is situated at the start of the Israelites war with the Philistines (1 Sam. 4.1–22). But the intensity of the imagined conflict is unprecedented in the elegiac verse. Etymologically, “pagan” ser ves Moodey well. Deriving from the Roman empire’ s Christianization, its sources are in the militant church’s Other—the unenlisted—and in the city and town’ s Other—the rustic. Neither part of an organized militar y nor an organized civility , Amerindians are “Moabs Bands,” nomads roaming and invading the land. The appositive contrast of “W e sigh, they sing, we mourn, Blaspheme [they?]” is both stark and intimate, suggesting a transference between the melancholic passivity characterizing Christian settlers and the rancorous

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aggressivity imputed to Native American behavior . Such a transfer will occur through the militant Christianity of white revenge. Similarly intimate, the public r hetoric of addressing “Black Pagans” as the elegiac audience implicates English-speaking readers in a complex fashion. At one level, the address unites the speaker and the English colonial readers against those “Black Pagans,” who become a “you” to the implicit “we” of this imagined white collective. Yet the “you” of the rhetoric also allows the English-speaking readers to occupy the role of the threatening Other , imagining themselves with the degree of fur y imputed to Native Americans and thus encouraging retaliator y violence through this fantasy. In its most potent figuration, the poem evokes the gift economy of Christian offering through sacramental imagery. Moodey uses the trope of sacrifice to swear vengeance on the native tribes, describing the “Blood” of Reiner spilled by the natives and then reinvesting this image with its meanings around communion. To this end, prior to these final lines, the loss of Reiner is suggested to threaten a “Famine . . . [of the] Bread of Life”; and his good cheer is appropriate because “Sour Leven pleases not for Sacrifice.” Divine withholding and saintly offering leave mortals out of this gift register, but a compensatory entry point is revenge’s dispensation: “dregs of wrathful cup [that] / Shall be your share.” Like the continuum of passive melancholy and aggressive movement noted through Indianwhite actions and address, the figure conflates the incorporative activity of pious settler and invading barbarian at the Lord’ s Supper. Moodey develops the sacramental imager y for Christian readers, with Reiner the imitatio. Reiner “willingly / Oferd himselfe to greatest jeopardy” and is to be blest with a “Martyrs Crown”; for Reiner—and by extension the good Christian reader who identifies with his conventional sacrifice—the blood becomes the less grisly “Meed,” the sustenance of Christ’s sacrifice that enables a righteous innocence in the face of pagan “guilt.” Because communion was the holiest of rituals in the life of piety, the startling conflation of English and Native American routes the propaganda through devotional identity. In the Reiner elegy, the occasion of death and its modes of corporeal feeling offer temporary consolation to fallen readers—at a dramatic cost to Native American sur vival, which is threatened by the forms of Christian mercy mobilized for the poem’ s ideal readers. To comprehend the poem as a meditation on artifacts, as an evocation of the gift economy , and as an emblem of the intercultural politics of mourning is, if we note Samuel Sewall’ s reading, no presentist imposition. Sewall’s transcription of the poem in his personal miscellany of elegies corroborates, or , better put, generates such an interpretation (Figures 18–20). 63 Sewall designs the poem. He omits over one-half of the work, retaining only 53 of the 114 lines. As with the book’ s other transcribed elegies, he decorates the text with funereal ink, by way of a

Figure 18

Figure 19

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Figure 20 Figures 18–20. Samuel Sewall’ s personal miscellany, featuring the transcription of Moodey’ s elegy on Reiner . Collection of The New-Y ork Historical Society (78790d in fig. 18, 78791d in fig. 19, and 78792d in fig. 20).

dark band measuring 3 inches by 1/2 inch, laid horizontally and centered above the poem. On a pastedown endpaper , Sewall indexes the vellum-bound miscellany, including the elegies’ titles and page numbers to permit discontinuous access. By intending it, crafting it, using it, he renders the poem an artifact in the term’ s root sense. Sewall offers the poem as a present. He reports in his diar y that on Januar y 30, 1677, he sent “a copy of verses made on Mr. Reynor” to the minister’s in-laws, who were also the cousins of Hannah Hull, Sewall’ s first wife. It exemplifies the this-world reciprocation prompted by the elegiac keepsake, rather than the otherworldly offering of the elegiac grave good. Because it is a copy, it is a gift of labor, rather than of property; but the intimate service endows the copy with the collapse of person and thing typical of gifts. To be sure, the incitement to donate to the relatives might itself reflect Sewall’s desire for services to be rendered: enclosed with the poem is gold coin and a purchase request of items such as “2 pair of Silk Stockings” and a “Turkish Alcoran, 2nd Hand.” 64 But the economy clearly signals

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that, in early New England, literature means through these artifactual properties, through its extraverbal status as memorial keepsake and exchanged object. But what of the judge’ s version of the verbal text? Sewall edits the poem. Given that less than half of Moodey’s work appears in the miscellany—53 of 114 lines—it is striking that Sewall includes the two passages lost from the broadside copy . The column bottoms on Christ’ s mercy and “Black Pagans”—about one-sixth of the original work—make up over one-third of Sewall’ s version: what I have called restored supplements become much of the main text in his transcription (20 of 53 lines). It may be that layout directs Sewall’s choice. He retains the top 15 lines and the bottom 10 lines of column one, and the top 14 lines and the bottom 10 lines of column two (49 of 53 lines). Because of literacy conventions in the W est, these are weighted points in the eye’ s ascending and descending movement about a page. The gravity of the eye would give special emphasis to the base of the broadside. But surely it is content that directs Sewall’s choice as well. His interest in passages highlighting the divine incarnate and the demonic incarnate makes palpable the bodily experience of mourning and death rendered throughout the elegies and steady sellers. The broadside fragment and its restored supplements dramatize what G. Thomas T anselle succinctly calls the “question of historicism”—the challenge of negotiating documentar y texts with critical emendations, of juggling past facts with present concerns—and what Walter Benjamin cast more polemically , in the language with which I began this study: “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” 65 These thinkers express sentiments that share a sensitivity to the contingencies of value shaping how and what an archive is. The Reiner elegy itself warns us away from reading Benjamin’s slogan too reductively, as a zero-sum indictment of archival collecting. Rather , the transmission histor y of the elegy on Reiner demonstrates that the archive can actively display its means of repression. If histor y is written by the winners, this history often enacts the archival barbarism its documents of civilization would seek to repress. Indeed, evidence of a seventeenth-century reader reading—that is, Sewall’ s transcription— plainly shows the broader patterns of bodily investment and melancholic nomadism recurrent in early New England’ s discourse on death and mourning. If certain traditions within puritan studies have sought to neglect this intercultural intimacy, Sewall did not. In any event, attention to the transmission histor y of physical artifacts ultimately might help us develop an epistemology of the archive, a point that becomes more power fully articulated in the book production and New W orld rhetoric of the missionary movement in New England.

Chapter 5

Race, Literacy, and the Eliot Mission

On August 29, 1686, an eighty-two-year -old John Eliot wrote Robert Boyle to express concerns typical of his lifelong commitment to both fund-raising among English patrons and education among Algonkian Amerindians: “My humble request to your honours, [is] that we may again reimpose the primer and catechism.” Yet his plea continues in language that deepens its sentiment and begins to register the bibliophilia that had propelled the mission: “for though the last impression be not quite spent, yet quickly they will; and I am old, ready to be gone, and desire to leave as many books as I can.”1 A first-generation minister and the chief missionary of southern New England, Eliot lobbied tirelessly and successfully for the “Indian Librar y,” a set of devotional titles translated into the Massachusett dialect and including most spectacularly the “Indian Bible,” his version of the Hebrew and Christian testaments. The elemental nature of primers and catechisms as literacy manuals explains the mission’s linkage of reading and conversion. 2 But the radical transformation literacy sought in the missionar y context is of course not solely evangelical. Instructional works intended to transmit Christian doctrine, the Massachusett primers and catechisms sought to displace oral modes of communication. While systems of writing and modes of orality coexisted in early modern cultures, the presence of the written record in the Eliot mission demoted oral knowledges and promoted the book as a sign of English superiority. Perhaps most revelator y, however, are the desired “many books” that will outlive Eliot himself. For if it is unsurprising that European literature of contact represents orality and writing in value-laden terms, Eliot’s work makes explicit that worship of writing is a product of English perceptions, not native “awe.” 3 As with the language of so much of the fund-raising efforts, Eliot here sees verbal works as artifactual wonders. Within the fear of exhaustion (“quickly they will” be “spent”), the need for plenty (“as many books as I can”), and the recognition of mortality (“I am old, ready to be gone”), they are written records that can sur vive and endure. Whether through symbolic means—such as his theatrical use of the Bible as prop in early preaching—or material expression—his

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invention of a written language for the speech dialects of Amerindians— Eliot’s faith in the textual artifact animated his efforts. For the missionary, Christian literacy meant devotional reading matter and the dismissal of Amerindian oral tradition; but it also meant the archival potential of written words. In correspondence, missionar y reports, promotional tracts, and Amerindian translations—a set of fund-raising works known as the “Eliot tracts”—he consistently values writing for its archival permanence.4 The Eliot tracts illuminate the meanings of literacy in the missionar y context. At one level, his “many books” describe the literary culture outlined so far. Staples of the colonial book trade, primers and catechisms joined translations of Bayly’ s The Practise of Pietie and Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted to make the “Indian Library” a cross-cultural epitome of the steady-selling canon. The conversionist reading matter assumed of course that literacy was transformative, rather than diverting or enlightening. Indeed, the missionar y reports presented the subjective life of Amerindians as one liminally transitional, a processual view of anxious piety that mirrors the image of the devotional reader I have sketched so far. If a cyclical as well as teleological spirituality characterized devotional readers such as Joseph T ompson, this form of subjectivity among Amerindian converts worked for promotional ends in the Eliot tracts. A vision of “praying Indians” as gesturing toward proper piety while lacking in key modes of belief could attract backers who both expected success yet needed an incentive for further contribution. For the Amerindians to fulfill the potential promised in the transitional state, they required books, ostensibly as a means toward conventional literacy. But Christian education—reading as internalization—was only one goal of the mission’s literacy advocates. Book objects were part of the “visible civility,” including town resettlement and instituted government, that was to discipline native subjects. Moreover , the ability of the written record to endure—glimsped in Eliot’ s modest language to Boyle—is construed more grandly in the Eliot tracts, where script, print, and the book are figured as monuments, as products of a civilization, products that symbolize its antiquity and record its histor y in iconic, totemic terms. The mission’s interest in book artifacts also operated in the register of the thick style, where a text’ s aesthetic embodiment ser ved fundraising and conversionist ends. A literar y culture predicated on the religious socialization of readers through the materiality of the written record: reading practices in colonial New England find their uncanny double in the Eliot mission. Understanding the Eliot tracts as promotional literature, this chapter will study their representations of literacy and Amerindians. Rather than standing as ethnographic facts drawn from the contact zone or as neu-

Race 181 tral sources of Algonkian expression, the tracts record the projections and investments of missionary scribes and sympathetic supporters. With a usually explicit and occasionally implicit English audience, the writings sought funds for the further civilizing and converting of Amerindians. Eliot and his colleagues reported the history and theory of the program in the tracts according to these financial, material, and spiritual needs. 5 Amerindians are consistently portrayed in terms of their transition to a Christian identity. Encouraging patronage, the image of this transitional state derives in part from the theor y of origins and conversion animating Eliot’s view of native peoples: the missionaries saw Indians as degenerate “sons of Adam” in need of English civilization before conversion. The portrayal of converting Amerindians is constructed through metaphors of degeneration and ruin, and regeneration and civilization; through definitions of memor y and knowledge; and through representations of preverbal and linguistic communication. Stressing both loss and potential, the portrayal functions with strategic ambiguities. For instance, a native’s pious gestures of the body represent both affective spirituality and defective linguistic skills; melancholic tears signal both the loss of Judeo-Christian wisdom and the sanctity of preparator y humiliation. The image of Amerindian conversion unambiguously emphasizes, however, communicative abilities that measure the perceived difference between the cultures: the textual media of script, print, and the book. To Charles II in the 1661 “Indian Bible”’ s New Testament preface—the preface being essentially the main text for this English audience—Eliot writes that the book “will be a perpetual monument, that by your Majesty’s favor, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ was made known to the Indians.” Seeking both to civilize and to convert, Eliot understood written records as monuments, a metaphor appropriate to the conjunction of the sacred and the civil that sustains the missionar y project. While man-made, monuments carry the aura of religious wonder, of denoting that which a culture should revere as its spiritual and moral essence. Moreover , the temporal subtext of the monument figure is made overt with the adjective “perpetual”: in the Eliot tracts, the written word is an artifactual wonder that provides means of remembering and renders permanent religious and cultural knowledge. For the missionaries, the written word could complement the nascent piety found in natives; further, it could supply symbolically what Amerindians presumably lacked in civilization, language, memory, and knowledge. Such a view of the word appealed to potential English patrons as well, whose understanding of literacy, technology, and civilization—in the context of perceived Ninnimissinuok difference—was confirmed. 6 While image patterns define reading and Amerindian identity accord-

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ing to English values, the material practices of writing and printing are of course equally consequential to an understanding of literacy and the mission. This chapter will thus also study the publication program of the Eliot mission that resulted from the promotional literature. Eliot’ s concern for the supply of “many books” emerged from specific missionar y activities. Besides educating natives through conventional reading, the provision of the written word was both a local invention—through Eliot’s creation of an orthographic Indian language and his translation of scripture—and an expansionist import—through the refurbishing of the Cambridge Press from English benefactors for the production of an “Indian Library.” These material practices had an indirect though crucial effect on the histor y of publication in New England. The missionary’s intention to supply “many books” for natives resulted in the revitalization of the colony’s print-house, producing titles for a secondgeneration Anglo-American audience. By adding a hand press to the Cambridge printing house in 1660, Eliot’s promotional efforts underwrote a second-generation white archive of jeremiad textuality. Rather than supply a sustained body of texts for “praying Indians,” writing technologies derived from the mission shaped the archive of Anglo literar y expression and reception. Finally, then, Eliot’ s interest in textual posterity helps orient discussion of literary culture in early New England to a larger concern with the historiography of American literature. With attention to the transatlantic canon of steady sellers and to the phenomenological interaction of book objects and reader subjects, I have argued that book histor y might best help us appreciate devotional literacy in colonial New England. Such a perspective also permits a deeper investigation of early American literary history’s premises and legacies. First, the Eliot mission helps question the project of a redefined early American literary history as influentially forwarded by William Spengemann. Focusing on the evolution of language, Spengemann abandons a historiography premised on authors or imprints located nationally, geographically, or chronologically in what would become the United States. Rather, he attends to how English is altered through New W orld encounter, tracing the mutation of predictable words such as “Columbus” and surprising ones such as “independence” as they gain meaning through prenational contact. Spengemann is equally interested in modes of American expression that endure, a histor y of sur vival that he attributes to the “literariness” of a linguistic event. The literature that endures, for Spengemann, surprises us in its ability to transcend its age, persisting in cadences that leapfrog the past and speak in the language of our world. Contra this idealization, the Eliot mission suggests that studying the material histor y of recorded language might be a better source for literar y historiography.

Race 183 Second, the jeremiad tradition of American studies is dependent on the Eliot mission’ s publication efforts, a fact under valued by both the Perry Miller school and the postcolonial response to his theses. Between 1660 and 1674, the Eliot press at Cambridge was responsible for the controversial literature on the Half-W ay Covenant; a providential histor y, Nathaniel Morton’ s New-Englands Memoriall (1669); elegies housed within the Morton history; and a series of sermons that Perr y Miller isolated and analyzed to compose “Errand into the Wilderness.” As much as his two volumes on seventeenth-century intellectual history, this essay established the “exceptionalist” theory of the New England mind. Given the Eliot tracts’ favored r hetoric, the essay ironically monumentalized the second-generation sermons, while itself becoming a monument of Americanist scholarship. But both Miller and, because of their fixation on Miller , postcolonial American studies ignore the intimate dependence of Eliot’s press on Amerindian bodies for the archive of sermons that produced the jeremiad thesis. In this light, literar y critics avowing postcolonial methods might learn from historical scholarship that has examined key crises of the seventeenth centur y—such as the free-grace debate of the 1630s or the witchcraft persecution of the 1690s—by way 7 of English-Amerindian contact and conflict. Regarding both the Spengemann thesis and the jeremiad tradition, book history’s interest in the processes of publication and preser vation might, again, correct the misconstruals of literary scholars and cultural critics. In the Eliot tracts, the complementar y roles played by representation—the image of Amerindians—and means of representation—the press facilities that displace indigenous cultures and that redefine Amerindian and English expression—indicate that cultural histor y benefits from an interpretive book studies alert to the implications of literacy and literacy’ s legacies. Preoccupied with the religious socialization of Amerindians and the archival endurance of textual artifacts, early New England’ s missionary writing can be approached first through an understanding of the mission itself.

The Puritan Missions Eliot tellingly explains his view of the conversionist project in a letter to one of the mission’ s English benefactors: “breifly , my scope is, to write and imprint no nother but Scripture principles in the abrasa tabula scraped board of these naked people.”8 The figure of the “scraped board” refers trebly to evangelism, civilization, and inscription, and thus encapsulates the goals of the mission in early New England. The notion manifestly expresses Eliot’ s desire to spread Christian doctrine to Amerindians. Yet the figure specifies this program of conversion with an

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image of the Indian as a “tablet” or “board”—that is, as an intended artifact, an object of dimensionality and permanence produced by a civilization for cultural reproduction. The slate is not simply blank, either; Eliot’s figure carefully represents the idea of a residual culture whose traces are ambiguously present, traces that have degenerated, “scraped” away by the wilderness. Those residual forms of knowledge will be replaced with the “writing” and “printing” of “Scripture principles,” a metaphor that illustrates the new forms of Christian knowledge while distinguishing conversion in terms of a technology of Western European civilization: the W ord recorded in visible language. As an artifactual product of civilization that promises the potential for restoration, the tabula abrasa is a revealing metaphor for the distinctive aspects of the Eliot missionary plan.9 A brief sketch of the mission’ s histor y over Eliot’ s career (1643–90) will help explain the specifics of his program and the functions of the tabula abrasa metaphor. Emigrating in 1631 soon after the Arbella and establishing himself by 1632 as a minister in Roxbur y, John Eliot was a key figure in the orthodoxy of the first generations of settlement; though under John Cotton’s tutelage, he sided with John Winthrop and Thomas Shepard against the antinomians in one of the foundational political acts of the colony. A belated start in conversion work came in the early 1640s, when Eliot began studying the Massachusett language with a native named Cockenoe; political conditions enabled Eliot’ s efforts, with the threat of native tribes neutralized by the 1643 confederation of Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Haven and the subsequent 1644 submission of five sachems to this united colonial rule. 10 By 1646 Eliot was ready to preach to a gathering at Dorchester who lived under the sachem Cutshamoquin.11 This September meeting failed, but a sermon of October 28 at Newton that included W aban was more successful. There were four meetings in 1646, and occasional meetings for the next three years. At the same time, missionary fund-raising was being pursued through colony agent Edward Winslow; his visits to England led to the formation of the New England Company . Literature backed by the Company and published in England sought an audience of donors in the Old World.12 Eliot mission activity reached its height in the following decade. By 1650, Eliot had decided to settle a group of Native Americans in a disciplined, organized town at Natick; here they could learn modes and forms of European civilization, prior to the full cultivation of piety and the institution of a church. This “praying town” model was to be followed for the next twenty-five years. Entering into covenant in August, 1651, the “praying Indians” at Natick only gradually grew in grace, according to white ruling elders; twice—in 1652 and 1654—Eliot readied

Race 185 them for examination, but in both cases the confessors failed to prove their knowledge of doctrine and their experience of conversion. The Natick town finally established a church in 1659, when eight natives related their conversion experiences to the satisfaction of elders such as John Wilson.13 Four other towns were established among the Massachusetts between 1653 and 1657. In England, millennial fer vor and Interregnum power created conversionist momentum; evangelizing the “heathen” was part of the puritan apocalyptic. Chartered in 1649, the New England Company immediately raised money through pulpit announcements and church donations; £4500 were raised by 1653, another £1100 by 1660, and investments led to yearly profits of £600.14 This money contributed to material goods and ser vices rendered for the praying towns, as well as annuities for Eliot, Thomas Mayhew , and others involved in missionary education. At the same time, Eliot had begun the extensive and complicated task of transcribing the oral speech of the Massachusetts into a written language, with grammar and vocabulary delineated by the Roman alphabet.15 A sickness disabled Eliot in 1656, but allowed him to finish his translation of the Bible, which, with the help of new press facilities provided by the Company, was fully printed in 1663. Restoration politics—which included the temporary disbanding of the Company and general antipathy toward puritan reform—led to less secure backing. Yet Eliot continued to proselytize, establishing nine more praying towns by the 1670s, seven of them among the Nipmuc tribe. Eliot met with resistance of course; the Narragansett rebuffed him in 1648 and Metacom (King Philip) and the Wampanoag countered his efforts in the early 1660s; Philip, and per haps these events, would be jarringly fictionalized in Eliot’s 1671 Indian Dialogues—wherein Philip, in a truly mistaken prophecy, submits to the Christian faith. Eliot had created fourteen “praying towns” by 1675, with eleven hundred members between them. No native had been ordained at this point (one was in the 1680s) and Eliot worked to administer the sacraments among the various towns, though weekly preaching would be undertaken by Indian church members. King Philip’ s War radically changed the nature of the mission, as praying Indians were suspected by white settlers; those who did not join with Philip were sent to Deer Island for protection. Many of the towns themselves suffered during the fighting, and the inland mission never fully recuperated. Death and flight—the plight of the majority of postcontact native peoples before and after this mission—decimated the Christianized Indians of southern New England. 16 “They must have visible civility,” wrote Eliot to an English benefactor , “before they can rightly enjoy visible sanctity in ecclesiastical communion.”17 The emphasis on civilization differentiated the English mission from other European efforts and emerged in part from the missionar-

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ies’ scripture-influenced perception of degeneracy , of a more glorious past that had been “scraped” away from the natives. Thus, natives, for the Eliot mission, were not radically different “barbarians”; their origins were explained by the myth of Genesis, the foundation of all human genealogy from the radical Protestant perspective. 18 In the second promotional tract, Eliot describes the Indians as “degenerated from Adam’ s fall” while Mayhew later calls them “those poor naked sons of Adam.” The opening to the Eliot-authored covenant that praying Indians were asked to speak stresses the Genesis lineage and their waywardness: “W e are the sons of Adam. We and our forefathers have a long time been lost in our sins; but now the mercy of the Lord begins to find us out again.” By the late 1640s, Eliot had specified a theor y of degeneracy, believing that natives were descended from the Jews, either as one of the ten lost tribes of Israel or as part of the lineage of Eber .19 Fed by millennial interest, the idea circulated transatlantically and appeared repeatedly in the New England Company’s promotional literature. A dubious anthropology supported the idea, with missionaries and sympathizers constructing some native customs such as circumcision, separation of women during menstruation, and the “ express[ing of] themselves in parables” as a Jewish inheritance. Eliot appended his conjectures on the subject to a pamphlet by Thomas Thorowgood called Jewes in America. The 1660 preface to A Further Account refers to the natives as “these late Aliens from the Common-wealth of Israel.” This genealogy—Jewish, or more generally Adamic—figured the Native Americans as having degenerated from a more civil (even originally perfect) past, vestiges of which persist but from which Indians have declined. 20 Thus, civilizing the natives meant in part the renovating of old modes of conduct and settlement through English customs and scriptural law; while spiritual conversion would entail a regenerative transformation, the missionaries’ anthropology suggested that civilization recalled a past way of being lived by the ancestors of this New World race. As practiced, mission efforts at civilizing included radical and, again, distinctive reform of land, space, and power through the construction of “praying towns” and the reformation of governance. Reining in a nomadic culture with an adaptive relationship to land and goods, Eliot designed praying towns such as Natick in 1650 that emphasized property lines, house lots, and orderly thoroughfares. 21 Similarly, Eliot submitted the praying Indians to a form of government inspired by Exodus 18 and developed in his antimonarchial tract The Christian Commonwealth. Scriptural source and Mosaic practice supplied a political hierarchy whereby, in theor y, leaders were chosen to rule groups of one thousand, one hundred, fifty , and ten; the hundred praying Indians at Natick thus elected one leader of the entire community , and then two leaders of

Race 187 fifty and ten leaders of ten.22 Dwight Bozeman has found precedent for this organizational scheme in Martin Bucer and Captain John Underhill, and Eliot’ s manifesto was far -reaching; he proposed the praying town model as a guide for the English commonwealth in the turbulent 1650s.23 The boundedness and numerical disciplinarity of the praying town restructured the habitat of native life, and while civilizing reforms had personal dimensions (as in the outfitting of natives in English apparel and the emphasis on monogamy), these architectural and political dynamics literally rebuilt native society and environment in the name of “civilization.” The twin emphases on degeneracy and civilization created a r hetoric to describe the course of conversion; that Indians carried the remnants of biblical antiquity and that they desperately needed English order informed their figurative representation. A recurring motif in the promotional literature on conversion refers to Native Americans as the “ veriest ruines of mankind that are known on earth,” suggesting the degeneracy of Indians in architectural metaphors. This version of the phrase comes from Eliot; while here he attributes it to Thomas Hooker , it is also used by Eliot in the Grammar and Indian Dialogues, and by Cotton Mather in the Magnalia. Moreover, in Eliot’ s essay on the origins of Amerindians the language of ruins appears repeatedly: in the onamastic parsing of Aphaxad (“healer of ruins”) and Aphaxad’s role in the replenished postNoah world and in the description of Nimrod’s kingdom, destroyed and Babelian, a “building [that] is unstable.” 24 Resonating in the Christian worldview of its users with the meanings of its Latin root—ruere, to fall— the term “ruin” connotes the deterioration of human constructs as well, in the context of the mission’ s project and the term’ s surrounding metaphors. For the Indians were similarly referred to as “the dregs of mankinde,” as the “dregs and refuse of Adams lost posterity,” and as the “rubbish” out of which a Church can be built. Coupled with the millennial trope of the natives as “dr y bones”—a cite from Ezekiel 37 that became the foundational T ext of Eliot’ s first successful sermon and a repeated refrain throughout the missionar y reports—these images suggest the relic quality of the Indian past, the English vision of decayed traces from a once appreciable civilization. 25 Belief in the process of conversion, through which these remnants could be reconstructed and transformed through regeneration, enables a corresponding set of metaphors, wherein the relics are embodied, both physically and spatially. Ezekiel’s prophecy in 37.1–10 is that the dry bones will gather flesh and sinews, a trope that figures the “Resur rectionWork” of the Eliot mission in terms of skeletal and corporeal architecture. When Eliot “[c]ompile[s] a Grammar of this Language” for English assistants and for “the poor souls of these Ruines of Mankinde,”

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he explains that his essay has “laid together some Bones and Ribs preparatory” for conversion work. 26 The biblical context of the “dr y bones” text extends these architectural tropes, as Ezekiel explicitly prophecies the reconstruction—via the remade bodies—of the “house of Israel” (37.11). Edward Reynolds pleads for donations to the missionary cause in the preface to Eliot’s A Further Accompt by asking patrons “to offer willingly towards the building of living and spirituall Temples” (A2v). Coexistent with the organic and agricultural metaphors of conversion— seed planting, soul har vesting—this rhetoric of construction reinforces the material project of building praying towns and underlines the importance of “visible civility” to the missionar y work of salvation. 27

The Liminal “Praying Indian” The rhetoric of construction places the Amerindian liminally between states, the process of conversion referring back to past sin while gesturing toward proper and deeper piety. As the most overt instance of a style where a sensor y and sacral aesthetic thickens verbal information, the characterization of Amerindians in the Eliot tracts carries for ward this processual image of conversion. For in the expressions of knowledge, body, and feeling reported in the promotional literature, the Indians appeared similarly situated between poles of ruin and restoration, degeneration and regeneration. If the rhetoric of construction aims to rebuild these “ruines of mankind,” the sentimental portrait of Amerindians encourages fund-raising by showing similar degrees of insufficiency and potential. With its emphasis on faint Judeo-Christian knowledge, gestural simplicity, and melancholy tears, the sentimental characterization imagines Indians as uprooted, inarticulate fragments of humanity, without history, tradition, or permanent language. Yet such lack is also an encouraging sign of Christian potential—traces of knowledge and feelings of humility communicate the beginnings of piety within the process of conversion. As we shall see, the inscribed word and the material book symbolize the civilized and sacred answer to this lack. The mission regularly showed an interest in the cultural memory of its subjects, in what they vaguely remember of Judeo-Christian knowledge. Thomas Shepard relates an evangelical visit to Cape Cod Indians with this anecdote from the question and answer period after Eliot’ s preaching: “an aged Indian” explains that “these very things which Mr. Eliot had taught them as the Commandements of God, and concerning God, and the making of the world by one God, that they had heard some old men who were now dead, to say the same things, since whose death there hath been no remembrance or knowledge of them among the Indians until now they heare of them againe.” After speculating that a “ French

Race 189 Preacher” might have transmitted Christian doctrine to the Indians, Shepard learns of a more general “apprehension now stirring among them”: “That their forefathers did know God, but that after this, they fell into a great sleep, and when they did awaken they quite forgot him, (for under such metaphoricall language they usually expresse what eminent things they meane:) so that it may seem to be the day of the Lords gracious visitation of these poore Natives, which is just as it is with all other people, when they are most low , the wheele then turnes, and the Lord remembers to have mercy .” Edward Winslow associates the loss of cultural memory with atavistic Jewish behavior in the Native Americans; he initiates Eliot tract discussion of the “Jews in America” theor y in part by noting mournful “daily expressions, bewailing the losse of that knowledge their Ancestors had about God, and the way of his W orship.” Through Thomas Mayhew , a Martha’ s Vineyard sagamore narrates a similar tale of degenerate knowledge; “lamenting the losse of their knowledge,” Towanquatticks reveals “ That a long time agon, they had wise men, which in a grave manner taught the people knowledge, but they are dead, and their wisedome is buried with them: and now men live a giddy life in ignorance till they are white headed, and though ripe in yeares, yet then they go without wisedom unto their graves.” Mayhew writes that the chief wondered why the English delayed in imparting their knowledge, “ he hoped that the time of knowledge was now come; wherefore himself with others desired me to give them an Indian meeting to make known the word of God.” Mayhew enlarges the same story for another instance of the Eliot tracts. A native confession collected by Eliot glimpses the practice of failed knowledge and generational jeremiad that T owanquatticks expresses more mythically. Ponampian states that when “I was young, I was at play, and my Father rebuked me, and said, we shall all die shortly . [In private we asked him what ground or reason moved his Father so to speak? he answered, it was when the English were new come over , and he thinketh that this Father had heard that Mr Wilson had spoken of the flood of Noah, how God drowned all the world for the sinnes of the people.]” A comparative study of the native confessions with English conversion narratives has found that the Indian relations lack in details from the past. Given the flawed memor y that is imputed to natives by the missionar y reporters, such relations—since they were mediated by ministers—may reflect the values of the scribes. Still, an Old and New W orld audience of benefactors and sympathizers familiar with more detailed conversion tales can find in the Christianized genre of native confessions a similar faintness of memor y as is present in the stories of T owanquatticks and the anthropology of Winslow.28 This vestigial Judeo-Christian knowledge parallels the emphasis on gestural communication in the Eliot writings; championed as affectively

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meaningful, the gestures represent the potential for Christian piety while also figuring illiteracy and ignorance. This representation is obviously a function of the language gap between the cultures; and it is true that certain praying Indians reach articulation in, for instance, the published confessions—though these too are qualified by their translation. (Eliot’s skill and veracity is continually checked, as he himself reports.)29 Yet the effect of the images renders the Indians as before or outside verbal communication. For instance, when Eliot uses pinky and thumb to denote God’s little and great mercies, he describes this approach by invoking the natives’ “use and delight in demonstrations.” Eliot on occasion encouraged such communication in the novice worshipper , recognizing their limited Christian knowledge and prompting a one-line prayer that was to be repeated and supplemented with extraverbal utterings: “wee told them, that although they could not make any long prayers as the English could, yet if they did but sigh and groane, and say thus; Lord make mee know Jesus Christ, for I know him not, and if they did say so againe and againe with their hearts that God would teach them Jesus Christ.” The missionaries also sought and reported the gestural expressiveness of praying Indians, as in the case of the aged speaker who overtakes the question-and-answer period of an evangelical lecture; “speak[ing] to the rest of the Indians,” he propounds God mercies in both the native tongue and “with strong actings of his eyes and hands.” Wilson describes the behavior of an unintelligible Indian preacher, who speaks “with great devotion, gravity , decency, readiness and affection, and gestures ver y becoming.”30 Gestural communication is especially evident in the Eliot writings when ministers describe the feeling it conveys, the amount of pious affect expressed without verbal language. Edward Jackson reports to Shepard that an Indian funeral based on English custom was supplemented by one half-hour of Christian prayer, where the gathered natives “did expresse such zeale in prayer with such variety of gracious expressions, and abundance of teares, both of himself and most of the company, that the woods rang againe with their sighes and prayers.” Observing the entirety of one of Mayhew’s meetings at Martha’s Vineyard, Henry Whitfield “desire[s] a blessing upon what they heard” and one of the island Indians complies; he “prayed a quarter of an houre, and somewhat more, with great reverence and affection, as farre as I could judge by his voyce and outward deportment.” After speaking with W aban one morning, Shepard overhears the sincerity, if not the discourse’ s literal meaning, of a man in a wigwam at prayer: “I was so much affected, that I could not but stand under a Tree within hearing, though I could not understand but little of his words, and consider that God was fulfilling his Word.” When the Natick Indians made covenant and attempted to establish church-estate in

Race 191 October, 1652, Richard Mather obser ved the proceedings and testified to the evidence of their nonverbal piety: “And though they spake in a language, of which many of us understood but little, yet we that were present that day, we saw them, and we heard them per form the duties mentioned, with such grave and sober countenances, with such comely reverence in gesture, and their whol [sic] carriage, and with such plenty of tears trickling down the cheeks of some of them, as did argue to us that they spake with much good affection, and holy fear of God, and it much affected our hearts.” Rituals of burial, prayer , and covenant making were loci of worship where the ministers inferred, through the Indian body , the beginnings of proper devotion. While speech in the native dialect is achieved at these moments and while ministers recognize the limits of their linguistic comprehension, the sentimentalism in the reports reduces communicative understanding to expressions of the body rather than the mind. 31 Both strands of this representational fabric—the degeneracy of spiritual knowledge and the affect of gestural communication—are woven into a generalized portrait of the “melancholic Praying Indian,” whose image is repeatedly conveyed in references to tears and weeping. 32 At one level, such references impart signs of contrition, as evident in the title Tears of Repentance that heralds the first set of transcribed native confessions; at another level, they carr y forward the images of sentimentalism, rendering the Indians as somehow preverbal. “[C]ertainely those aboundant teares which wee saw shed from their eies,” testifies Eliot earlier in the mission, “argue a mighty and blessed presence of the spirit of Heaven.” The tear ful public repentance of a wife beater is pictured by both Eliot and Shepard, with the latter allowing the hyperbolic irrigation of the repentant’ s domestic floor . During his 1652 confession, Waban “spake these latter expressions with tears,” his extraverbal gestures reinforcing the image of humble piety. Indian weeping could lead to the mutual humility of shared tears between natives and missionaries. The confession of Toteswamp prompts tears in both speaker and Eliotas-transcriber, while the dying words of the Natick praying Indian Wamporas leads to a mutual lesson in the lachr ymal: “they used to flie and avoyde with terrour such as lye dying, now on the contrar y they flocked together to heare his dying words, whose death and buriall they beheld with many teares; nor am I able to write his Storie without weeping.” Eliot reveals the ideology of such shared sadness—its expression of the paradoxical essence of puritan devotion and its benefits for the missionary project—when reporting on the effects of the continued cr ying of an Indian in prayer; it “forced us also to such bowels of compassion that wee could not forebeare weeping over him also: and so wee parted greatly rejoycing for such sorrowing.” Finally , the missionaries duly re-

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ported the Indian tears that seemed least public, as with the auditor of an early Eliot sermon who “powred out many teares and shewed much affliction without affectation of being seene” and the abusive, repentant husband “who turned his face to the wall and wept . . . with modest indeavor to hide it.” As with Shepard’ s walk among the wigwams, the results of this sur veillance imply authenticity and shame among the praying Indians. The meanings of this general tearfulness are manifold, including its status as evidence of sincere piety , its intimate reversal of the “stoic Indian” stereotype and its despondent reflection of the loss of traditions. Yet each of these meanings implicitly or explicitly suggests insufficiency and potential. Signaling both inadequacy and possibility, the images of fragmented memor y, bodily expression, and sentimental melancholy promote—to New England Company commissioners and independent patrons—the perceived needs of natives. 33 When Eliot and other missionaries report language use, they similarly measure communicative ability and conversionist promise; whether it is natives grappling with English or Anglos analyzing Massachusett, each second language reveals Indian naïveté and Indian promise. Indeed, dissimilarities were a resource to promote the mission. W aban’s concern over prayer and linguistic difference—“Jesus Christ . . . had bin used to heare English man pray and so could well enough understand them, but Indian language in prayer hee . . . was a stranger to it”—sur faces four times in the tracts, first as an entr y in the earliest account of an Indian lecture and later as part of W aban’s conversion narrative. 34 The question’s repeated placement—always followed by an assurance of God’ s omnipotence—sounds an innocent mode of degeneration, a simplicity that underscores the natives’ potential. Highlighting the obstacles to conversion while wondering at the mar vel of divine power , Shepard knits linguistic difference into the fabric of God’ s will; “considering the variety of Languages in small distances of places” among Native Americans, “onely hee that made their eares and tongues can raise up some or other to teach them how to heare, and what to spake; and if the Gospel must ride circuit, Christ can and will conquer by weake and despicabe meanes.” Scriptural theories of degeneration explain linguistic dispersion in terms of God’ s wrath at the Tower of Babel, as does Eliot in the “Learned Conjectures.” But such a lesson could be turned to missionary advantage, as either Eliot’s preaching or a reading from Genesis marked an important turning point for one native confessor , Monotunkquaint: “My heart said, It may be God made English men, but not us poore naked men, as we are of a strange language; and therefore I doubted to pray. Then I heard of Nimrod his building of Babel, and that God was angry, made strange to each other their language, and brake their work: Then my heart said, Surely so it is, as I did believe.” 35

Race 193 Yet similarities between the languages, in meaning and structure, were also signs of favor and references to biblical antiquity . For Eliot—who systematized and invented the orthographic version of an Indian dialect—perceived affinities between Massachusett and Hebrew were a function of and evidence for the natives’ Jewish descent. Having traveled eastward and “degenerated from the Church,” “the posterity of Eber, have not more footsteps of the Hebrew language, at least in the grammatical frame of the language, than the westerne world hath. It seemeth to me, by that little insight I have, that the grammatical frame of ourIndian language cometh neerer to the Hebrew, than the Latine, or Greek do.” Missionaries could find in the overlap between meanings and language providential import that augured well for the evangelical work. Describing the wonder of Eliot’s preaching from Ezekiel 37.9–10—“that by prophesying to the wind, the wind came and the dry bones lived”—Shepard explains that “the Indian word for Wind is Waubon, and the most active Indian for stirring up other Indians” to seek God is named “ Waubon”; Shepard notes further that “some of the Indians themselves that were stir’d up by him took notice of this his name and that Scripture together .” A later epistle underscores the presumed miracle of this event. Less hopeful than Eliot’s anthropology, Thomas Mayhew found degenerate Indians and their “Heathen T raditions” partly subject to the Devil, and located in their language their fealty to sin’ s mortal decay: “The Devil also with his Angels had his Kingdom among them, in them; account him they did the terror of the Living, the god of the Dead, under whose cruel power and into whose deformed likeness they conceived themselves to be translated, when they died; for the same word they have for the Devil, they use also for a Dead Man, in their Language.” Mayhew’ s letter continues by describing the successes of the Christian mission at freeing natives from how “they conceived themselves.” In these instances, the verbal congruities of the Algonkian tongue with Hebrew genealogy and Christian doctrine promise further victories in the conversionist program.36

The Written Record as Artifactual Wonder The provision of the written word sought both to contribute to the civilizing of the “scattered” natives and to guide them, by way of scripture, through this transitional state of nascent godliness. Ostensibly , writing and reading were part of the educational curriculum, which itself was part of a larger set of civilizing objectives (such as the instituting of bounded property, town government, and worship lectures). Crucially , the written word was to help convert, providing readers with JudeoChristian doctrine and means of grace that would ultimately help assure

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Indians who turned to Christ. Yet the educative role of the written word only partially explains its function in the New England missionar y context, especially given the relative failure of the English Protestants to convert native peoples. Training in conventional literacy—the internalization of information through silent reading—was one appeal made in the Eliot tracts. But another appeal relied on the extraverbal symbolism of monumentality, an appeal embedded in Eliot’ s tabula abrasa trope and elaborated in the tracts. Script, print, and the book were artifactual presences that figured a sacred civilization and that could help provide Christian stability to the fragmented and inarticulate native peoples. This discourse in the Eliot mission is the thick style writ large, where the linguistic codes of imaginative expression and the bibliographical codes of documentar y materials built a sensor y aesthetic that justified Anglo cultural superiority. “[F]or their own Language we have no book,” wrote Eliot in October of 1650; “my desire therefore is to teach them all to write, and read written hand, and thereby with pains taking, they may have some of the Scriptures in their own Language.” Eliot’ s wish to create an “Indian Library” and the New England Company’s support is manifest throughout the tracts, and, at one level, explains the urge toward conventional literacy training. As early as July of 1649 he had expressed his interest in recording the Algonkian tongue: “I do ver y much desire to translate some parts of the Scriptures into their language, and to print some Primer in their language wherein to initiate and teach them to read.” Twice, in separate letters of a 1652 tract, Eliot invokes scriptural dissemination as a principal mission goal. The minister mentions his aging to spur donations for the project. In Whitfield’s 1652 tract he sighs, “I have no hope to see the Bible T ranslated, much lesse Printed in my dayes”; correspondence to missionar y benefactors reveals that he fears “the Translation of the Holy Scriptures . . . will not be obtained in my dayes,” and that the “progresse” on 1655 print work of Genesis and Matthew “is slow, and hands short.” Commissioners and Company representatives financed a series of devotional texts from the 1650s through 1680s that radiated about the production of the Indian Bible’ s first edition in 1663. By October of 1651, there is evidence that Eliot had composed in Massachusett, as John Wilson reports of an “ Indian School-Master [who] read out of his Book one of the Psalmes in meeter, line by line, translated by Mr. Eliot into Indian.”37 Manuscript copies of an Indian catechism and two books of scripture (Genesis and Matthew) began to circulate in the early 1650s; they reached print, respectively , in 1654 and 1655. The translation of the Bible was completed in 1658. Publication of the New Testament in 1661, and of both testaments in 1663, gave the “Indian Library” its centerpiece. In the 1660s, Eliot created translations of devo-

Race 195 tional steady sellers by Baxter and Bayly, along with primers, confessions, and “logicks.” The Indian Dialogues, intended for an English-speaking native audience of missionaries, was published in 1671; a second edition of the Bible appeared in 1683. The mission gradually created a store of texts to teach Indians conventional literacy. And there is evidence of Amerindians reading titles from the Eliot booklist. The growth of the praying towns to include roughly eleven hundred residents by the mid-1670s suggests that these texts found an audience. But indeed, we can see in the sur viving tracts and journals signs of Indian readership as early as Eliot’ s first translation of Genesis and Matthew. Eliot tracts from 1659 and 1660 featured, respectively, fastday speeches and confessions, both of which showcase Native Americans’ referring to Genesis and Matthew. Eliot notes in a postscript to the 1659 tract that “such as see these Notes may easily observe that they read [the translations].” 38 The diary of minister John Cotton, Jr . (1640–98), whose journal documents his biweekly visits to Plymouth and Martha’ s Vineyard natives from 1666 to 1675, further demonstrates Amerindian reading. Each entr y features the text from which Cotton preached and then a few questions on scripture asked by auditors. While the Psalms and Matthew are referred to most frequently , Cotton’ s notes indicate that auditors were reading ever ything from Deuteronomy to Corinthians to Revelation. Moreover, they cite the devotional manuals Eliot also translated, as in these 1667 entries: My 72nd [meeting] at Chappa[quiddick]: Apr: 9: on Psal:2:11: Hiacoomes: What is meant by that Phrase in Mr Eliots Catechisme, when a man dyes, his soule goes into a Strange Countr y? . . . Aug: 13: . . . Assaquonhett . . . several other Ques: he asked me for a more full understanding of some things, in the practice of piety

Marginalia of an early to mid-eighteenth centur y Mashpee in the Eliot translation of Bayly and in the Indian Bible likewise reveals Amerindian readership. Verbal reading as a means to master doctrine through bookish media: such are the conventional uses of literacy these examples mark.39 Yet, on two fronts, the externalization of the word matched this method of internal master y; reading entailed the physical presence of language, the word’ s artifactual status marking cultural difference and defining power relations. First, Eliot invented a visible language, wherein literacy was to be cultivated through a system of meaning new to both Amerindians and European settlers. His choice of an Indian orthography rather than English was intended to evade the double obstacle faced by natives of transiting to both a visual medium and a new

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language. As Har vard president Henr y Dunster explained to a correspondent, “We doe not trouble the Indians to Learn our English”; he notes that books sent for the natives’ reading were “above their capacity for the present especially being writ in the English tongue.” 40 Language use was also an artifactual presence in the mission, a practice of decoding sounds and inscribing signs, of producing a grammar and logic for the Massachusett tongue in order to make God’ s Word. The practice brought with it conflicts that were coextensive with other Protestant attitudes to communication, such as the tension between biblical access and ministerial control or the paradox of print’ s association with the Truth of the Book and the truth claims of books in a competitive marketplace. On the one hand, Eliot saw his “T ranslations . . . as a sacred and holy work, and to be regarded with much fear, care, and reverence”; and he established affinities between Massachusett and Hebrew. On the other, questioning by ministers about “whether [he] had expressed the Translation in true language” led Eliot to reply that he “feared after times will find many infirmities in it, all humane works are subject to infirmity.” Eliot also encountered and reported curious queries from Amerindians about the varied meanings of human-made words: one group of praying Indians asked how Gortonists arrived at a different interpretation of the same English Bible, while another auditor wondered how salvation might be achieved—using Eliot’ s Renaissance trope— through “reading the book of the creature.” More generally , Eliot grappled with the puritan settlers’ ideology of living according to “the word of God, without such humane additions and novelties.” Working with English-speaking natives to render an oral language material, Eliot spoke, from his perspective, a profane Massachusett dialect while importing sacred Western media.41 Second, native education required the production of written texts, and the social practice of printing and publication was thus a crucial consequence of the mission’ s promotional efforts. In the rearming of the Cambridge Press—a goal made explicit at certain moments in the Eliot writings and realized soon thereafter—the mission contributed to the colony’s print technology . Due to the commission of Indian texts, Cambridge was supplied, in 1655, with “twenty pounds worth of type and paper,” most likely tailored with fonts featuring extra provisions of the letters O and K, which were used more frequently in the Indian language.42 By the time Eliot completed his translation of the testaments, requests to the Company were reiterated in the 1659 tract A Further Accompt of the Progresse of the Gospel. Here Edward Reynolds notes that as the printing of the Bible is “a work of great labour . . . so will it be a worke of cost and charges to provide paper, workmen, and letters for so large a work”; Eliot adds that the project needs “some honest young man, who hath skill to

Race 197 compose (and the more skill in other parts of the work, the better),” and he even enlists Governor John Endicott to request press tools and labor.43 Authorizing the go-ahead for printing in May 1659, the Company furnished Cambridge with a new press in September 1659. In April 1660, Marmaduke Johnson was found sufficient for the role of colonial Bible printer, and he arrived in Cambridge in late July 1660. The Company also requested that paper for the Bible be exempt from customs and excise taxes. This influx of print capital and labor—while paper and ink could be exhausted, the other materials were resources whose usevalue would extend past the Bible’ s production—vitally reconstituted the Cambridge Press. Indeed, printer Samuel Green had noted as early as June of 1658—and independent of these requests to the New England Company—the deteriorating condition of the College’s press facilities.44 Within the goals of civilizing the Indians, the means of textual reproduction in early New England were significantly enhanced. These material practices of inscription and production were complemented in the Eliot tracts by a discourse that represented the written word as an artifactual wonder . A telling use of monumentality as a metaphor for the media of the book is witnessed in an exchange from Eliot’s fictionalized Indian Dialogues, when a native missionar y speaks with a skeptical kinsman. After the praying Indian discusses the spiritual state of fallen man, his peer responds with a critique of English settlement: “May not we rather think thatEnglish men have invented these stories to amaze us and fear us out of our old customs, and bring us to stand in awe of them, that they might wipe us of our lands, and drive us into corner, to seek new ways of living, and new places too? And be beholding to them for that which is our own, and was ours, before we knew them.” Imagined from the vantage point of the colonized, this frank acknowledgment of the colonial project permitted Eliot a response that both defined scripture as an iconic monument and captured the larger self-perceptions of Protestant literacy . His Indian missionar y answers, “The Book of God is no invention of Englishmen. It is the holy law of God himself, which was given unto man by God, before Englishmen had any knowledge of God; and all the knowledge which they have, they have it out of the Book of God. And this book is given to us as well as to them, and it is as free for us to search the scriptures as for them.” 45 The written word participates in sacred time, rather than human histor y; it predates English civilization and reflects “the holy law of God himself.” The gift economy of early New England literar y culture is writ large— “The Book . . . was given unto man by God” and “given to us as well as them”—and implicitly the written word is to endure as a human obligation in response to divine benevolence. The public access and navigable structure of writing is likewise championed, the material object making

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God’s word free for consultation across cultures. It is as if the peer’s radical critique so threatened puritan colonial logic that Eliot’s Indian missionary must make transcendent longevity and durability the book artifact’s essential value for the Protestant vernacular tradition. The Bible’ s authority as the pure “Book of God”—uncorrupted by time and human alteration—informed representations of the text in native confessions and the Dialogues more generally. Anthony, a fictional Dialogues character, explains that the “Word of God . . . is the will of God written in the Bible.” Distinguishing kinds of sacred writing while maintaining the Bible’s purity, Nookau confesses “I beleeve the Catechism we learn to be according to the W ord of God; but the writings of the Bible are the ver y Words of God, and the Spirit of God is the W ord.” In another confession, Poquanum establishes preconversion sinfulness in terms partially defined by his view of the Bible’ s mediation: “When the Indians first prayed to God, I did not think there was a God, or that the Bible was Gods Book, but that wise men made it.” Similarly , William, a fictional Indian missionar y, defends the purity of scripture by citing Deuteronomy 12:32 (“thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it”) and critiquing the mediations of “popish ministers and teachers.” While busy with the man-made artifacts of Massachusett devotional literature, the mission represented God’ s written W ord as wondrously unmediated.46 Eliot negotiated this tension through images that asserted the endurance of written artifacts; the preservation of books marked both their sacred and civil status as monuments. Having proposed that scripture be the model for governance of the praying towns, Eliot suggests the same for his English audience by calling on a revered, enduring text of national histor y: “Oh the blessed day in England when the W ord of God shall be their Magna Charta.” As noted, Eliot’ s preface to the Indian Bible framed it as “a perpetual monument.” In the Indian Dialogues, a final proof “that the scriptures are the Word of God” is their sheer presence over time: ““that is, by the great antiquity of these writings; which have been extant so many thousands of years, and have sailed through so many enemies hands, who have used all art and force to abolish them, or corrupt them, and yet they could never do it.” Calculating the age of the text from Moses’ time to the coming of Christ through to the present, Eliot’s fictional Indian William determines that the Bible is threethousand years old. Its survival in the face of “the Devil and wicked men” leads Eliot’s William to argue that “W e have ever y word of God per fect and pure unto this day, which cannot be said of any other writing in all the world. And this wonder ful divine protection of this book doth greatly manifest that doubtless it is God’s own word, over which he hath bestowed such eminent care.” The mar vel of the book’ s perseverance,

Race 199 the Bible’ s durable purity—the figure of the “perpetual monument” served to justify the man-made inventions of Massachusett publication while celebrating the putative value of a culture of writing. 47 The missionary writers likewise recounted the wondrous uses to which book objects were put, associating the artifactual nature of written words with the preservation of memory and the power of icons. Eliot attributes the inconsistent expressions of confessing Indians to the absence of scripted communication and its supposed weakening of memor y: “they have not any writing, or like helps, only their memor y, and the help of Gods Spirit, to read in their own hearts, what they utter .” In Eliot’s Dialogues Anthony also speaks of writing as an aid to memor y; it is “a great benefit to us, to have God’ s word and will written. For a word spoken is soon gone, and nothing retaineth it but our memor y, and that impression which it made upon our mind and heart. But when this word is written in a book, there it will abide, though we have forgotten it.” The missionaries reported as well stories that enshrine books as icons of English Protestant power . The first successful lecture featured theatrical gestures intended to draw Indians without conventional literacy to a knowledge of their worldly sin; Eliot noted of one auditor that “we held forth to him the Bible,” while to the group more generally, the minister argued that “they must lament . . . their ignorance of Gods booke (which wee pointed to) which directs how to ser ve him.” The tracts imagined the book as a weapon, derived from the purportedly insincere perception of Passaconnaway, an Amerindian leader . Having fled from conversion efforts, the sachem then abjured a meeting with missionaries because, according to Shepard, the sachem “pretend[ed] feare of being killed by a man for sooth that came only with a book in his hand, and with a few others without any weapons only to bear him company and direct his way in those deserts.” Whether savvy pretense or actual fact, Passaconnaway’s “fear” of the book betrays a threatening power that missionaries can only misrecognize. In one case, the report understood the book as an amulet. Hiacoomes’s was represented as a model pilgrim martyr during a period of disease: “The Indians having many calamities fallen upon them they laid the cause of all their wants, sicknesses, and death, upon their departing from their old heathenish ways, only this man held out, and continued his care about the things of God: and being desirous to read, the English gave him a Primer, which he stil carries about with him.” Record, totem, artiller y, charm—this figural thickening of the book constructed it as a wonder , thus remarking and championing the perceived cultural differences between the English and the Amerindians. 48 Even book format was implicitly conceived as a divine mar vel, allowing providential reading practices and continual, visual access. Conclud-

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ing his report, Shepard hears a stor y of a praying Indian who feels the vulnerability of being caught between the suspicions of native tribes and English settlers, and yet takes heart in Christianity . Shepard considers the speech a “speciall providence,” noting the situation of receiving the tale as supplying meaningful closure to his letter: “that such a speech should be spoken and come to my eare just at such a time as this, wherein I was finishing the stor y . . . confirme[s] in some measure what hath been written.” Similarly , the tracts turn the serendipity of Eliot’ s preaching on Ezekiel 37 into further proof of the Jewish origins of Amerindians. And John Dur y, who facilitated this conjecture, actually cites Jesus’ preaching at Nazareth (Luke 4.18) as a form of bibliomancy that augurs well for the mission: “When our Lord came to Nazaret, and standing up to read: Its said there was delivered unto him the book of Isaias, and he opened the book, and found it written,The spirit of the Lord is upon me, &c. The bringing of that Scripture to our Lords hands so providentially, was a hint (at least) that the present hearers were in an eminent manner concerned in that prophesie.” In the Dialogues, Eliot valued writing as a visual technology abolishing the temporal and spatial constraints of aural media. He had praying Indian Anthony distinguish “scripture” from other bookish terms, defining it as “The word and will of God written in a book, whereby we not only hear it with our ears, when it is spoken by others, but we may see it with our eyes, and read the writing ourselves. . . . Yea, and such as cannot have an opportunity of hearing the word, yet they may always have an opportunity of reading the word, because it is written in the Bible; which they have by them in their houses, and may read in it night and day.” While literacy, as we have seen, was highly mediated by orality and always hemmed in by social authority, English missionaries here make the readable book a mar velous artifact of individual access and constant “opportunity.”49 The treatment of the written record as a wondrous artifact coalesces in the final testimony of Waban, a figure who looms large in the tracts as one of the earliest converts and best preachers and whose text opens one of Eliot’ s last publications, 1680’ s The Dying Speeches of Several Indians. Indeed, as it measures the perceived difference between cultures of writing and orality, as it typifies the characterization of Amerindians, and as it engages an aesthetic of the thick style, the passage deserves quoting at length. I now rejoyce though I be now a dying, great is my affliction in this world, but I hope that God doth so afflict me, only to tr y my praying to God in this world whether it be true and strong or not, but I hope God doth urgently call me to Repentance, and to prepare to come unto him; therefore] He layeth on me great pain and affliction, though my body be almost broken by sickness, yet I desire to remember thy name Oh my God, untill I dy I remember those words Job

Race 201 19.23, to 28. Oh that my words were now written, oh that they were printed in a book that they were graven with an iron pen and lead in a rock forever. For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand in the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin, wormes destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God, &c50

However we might take this as an authentic testimony of faith, its function in the promotional literature is to continue the portrait of the melancholic praying Indian. The thickening aesthetics of genre and typology contribute to this characterization. His affliction draws on the language of feeling, its sentiment reinforced by the deathbed rhetoric of the “dying words” genre. W aban compares himself typologically to Job. The trope of the eschatological body prompts the sensor y imagination as well. Through “bodilie eyes,” a mode familiar from our look at elegies in Chapter 4, Waban contemplates the actualities of the corpse, the vivified flesh at the resurrection, and the incarnate Christ. His affliction is also spiritual, the speech registering his anxiety over whether the prayer is “true and strong or not” and his conflicted feelings of “rejoyc[ing]” while in “great pain.” Though a convert admitted into church-estate, Waban still wrestles with his faith, in a processual movement typical of puritan piety and essential to the fund-raising effort. The typological reference to Job recalls the architectonics of the body—the restoration of his broken, mortally sinful frame into “flesh” before God—while prompting a sacred temporality , one that interidentifies Job, the “Redeemer,” and W aban, and that points simultaneously backward to Hebraic suffering and forward to eschatological salvation, with Christ at its origin, apogee, and telos. 51 Moreover, Waban uses Job to emphasize the print artifact’ s status as a monumental wonder. He focuses on the practice of inscription, on the various tools of civilization—“print,” “iron pen,” and “lead”—required for a text’s material presence in codices (“ a book”) or on the landscape (“a rock”). He associates the creation of such a text with memory, with his desire to “ remember [God’s] name” and to create a permanent tribute to God “forever.” Further, the King James Bible cited here presents striking textual variants for Job, variants that highlight the hand-press codex as a privileged artifact of W estern Europe’ s self-identification. While standard for New England ministers, the King James substitutes the verb “print” and the noun “book” for the Hebrew original’ s “engrave” and seper (meaning “book” or “scroll”) and for the Geneva Bible’s more general “write” and “written in a book.” The Hebrew original’ s sense of engraving on scroll papyrus or codex parchment seems unlikely; solutions have been to retain “engrave” and adjust seper to “tablet,” “monument,” or “copper.”52 Given this crux, translator preference for the language of the “printed book” is significant. The citation remarks the symbolic in-

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vestment of learned Westerners in the durational power of early modern book technologies. Even as it admits of the human hands necessar y for material production, the Job passage returns to a pious zone analogous to typology itself: from the Western perspective, written artifacts abolish the constraint of time. Their enduring sacred contents exist transhistorically. This sacred temporality is matched, however, by a worldly temporality that further demotes oral knowledge. The passage features a doublevoiced irony , whereby a perceived oral culture has its language preserved by and for a society of writing. The speech casts the Amerindian as naïvely hopeful, plaintively orating in the subjunctive—“Oh that [his words] were printed in a book”—while Anglo readers, temporally and epistemologically situated by the presence of the book, know the speech has been recorded. Patron Robert Boyle most likely received a copy of the 1680 title, and the ideological function of the passage’ s polyvocal thickening is clear: the temporality of the book works by structuring readerly consciousness with after -the-fact knowledge while denigrating the simple orality of the Amerindian. The passage exists as a readerly example of “salvage ethnography ,” what James Clifford critiques as the writerly impulse of Western anthropology.53 The written record—its imagery and its phenomenological experience—participated in the colonialist ideology of literacy , wherein the production of books permanently recording God’s name confirms the W est as a literate culture of civilization and memor y.

An Epistemology of the Archive The Eliot tracts remind us finally that an archive is actively constructed: it is made up of written records and of a value system designed to remember and restore a past civilization. As such, it is a source for literary history. Oral culture is another source: Amerindian oral societies, for instance, retain memories, preser ve knowledge, and engage the imagination through speech genres. But in the face of genocidal war and disease during the early modern period, such legacies were threatened by the loss of these human archives. To focus on the written record is not to ignore oral traditions but to acknowledge the qualitative difference of documentary texts—their artifactual existence, over and against the transience of speech—and then to address the power relations that embrace, forget, or reject such differences. Historiographers are well aware of these fundamental problems of evidence; specialists in Amerindian literatures have actively worried the politics of orality and literacy; and literary historians of the colonies and the United States have pursued these tensions in other regions and periods. 54 But early Americanists

Race 203 have been oddly mute on Eliot’ s role in telling the stor y of AngloAmerican letters. Indeed, recent and searching literar y historiography of language and of cross-cultural conflict neglects Eliot and the mission’s production of an archive. Book histor y’s concern with the publication and preser vation of words in the contact zone usefully deepens the linguistic and postcolonial emphases of this scholarship. For instance, William Spengemann’s challenge to redefine American literary histor y is engaged by the discourse and realities of the Eliot tracts. Spengemann’s argument is both synchronic and diachronic, contextual and durational. His synchronic, contextual claim is that literature of the postcontact, prenational period is determined not by extralinguistic categories of nationality , geography, or chronology , but rather by the separate European languages that determine the literature’s character. Critics are best ser ved seeing literature of the colonial period not as anticipating a nationalist United States art, but rather as a process wherein New W orld encounter alters European languages, a process he refers to as “Americanization.” Less attended to is the diachronic, durational element of Spengemann’s argument. He posits an evolutionary scheme to understand language’ s literariness. The object of study in literary history are the texts that endure, the ones that create a “shock of recognition, an impression of presentness that seems to deny their age”: “the most significant verbal per formances of the past, the ones we call literature, are those that appear to have created, and hence to participate in, the language that constitutes our world.” 55 Historicist and refreshingly presentist, Spengemann’ s claim is nonetheless weakened most obviously by its disregard for the contingencies of value that decide which texts will and will not endure. The exile of Amerindian languages and art from Spengemann’ s canon is similarly problematic, and Eliot’s inscription of Massachusett speech muddies Spengemann’ s “Americanization” thesis. What the Eliot mission demonstrates is that language has a material determination, that it is preserved through writing technologies and social negotiations taken up by human agents who bear differing systems of value. Both traditional jeremiad studies and postcolonial literar y theor y might benefit likewise from renewed attention to the Eliot writings; taking up the material histor y of words over time (rather than Spengemann’s ideational theor y of literar y language) will help us pursue an epistemology of the archive, by which I mean a study of not only what we know from the evidential record of this period, but also how we know what we know . So, while in the name of Amerindian literacy , the new hand press that Eliot secures contributed to a second-generation white archive, the jeremiad sermons and elegiac laments produced by ministers reacting to the first emigrants’ founding purity . The material and

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historiographic success of second-generation textuality is both pervasive and misrecognized. One lost fact is the sheer contingency of this archive. Eliot secured the press in 1659 just prior to the Restoration, a period which would be of obvious instability for the puritan settlements; and while Eliot maintained support from Charles after 1660, he did so partly through the press’s “Indian Library” product. Indeed, the Indian Bible was used as a display copy at court for fund-raising; such a monu56 The ment was both wondrous and illegible to the English king. transatlantic missionar y movement ser ved a print agenda that became— contingent on its reception by historians of the jeremiad—strikingly nation based. From 1660 to 1674, the Cambridge print-house used, along with the original press, the Indian press brought over by Marmaduke Johnson. Its peregrinations after 1674 seem to have led it to the new Boston print shop, and there is a suggestion that Johnson imported a third press for the Cambridge house that went idle and unlicensed. But in the key years of 1660–74, the Indian press enabled the Cambridge house’s productivity; and, arguably , the Indian press constituted the post-1674 Boston house run in succession by John Foster, Samuel Sewall, and Samuel Green. In any event, the presence of two functional presses—when together at Cambridge after 1659 or when competing post-1674—reinforced each and thus boosted local production of English titles. But keeping to the Cambridge location where we can confirm the Indian press’s service, what was produced between 1660 and 1674? For The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Hugh Amor y describes this output as follows: “eccleasiastical and municipal laws, Indian texts, and practical divinity.”57 Buried in a paragraph, itself a set of subordinate phrases, Amory’s bracing summar y within this comprehensive reference work startles any literar y or intellectual historian versed in puritan r hetoric, because it is The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World’s only mention of the second-generation archive. For literar y and intellectual historians, certain titles of the 1660s and 1670s, however, loom large: John Davenport’s God’s Call to His People (1669), William Stoughton’s New England’s True Interest (1670), Jonathan Mitchel’ s Nehemiah on the Wall (1671), Samuel Danforth’s A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness (1671), Thomas Shepard’s Eye-Salve (1673), Urian Oakes’s New England Pleaded With (1673), and Increase Mather’ s The Day of Trouble is Near (1674). These classic jeremiads came to define literar y culture for later historians who restricted their study to colonial authors and local imprints. It is a print culture whose pretext is Ninnimissinuok populations. How did this handful of sermons become representative of a singular mode of “American” expression? The jeremiad titles make up Perr y Miller’s archive in his influential 1956 essay on the culture of declen-

Race 205 sion, “Errand into the Wilderness.” Although now an academic mainstay, the essay was itself, on the one hand, contingently occasioned by a 1952 book exhibit of New England-related publications at the John Carter Brown librar y. Miller credits the curators, and then Samuel Danforth, for his theme, and it is certainly credible that his deep learning emerged, procedurally, from the constraint of an exhibition title whose metaphor of “errand” cr ystallized Miller’ s view of the New England mind. On the other hand, the librar y display of textual monuments reproduced—here in a Cold War showcase for superpower nationalism— 58 the ideology of literate civilization embedded in the Eliot tracts. Miller’s narrow focus, when compared with the relative diversity of the exhibition catalogue, illustrates how an archive becomes a canon, how a range of texts are selected, interpreted, and consecrated as authoritative. For Miller , the literature of the second-generation Cambridge sermons embodies a double failure, marking the transition from an errand for Protestants in England, an audience who has lost interest in the colony’s effort at reform, to an errand of its own, whereby New England has attempted a utopia, but lost the vocation of its founders, and found a den of iniquity . Miller’ s is a threnody whose memorable coda runs “Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America.” In The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch’s point of origin is “Errand into the Wilderness,” but he converts Miller’s pessimistic theme into a positive ritual, transhistorical in scope. The litany of complaint about a backsliding generation was only one section of a three-part sermon, dynamic in its arc of promise, condemnation, and affirmation: however much realities contradicted the vision of a chosen people, the vision itself became a reality, its imaginative reach of righteous self-justification providing “social cohesion and continuity.” Bercovitch’s “The Puritan Errand Reassessed” was followed by David Scobey’s 1984 essay “Revising the Errand.” For Scobey, the puritan ministers were left alone with American histor y. The second-generation literature reaches backward not solely to idealize the founders, but also to construct New England as “an object of historical consciousness.” The sermons exhort “their audience to regain as a memorialized past what has been lost as a present custom.” The formula and its intellectual consequences became the organizing device for a chapter by Emor y Elliott in The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994). Along with itemizing the second-generation sermons, “The Jeremiad” subsumes Mar y Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and Cotton Mather’ s Magnalia Christi Americana. Miller’ s, Bercovitich’ s, Scobey’ s, and Elliott’ s are scholarly works of canon formation that use as their substrate the works by Daven-

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port, Stoughton, Mitchell, Danforth, Shepard, Oakes, and Mather published from 1660 to 1674 by the Indian press. 59 Miller’s “Errand into the Wilderness” has become notoriously problematic for its “exceptionalist” emphasis, an emphasis hinted at in the language of puritans “alone with America.” Bercovitch, Scobey , and Elliott are more nuanced in seeing transatlantic and cross-cultural meanings for the jeremiad. And Miller’ s method has recently been subjected to searing postcolonial critique. Jane T ompkins and Amy Kaplan compellingly analyze an anecdote about the Congo that prefaces the 1956 volume where the “Errand” essay was first published. Miller’ s vocation, he tells us, emerged from an epiphany felt while he was unloading oil drums in Africa. At this moment of transnational presence and U.S. imperialism, he understood that he should write the histor y of the New England mind. It is an intellectual and literar y histor y that, for T ompkins, describes precontact North America as a “vacant” wilderness and that, for Kaplan, evades slavery and the Chesapeake as an alternative origin for American studies. T ompkins and Kaplan miss, however , the deeper forms of racial subordination that structure his archive. 60 A fully historicized postcolonial analysis would thus recognize that Miller’ s evidential record is itself a product of publication technologies in the seventeenth century, technologies that were predicated on the use value of indigenous peoples. Book history that integrates study of bibliographical transmission and cultural politics might help the literary scholar best navigate the archive. While I am skeptical of the Eliot writings as ethnographic realism, a native’s prophetic dream, as reported by Thomas Shepard in a tract from 1648, might guide us in this fashion. Foregrounding an approach that examines the material histor y of imaginative language, the dream-stor y comments critically on the temporal potential of the book in the face of Amerindian genocide: That about two yeers before the English came over into those parts there was a great mortality among the Indians, and one night he could not sleep above half the night, after which hee fell into a dream, in which he did think he saw a great many men come to those parts in cloths, just as the English now are apparelled, and among them there arose up a man all in black, with a thing in his hand which hee now sees was all one English mans book. . . . this black man he said stood upon a higher place than all the rest. . . . this man told all the Indians that God was moosquantum or angry with them, and that he would kill them for their sinnes.61

If we take it as European fantasy, the story confirms the theology of colonial conquest—the export of W estern pathogens is transmuted into divine judgment. As Native American expression, however , something

Race 207 deeper is happening, something not satisfactorily named as either fatalistic superstition or optimistic, Homi Bhabha–like mimicr y. As a narrative drawn from what Myra Jehlen calls the “zone of contest”—where competing civilizations meet and use resources both culturally distinct and culturally shared—the story articulates critical agency in response to European colonialism. 62 Drawing on the culturally distinct authority of dreams within Algonkian society , the prophecy claims control over the future; because it happens two years before actual English settlers arrive, the dream-narrative anticipates Christian ideology. Drawing on a culturally shared critical reason, the stor y interrogates this ideology . As prophecy, the dream announces a present and future of genocide, exposing the genocide’s European rationalization through Christian civility, where the power of the “man all in black” is communicated through clothing and identified by “the thing in his hand,” the book. The stor y powerfully demystifies book technologies, and it is power fully felt through moods of anger , sorrow , and frustration. It is an alternative starting point for the Eliot mission and early American literar y studies: a dystopian prophecy made up of hard facts.

Notes

Introduction 1. Crouch, Admirable Curiosities, 21; Cressy, “Books as Totems,” 96; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 26. The story told by Crouch (who also published as “Richard Burton” and “Robert Burton”) was recounted and embodied in Vox Piscis; or, the Book-Fish (1627). The event has been examined for the light the prodigy sheds on providentialism and University of Cambridge politics in the 1620s—the story “was manipulated by ministers and laymen as a weapon in a struggle to preser ve what they believed to be the Church of England’s historical identity” (Walsham, “Vox Piscis,” 605)—and for the light it sheds on bookbinding as a crucial determinant in understanding our cultural deposits (L ynch, “Vox Piscis,” 156–57). 2. Axtell, “The Power of Print,” 302–4. 3. Harriot, “A Brief and T rue Report,” 130; Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine,” 44. I borrow “Ninnimissinuok” from Kathleen Bragdon, who adopts the term— Narragansett for “people”—to discuss the Amerindian populations of southern New England. See Native People of Southern New England. 4. Fuller, Good Thoughts in Bad Times, 54–55. 5. Spengemann, A New World of Words, 43–50; Amor y, “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” 28. 6. David Shields notes that “literar y culture” as a term is an invention of the 1830s, used by critics to describe “communicative manners” in lieu of the language of “genius” or “tradition” (“Eighteenth-Centur y Literar y Culture,” 434). Possibly anachronistic, the idea will be expanded and defined in Chapter 1 through the canon of the steady sellers and through an aesthetic of the thick style: both are modalities inculcating pious, if not genteel, manners. The term’ s use in puritan studies returns us to Thomas Goddard W right’s 1920 work on the circulation of books in early New England ( Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620–1730). While literary critics and literar y historians have veered away from W right’s documentation, book specialists recognize his pioneering efforts—though they also note his limitations (see Gilreath, “American Book Distribution,” 106–9). Simply attuning literary and cultural critics to the titles W right and Worthington Ford (The Boston Book Market) itemized is one of this monograph’ s goals. 7. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 48–49; Hall, “Readers and Writers,” 126–27; Bremer, Congregational Communion, 202–52; Ford, The Boston Book Market. 8. Ian Green comprehensively sur veys the production and circulation of the steady sellers in England: for editions and print runs see Print and Protestantism, 168–80; for the (as Green notes) hardly believable single print-run number for

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Alleine’s Alarme, see 339. On the “bricks,” see Foster, The Long Argument, 87; and on “popular consumption,” see Hall, “Readers and W riters,” 127. A reader -based literar y histor y for other periods of American literature is equally compelling. Jay Fliegelman (“Forum”) provokes us to think about the importance of Dickens to U.S. readers; Meredith McGill (American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting) studies more intensively the culture of reprinting in nineteenth-century America; and Leon Jackson (“The Reader Retailored”) has traced reader response to Carlyle. Recent scholarship that reckons the centrality of religious texts to popular consumption in the U.S. includes work by Paul Gutjahr (An American Bible), David Paul Nord (Faith in Reading), and Candy Gunther Brown (The Word in the World). 9. “Thomas Shepard’s Confessions,” 115, 107–8, 112. 10. Essex, Robert Muzzey (March 18, 1643, will); Essex, Christopher Y ongs (June 9, 1647, will); Essex, Sarah Dillingham (July 1636, inventor y); Essex, William Casely (May 30, 1672, inventor y). John Spar hawk (1674–1718), Commonplace book, Ms. Holdings, American Antiquarian Society. 11. Julia, “Reading and the Counter -Reformation,” 259. Though without its quantitative range and economic expertise, my argument is, from this macrological perspective, in the methodological spirit of William St. Clair’ s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period and “The Political Economy of Reading.” The latter warns against a literar y or intellectual histor y following the metaphors of the “parade” (great individual thinkers marching across histor y) and the “parliament” (great individual thinkers conversing within histor y). Instead, St. Clair presses scholars to consider what was read at the time period scrutinized and how the literature of that time period might itself be handed down from the past rather than newly composed within the topical moment under study. But St. Clair’s “tranches” of publication and access—the movement of the demand cur ve, where modern texts enlighten elites and slowly trickle down in small formats, while affordable older texts provide subsistence for nonelites—result in a correspondence model of class and culture (where genres, serials, or titles can be read as simply reflecting the tastes of a predetermined socioeconomic group), a reflectionist theor y that both book historians and cultural studies scholars have mostly abandoned. See St. Clair, “The Political Economy of Reading,” 3–9. 12. Hall, “The Uses of Literacy,” 59. 13. See Rice, The Transformation of Authorship; Round, “By Nature and Custom Cursed” ; and Johns, The Nature of the Book. Valuably though briefly, Kevin J. Hayes attends to the devotional books in his reference guide A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf (28–45). 14. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 10. 15. Sherman, John Dee; Sharpe, Reading Revolutions; Brayman Hackel, Reading Material; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, 92–97, and “Irrational,” passim; Achinstein, 4–25. Sharpe notes the subsuming of religious reading to concerns with state governance in Drake ( Reading Revolutions, 225–35). Brayman Hackel obser ves piety’s service to gender ideologies of the Renaissance and rightly subordinates piety to display the range of reading practiced by women in the period (15, 212). Y et if not her main focus, how much devotional reading makes up the texture of consumption is evident in the expert appendix listing the Countess of Bridgewater’s library: note the Bibles, psalters, the titles by Richard Rogers, Thomas à Kempis, Samuel Smith, and Johann Gerhard, and at least two editions of Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Pietie, one in English, one in French, with possibly a third included as

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well (260–81). Raymond per haps overstates early modern readership historiography’s emphasis on the utility-minded or goal-oriented reader , embodied in a Gabriel Harvey or John Dee. Consider the landmark studies of the Italian miller Menocchio’s cosmology (Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms) and the mental world of Samuel Sewall (Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 213–38). Similarly, Adrian Johns has fruitfully discussed religious enthusiasm as a reading mode in “The Physiology of Reading” ( The Nature of the Book, 408–28). But, as with the chapter title and the book more generally , his scientific bias is betrayed when the diction of “mechanisms” is selected to describe devotional literacy habits (412). The pious’s self-understanding would name these reading practices “means.” Margaret Spufford’s Small Books and Pleasant Histories is the germinal early modern scholarship tracing reading practices among the humble devout. 16. Green, Print and Protestantism; Foster , The Long Argument, 90, 88; Hall, “Readers and Writers,” 127. 17. Spengemann, A New World of Words, 43–50; Shields, Civil Tongues; Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes; Lepore, The Name of War; Norton, In the Devil’s Snare. 18. Spengemann, A New World of Words, 37. 19. Kernan, The Death of Literature; Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies; Ong, Orality and Literacy and The Presence of the Word; Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind. 20. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice; Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 1–33. 21. Chartier, “Texts, Printings, Readings,” 170. 22. Essential sources for the cultural histor y of early American per formance are Fliegelman ( Declaring Independence), St. George ( Conversing by Signs), and Gustafson (Eloquence Is Power). 23. This is to be distinguished from a phenomenology of the reader . For example, W olfgang Iser demotes the role of material formatting when citing Woolf’s appreciation of Jane Austen: “The ‘enduring form of life’ which Virginia Woolf speaks of is not manifested on the printed page; it is a product arising out of the interaction of text and reader .” In usefully attending to the dynamic between verbal content and gaps or blanks, Iser under values the structure of the physical text. See Iser, “Interaction,” 293. 24. Darnton, “First Steps,” 157. 25. For examples, see Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling ; HambrickStowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines ; Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative; Selement, Keepers of the Vineyard; Cohen, God’s Caress; Hall, Worlds of Wonder ; Knight, Orthodoxies. 26. Lake, “Defining Puritanism—Again?,” 27. Stephen Foster similarly argues that New England did not feature declension so much as a reritualization and institutionalization of such modes of piety as the centur y progressed (The Long Argument). Students of puritanism tend now to focus on the semantics of the term in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than to identify a set of public positions regarding the reform of church governance and liturgy , positions held exclusively by figures who could then be named “puritans” (as opposed to, say, “Anglicans”). Scholars currently understand the term as a weapon in a rhetorical battlefield, where outsiders or insiders might adopt or reject the name to label individuals or groups. Following Lake and Patrick Collinson, I maintain that a style of piety can be discerned, one that does not reduce individuals or groups to certain theological, doctrinal, or sociopolitical positions. When traits of this spiritualizing impulse can be found, we recognize a puritan sensibility in the same way that—borrowing from Wittgenstein—resemblances gather to

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help us know a member of a family. For more detailed reflection on the term in the light of English and American puritan studies, see Winship, “W ere There Any Puritans?” 27. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 157–61. Because of an interest in religious affect across a spectrum of worshippers (including unconverted churchgoers and horse-shed Christians), I do not treat the ritual of the Lord’ s Supper, the most holy moment in the life of piety and one whose conduct is regulated in a number of devotional steady sellers. 28. The plotted, twelve-step “morphology of conversion” has been rethought by the scholars of experiential piety . Michael McGiffert’ s editorial work on Thomas Shepard’s life writings best illustrates the liminal process characteristic of the devout. 29. Such an orientation is attuned to the ordinary laity, rather than to the theological sophistication of seminar y histor y. The language of “christology ,” “kairotic time,” or “recapitulative typology” is certainly alien to a Joseph T ompson or Mary Rock, readers I treat in the subsequent pages; to listen to their language is an attempt to respect their representation of the pious life. T o be sure, “phenomenology” and “subjectivity” are foreign to T ompson and Rock as well. Yet one term that both my historical subjects and my present-day audience would share is “performance”: the steady sellers repeatedly speak of behavior and conduct in performative cadences, a music with which contemporary readers in the academy are no doubt familiar. 30. Tompkins, Sensational Designs; Davidson, Revolution and the Word. 31. Noyes “A Prefatory Poem,” 275. For an excellent discussion of panic, desire, and sex/gender norms in New England’s devotional poetry, see Hughes, “‘Meat Out of the Eater’”; for a reception history of Anne Hutchinson keen to the gender politics of male perception, see Lang, Prophetic Woman. Again, the image of oppressive puritan masculinity can do cultural work in the present to the benefit of male power: it becomes a self-congratulator y measure of our “progress” and a disowned Other mirroring our repression. 32. Michael Warner discusses new uses of print technology and new publication genres in the 1720s moment; see The Letters of the Republic, 30–33. 33. Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spirit of the Old W riters,” 281–82, 284. 34. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 113–14 and 212–21, 223–40. 35. Rosenwald, “Sewall’s Diary,” 332. 36. Fox, Time, 3; Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, 187. W eld, from “Spiritual notes and duties” in his commonplace book, 133. Chapter 1 1. Holmes, Increase Mather, 323–27; Fairbanks and T rent, New England Begins, 132; Carter, ABC for Book Collectors, 62; Increase Mather, The Life, sig. A2v. 2. Genette, Paratexts, 1–2. Although Genette keeps his study to verbal paratexts, Jerome McGann questions this restraint and focuses on visual paratexts as well; see The Textual Condition, 13. 3. See also Jer. 31.33. 4. Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 19–20; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 24, 42. 5. While alert to rhetoric and to devotional affections, Perry Miller’s emphasis on utilitarian aesthetics and intellectual rigor—drawn from ministerial critiques of the “high style”—has nevertheless cemented this view of New England art for

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nonspecialists. See “Literar y Theory,” in Miller and Johnson, eds., The Puritans: A Sourcebook, 666. 6. Jager, The Book of the Heart, xv. 7. I refer in the Introduction to the tradition of “pure bibliography ,” wherein W. W. Greg conceived of verbal or visual content as “arbitrar y marks” on the page with no bearing on a bibliographer’s inquiry. See Greg, “Bibliography—An Apologia,” 247. But even book histor y might be questioned in this regard: a quantitative focus on the book trades can slight exegesis, missing the qualitative differences between texts and ordinar y items of trade. 8. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 214, 72. 9. Thomas qtd. in Amory, “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” 45; Amory, “Printing and Bookselling,” 104. For a corrective to cultural histor y that would derive from these records either an “anglicization” of colonial culture due to London dominance or an independent, puritan influence due to the consumption of locally printed matter, see Amory, “Under the Exchange,” 89. 10. Wright, Literary Culture, 233, 235; Amory, “Printing and Bookselling,” 108, 109; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 31. 11. Selement, Keepers of the Vineyard, 63–73; on Sewall, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 45–46, 236–37; the Newberr y Library copy of Ephraim Huit, Whole Prophecie of Daniel Explained (London, 1643), Case C 3859 .41; Calamy , The Godly Man’s Ark, 62; John Foxe qtd. in Hall, “Introduction,” 3. 12. Mather qtd. in Wright, Literary Culture, 223. Weld, Commonplace book, 43. The literature on gift economies is vast, inaugurated by Mauss, and nicely summarized by Schrift, “Introduction,” 1–22, and by Frow , Time and Commodity Culture, 102–217. For an example of the gifting of devotional books in an early modern aristocratic household, see Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 229–30. 13. Cohen, God’s Caress, 53–55. Natalie Zemon Davis discusses Calvin’ s use of “inheritance” to explain salvific relations with God, and to suggest the vertical and asymmetrical gift circuit of Protestantism; see Davis, The Gift in SixteenthCentury France, 114–21. 14. Cohen, God’s Caress, 68, 70. The pitch of debate between the “orthodoxy” and the “antinomians” was and is organized around the nature of the gift of God’s grace, such that Michael P. Winship renames the crisis “the free-grace controversy”; see Making Heretics. See also Knight, Orthodoxies and Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain, for reconsiderations of the controversy . My point is that laity would feel, if not articulate, these broader , contradictor y frameworks, that the devout would experience both sides without necessarily taking sides. 15. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 26; Murdock, ed., Handkerchiefs, 7–9; St. George, “‘Heated,’ ” 304; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 103. 16. Collinson, “‘The Coherence of the Text,’ ” 107. 17. Davies describes early New England’s ritualized worship practices in Worship. 18. Kibbey’s study of puritan iconoclasm and the acoustic materiality of preaching pursues a similar contradiction; see The Interpretation of Material Shapes. 19. Miller , Seventeenth, 3–34, Schweitzer , The Work of Self-Representation, 7–9; Cohen, God’s Caress, 15. For this affective life more generally , see Cohen, God’s Caress; Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines; McGiffert, “Introduction,” God’s Plot; and Knight, Orthodoxies. 20. For the Pauline doctrine, see Lewalski, Protestant Poetics; for covenant psychology and the way of salvation, see Cohen, God’s Caress, 47–110. 21. Cotton Mather, Humiliations, 21. 22. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 45; on

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reading and writing as unofficial means, see 157–61, 186–93. Dwight Bozeman establishes the ritualization of piety thoroughly , conceptualizing it in terms of shared costs and gains, torment and reward, in The Precisianist Strain, 175–79. 23. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 12, 22, 24. 24. Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain, 145–46; Sibbes qtd. in Heimert and Delbanco, eds., The Puritans in America, 19. W eld, Commonplace book, 133. “Anxious” is a well-worn adjective to describe early New Englanders; but I intend to use it here in a precise sense: as a mode of being that habitually read signs and pressed for answers, in the context of both uncertainty and assurance. Anxiety over the soul’ s salvation was, in Raymond Williams’ s formulation, a deeply engrained structure of feeling for puritan subjects; see Marxism and Literature, 134. 25. Both doctrinally and practically , the materiality of spiritual communication was countenanced in the period. Theologically, the doctrine of means—the notion that God accommodates Himself to the limits of human understanding and that worshippers can seek knowledge through means such as the Bible—acknowledged the efficacy of mediation through texts like the preached sermon. Emblem books were central to devotional exercise throughout the period—their visual images were used for meditation—as was “composition of place,” the method whereby the pious would visually imagine themselves in biblical or spiritual settings (HambrickStowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 29–32, 38–39). David W atters’s study of gravestone images and eschatology locates a tradition of sensor y epistemology and mediated divinity derived from the writings of Richard Sibbes, John Owen, and the younger Mathers (“With Bodilie Eyes”). Robert Blair St. George has extensively theorized the semiotics of image, gesture, and space in early New England (Conversing by Signs). Edward Taylor’s poetry is another source for understanding the sensory and iconographic qualities of puritan devotion. Both Ann Kibbey and Charles Cohen point to the utility of double-bind communication in New England ministerial language and conversion theor y. For Kibbey, a sermon’ s “sound design exploits the hearer’ s aesthetic sensibility to promulgate a religion that doctrinally repudiates the intrinsic value of material forms. That is, the means by which the Puritans articulated their other worldly beliefs was deeply committed to the intrinsic meaning of concrete, material figurae” (The Interpretation of Material Shapes, 22). More generally , Kibbey indicates the importance of metacommunication—the mediating functions of gesture, tone, orality, and extemporaneity—to “the linguistic values in Puritan theology” (23, 24). The complications of meaning attendant upon the uses of metacommunication and material signs are controlled by ministers such as John Cotton, who yoke these extraverbal media to a “referential imperative,” a use of language that enforces the “simplicity of literal meaning” for the spiritual ends of communicating doctrine and effecting conversion (11). Contradictions within the ministerial r hetoric—such as the difference between doctrinal repudiation of material forms and practical deployment of concrete, sonic figures—are never recognized as such in the ministers’ discourse. Instead, listener -readers experience these contradictions; asked on the one hand to seek the spiritual referents of the ministers’ language, they are at the same time enjoined to accept the materiality of the language being presented. Invoking linguist Gregor y Bateson, Kibbey argues that this discourse functions as a “double-bind communication,” wherein two equally weighted but opposed imperatives determine the spiritual plight of pilgrim auditors and readers. Bateson’s notion has been useful to a very different study of puritan spirituality; Cohen’ s more sympathetic treatment invokes the “double-bind” to explain conversion processes ( God’s Caress, 62–63).

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26. Whether implicit in D. F . McKenzie’s belief in an aesthetic of decorous professionalism—embodied in Congreve—or avowed in Hershel Parker’ s defense of creative frenzy, editors refreshingly document relationships between the materiality of a text and its aesthesis. See McKenzie, “The Book as an Expressive Form” and Parker, Flawed Texts. At a more philosophical level, a number of editors have pursued an aesthetic inquir y first posed by F. W. Bateson, in what has become a classic ontological prompt for textual studies: If theMona Lisa is in the Louvre, where are Hamlet and Lycidas? In response to his prompt, Bateson dismisses the material existence of literar y art. But in taking up Bateson, ontological investigations by G. Thomas T anselle, James McLaverty , and Peter Shillingsburg redeem, to varying degrees, literature’s physique. D. C. Greetham collates these responses, to which should be added George Bornstein’s contribution, in work that, like McKenzie and Parker , lucidly blends practical criticism and theoretical insight. See Greetham, Textual Scholarship, 342–43, and Bornstein, “How to Read a Page,” 29. 27. McGann, The Textual Condition, 76. 28. Of course, we still live in a profoundly religious era. But the currents of intellectual, literar y, and economic histor y—from Enlightenment values to Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism, and their shifting relations with the marketplace—have added a secular component to cultural expression and production in the post-1700 period that have changed the roles of author , publisher, and reader , without replacing the adjusted perceptions of those roles among the devout. Of course, there are secular voices in these roles before 1700, but discourses of the Enlightenment surely have altered sensibilities from what Andrew Delbanco usefully calls the “age of belief” ( The Death of Satan, 21). 29. McGann, The Textual Condition, 72. 30. O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word, 57. These obser vations refract upon the current information revolution, and the claims for the “newness” of the new media. Historically, books—the steady sellers are an exemplary case—have been search engines, randomly accessed and cross-referenced; they have been physically experienced, engaging the senses in public and private settings; and they have been radically instable, printed with multiple variants and disseminated in reconfigured formats. As many book specialists have indicated, the salient analogy in the W estern tradition for the current information revolution is not the change from manuscript to print but rather the shift of the second to the fifth centuries C.E.: the movement from scroll to codex, where the enforced linearity of self-contained rolls gave way to the nonlinear navigation of individual and multiple books. As the codex format was enabled by navigational aids and crossreferencing techniques—word separation, page numbers, tables of contents, indices, concordances, librar y catalogues—that developed over the millennia, it modeled for the digital age the potentialities of random access. The digital age has reproduced, as O’Donnell explains, this antiquity-to-medieval knowledge revolution, with databases, search engines, and online catalogues exploiting the codex’s discontinuous access in an infinitely faster mode. Again, it is not, as Peter Stallybrass clarifies, that we have transcended the scrolling inter face and its plodding linearity—we are surrounded by modalities such as the videotape, the slide projector, and, not least, the computer screen of unlinked electronic text, all of which frustrate discontinuous use. And we are glimpsing a future where, in O’Donnell’s terms, we continue to make knowledge available to nonlinear access in as many ways as possible—only much faster. A cultural history of communication would want to account for the book format’ s difference, mea-

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suring it with allied codexical forms such as the magazine and the pamphlet; and against “scrolling” technologies, such as the roll, the videotape, and the computer screen. See O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word, 50–70, and Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,” 42–79. 31. James Green discusses Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–1719), the founder of Germantown, and his manuscript commonplace books “The Bee Hive” and the “Avearialia” in “The Book Trade,” 220. 32. Griffiths, Religious Reading, 101–8. 33. For the most intriguing applications of this paradigm to specific contexts, see Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls”; Masten, Stallybrass, and Vickers, eds., Language Machines, 3–4; the essays in Rhodes and Sawday , The Renaissance Computer; Zwicker, “The Constitution of Opinion,” 296–97; Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel; and Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” 29–30. In the shade of this endnote, I might gesture to the role of nonlinear reading in devotional cultures across the early modern West. While print-houses in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow , and Dublin published between them by 1701 over sixty English editions of Lewis Bayly’s The Practise of Pietie, this classic, encyclopedic steady seller was itself translated, also before 1701, into W elsh, Dutch, French, German, Romansch, Polish, and Massachusett, and went through multiple editions in the Northern European countries, an international life that was maintained well into the eighteenth centur y. A comparable devotional text of the traditional church, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, was organized by a table of contents to enable navigation for its international audience. While sequenced, the textual habits prompted by a Catholic manual such as St. Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life or the Ignatian Exercises entailed periods where the book’ s reading was discontinued for purposes of behavioral discipline. Hymnals and psalters organizing Reformation worship were likewise consulted for discrete songs. In preparing the 1588 Bible, Genevan pastors suggested that summaries of theological commentar y could replace cover -tocover readings of biblical exegesis (Gilmont, “Protestant Reformations,” 222). And in forms that would conjoin Hebrew and Christian scriptures, or only the gospels of the New T estament, or biblical books with psalmbooks and prayer books, or other varied combinations of the W ord in a single volume, the codex of the early modern West was of course accessed randomly and read collatively . 34. Index entries from Dent, The Plaine Man’s Path-way, sig. Cc5v–Cc6. Green, Print and Protestantism, 349. Kevin J. Hayes notes that a colonial abridgment of Bayly evidences a mode of selective reading, though the complete Bayly was likewise intended for extraction and the New England edition was surely motivated by saving costs through paper conser vation (A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf, 43). 35. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 2; Stubbes, Conscience, 44; Doolittle, A Call to Delaying Sinners, 3; Vincent, Words, sig. A3; Dyer , A Cabinet of Jewels in “Dyer’ s Works,” 28; Alleine, Alarme, 162. 36. Study of Psalm 119 from the perspective of religious textual histor y is extensive. For an over view, see Levenson, “Sources”; for commentar y, see Soll, Psalm 119. The centrality of the psalms more generally to English literary culture has begun to receive attention with Hamlin’ s Psalm Culture. 37. Citations are from the King James Bible, with spelling modernized, italics dropped, but punctuation mostly retained to indicate the bicolon. 38. See Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 145. 39. The early modern English versions consulted include the Coverdale Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the Bishops Bible (through the use of

Notes to Pages 36–40

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Wright, The Hexapler Psalter), and psalmbook translations by Sternhold and Hopkins, Henry Ainsworth, William Barton, T ate and Brady, and the New England ministers behind both the Bay Psalm Book ( The Whole Booke of Psalmes) and the New England Psalm Book ( The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs). 40. John Calvin, The Psalmes of David, part 2, 157 and 156 verso; Abbott, Brief, 575–76. 41. This vernacular commentary is to be distinguished from medieval and Renaissance continental readings, where the learned found in Psalm 119’ s structure numerological and prophetic significances. See Røstvig, “Structure,” 50–52. 42. In The Story of A, Patricia Crain explains that because the alphabet is an arbitrary order, it is saturated with meaning according to its historical context and specific uses. 43. The Whole Booke of Psalmes (Cambridge, Mass.: Stephen Day, 1640), American Antiquarian Society copy, Reserve 1640. For exposing me to this copy’s structural feature, I thank Joanne Chaison, Michael W arner, James Green, Peter Stallybrass, and participants in the “Publishing God” seminar at the American Antiquarian Society, June 2005. 44. John Cotton, The Whole Booke of Psalmes, sig. **3v. Format differences were the most glaring indicators of the literar y culture’s complexity. Larger formats featured double columns, with Ainsworth—preferred by the Plymouth separatists, and used there until 1692, and used in Salem as well—offering prose in one and verse in the other . The first local editions, however , featured a single column format, meaning that users handled an especially extended series of leaves when reading Psalm 119. The Geneva Bible of course presented marginal annotations; Ainsworth appended annotations; and headnote summaries appeared in Sternhold-Hopkins. The Bay Psalm Book dropped such an apparatus, while the first New England Psalm Book’s two versions of the psalm offered two minimal subheadings indicating their different meters. Later English and local versions of the New England translations were in double-column format; William Barton’s and the early Tate and Brady translations used a single column per page. 45. The neglect of the psalms by early American literar y critics is most odd; other than John Dorenkamp’ s two articles, there is scant interpretation of this essential reading matter. For cultural and print histories that provide a start, see Haraszti, The Enigma, Dorenkamp, “The Bay Psalm Book” and “The New England Puritans”; Amory, “Gods Altar”; and Targoff, Common Prayer, 118–30. 46. Daniell, The Bible in English, 276, 309, 451; Stout, “Word and Order in Colonial New England,” 24–26. Did one translation predominate in early New England? The presence of specific language from one version in the speech or writing of settlers is evidence of restricted influence, but provides little extrapolative value. Anne Hutchinson and William Bradford referred to the Geneva, John Eliot to the King James, and the Bay Psalm Book translators to both. As print product and export, the 1611 translation displaced the 1560 Calvinist text over the century of course, though one cautions that private ownership and inheritance can install older translations, such as the Geneva, within a family . 47. Sewall, The Diary, vol. 2, 270. Among many others, Psalm 119 is recommended by George Webbe to be sung “Commonly at all times” in the steady-seller A Garden of Spiritual Flowers (Rogers et. al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, 124). 48. Barton follows the King James focus on social discourse, and uses galloping tetrameter couplets; like Sternhold-Hopkins, the Tate and Brady version employs the common meter with four-line treatments of a single verse.

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Notes to Pages 41–53

49. Commentators are, for example., Calvin, Two and Twentie Sermons, 1 verso; Wilcox, A Very Godly, 494; and Poole, Annotations, sig. Xxxxxx. 50. Verse 111, The Whole Booke of Psalmes, unpaginated; verse 111, The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, 258, 270. For the use of ‘e-do- t, see Soll, Psalm 119, 43–44. 51. John Calvin, Two and Twentie Sermons, 1 verso. For the learning techniques Calvin here alludes to, see the essays and images in Sherman, Writing on Hands. 52. Amor y, “Printing and Bookselling,” 106; Ford, The Boston Book Market, 1679–1700, 119, 123, 168. 53. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, title page. Andrew and Thomas Delbanco describe the echoes of puritan religious culture in twelve-step language; see Delbanco, “A. A. at the Crossroads.” 54. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, sig. A3–A3v, sig. A2v, 3, 5, 72–73, 106. 55. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 10, 58, 133, 141, 173, 189. 56. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 124–125, 129, 126, 138, 151, 152, 153, 181, 182. For the readers as heirs, see 62–63, 122, 144. 57. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 4, 69, 73. 58. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 191, 99, 98, 95 and 144. 59. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 2, 7, 107, 106, 206, and 108–09, 146–47, 148, sig. c4, 113–14, 211–12. See also Leigh, A Treatise of the Divine Promises. 60. Hall, “Readers and Writers,” 554 n. 53. 61. Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, 28–30. John Sparhawk’s book in the American Antiquarian Society and Joseph Belcher’s book in the Massachusetts Historical Society follow Perkins’s scheme, with alphabetic heads on, in Belcher’s case for example, “Conscience,” “Good,” “Honesty” and “Ordinances.” Mary Thomas Crane (Framing Authority) studies the educative function of commonplacing in humanist pedagogy. Susan Stabile (Memory’s Daughters) moves past an exclusively literary treatment of the commonplace book to a larger understanding of its role in the material culture of memor y among genteel female coteries in colonial Philadelphia. 62. Weld, Commonplace book, 4, 7. Robert Blair St. George clarifies the role of memory theater in colonial New England; Ramist denunciations aside, elites and ordinary settlers used locations to remember key events or ideas and they used spaces to mark the convergence of the sacred and mortal worlds that made up ever yday reality. See Conversing by Signs, 8–9. These “common places” had their corollar y in the spatial disposition of books, which ser ve as an especially agile way to organize pictographic forms of nonhuman memor y. 63. Weld, Commonplace book, 21, 23, 25, 49, 43, 33. 64. Weld, Commonplace book, 16; see 26 for Thomas Hall, A Practical and Polemical Commentary . . . upon . . . the latter Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy. For Weld’s library, see Robinson and Robinson, “Three Early Massachusetts Libraries,” 166–75. 65. Weld, Commonplace book, 29, 5. 66. For example, see the long title of Mather, The Boston Ephemeris, which dates the year 1683 C.E. as also year 5632 “of the World’s Creation.” 67. Discussion of almanac-diaries can be found in the work of historians on the institutionalization of religion (Foster, “Not What But How,” 38) and on popular religion (Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 235); in literary treatments by Hilmer, “The Other Diar y of Samuel Sewall,” 354–65, and Rosenwald, “Sewall’ s Diar y,” 332; and in McCarthy, which is attentive to the interaction of print and script in the genre (see chapter 1, “A Page, A Day”).

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68. Thomas Paine’s almanac-diaries (1716–19, 1721) are in the Robert T reat Paine papers, 1659–1862, Massachusetts Historical Society. 69. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 6, 201–7. 70. Rosenwald, “Sewall’s Diary,” 331. 71. The Poole work’ s short title is Matthew Poole, Synopsis criticorum aliorumque, London, 1669. For Fuller’s invention, see Good Thoughts, 77. In a recent review of Burton, Charles Rosen recalls Fuller’ s place among these figures. But, like Ian Green, Rosen grants a kind of topical urgency to Good Thoughts in Bad Times—its “bad times” are the civil war—that misses the work’ s devotional rhythms. To be sure, one “mixt contemplation” begins “The Nation is scourged with a wasting war”; but Fuller’ s lesson renders this affliction in strictly nonpartisan terms. More fundamentally however, Good Thoughts stays in print long after the war; it operates in a time zone of piety, through a set of generic meditations, admonitions, and affirmations that have no necessar y historical referent. See Rosen, “The Anatomy Lesson,” 78–79, and Green, Print and Protestantism, 287. The procedural variation with Psalm 119 and, as we shall see in Chapter 4, the sport of anagrams indicate New Englanders’ linguistic play . 72. Swaim, “‘Come and Hear’: Women’s Puritan Evidences,” 35. 73. Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain, 132–36. 74. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, sig. A2v, sig. A4, and 212, 209–11, 211–12. 75. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 242, 245, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 249, 247, 250, 252. 76. Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 253, 254. 77. Tompson’s miscellany is Ms Am 929, Houghton Librar y, Harvard University. Born in Braintree in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on May 1, 1640, Joseph Tompson was the son of minister William Tompson and Abigail (Collins) Tompson. One of eight children, T ompson was the first of the family to be born in New England and was older brother to the poet Benjamin Tompson. In 1660, he moved to Billerica, where he acquired a twenty-seven-acre lot of land, and on July 24, 1662, he married Mary Brackett. As son and brother to ministers, he received a good education, though he did not become a preacher himself; he did become schoolmaster in Billerica on Januar y 19, 1679/80, and carried for ward this job for much of his life. Along with his role as educator , he ser ved in the Naragansett campaign of 1675 and headed a garrison in 1676 during King Philip’s War. He became an ensign in 1678, a lieutenant in 1693, finally becoming a captain of the Billerica militia. He was deacon in the Billerica church and town clerk from 1691 to 1702; in 1692 and 1699–1702, he served as deputy to the General Court. His family life saw the birth of five children with Mar y Brackett, the first of whom died young. Mar y Tompson herself died March 23, 1678/79; Joseph remarried Mar y Denison on March 17, 1680/81, and they had five children as well. Tompson passed away on October 13, 1732, when he was ninety-two years old. See Weis, The Rev. William Tompson, 16. 78. “24 novemb 1726 / when i began to write in this boock is noted in the beginning further on, and haveing writen it out and given wast paper left here in the beginning was willing to conclude my after noteing here now in the 86 year of mine age” 79. The heading for the list reads “Transcribed july 22 1719 in the eightieth year of mine age out of mr. lees joy of faith + noted by him as signs of the grace in page 204. aserted allso by mr. scudder”; the six signs then follow in Tompson’s miscellany. The source is Samuel Lee, Chara Tes Pisteos, or the Joy of Faith (Boston, 1687). 80. Standard for the era’ s diaries, it, as a citation style, recalls the almanac-

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diaries from the period discussed above, where users interleaved the printed calendar with blank pages for personal writing. 81. “Reading in my Cours in my family 27 Mat & Considering what my Dear Saviour had sufered.” 82. Thomas Shepard refers similarly to the “frowns of God” in his journal (McGiffert, God’s Plot, 120, 121). 83. “[T]hou fallest into the lake, that burneth with fire and brimstone,” warns Joseph Alleine, “where thou must lie scalding and sweltring in a fier y ocean, while God hath a being, if thou die in thy present case. And doth not thy soul tremble as thou readest? Do not thy tears bedew the paper , and thy heart throb in thy bosom? Dost thou not yet begin to smite on thy breast, and bethink thy self, what need thou hast of change?” ( Alarme, 146). 84. David S. Shields mentions these same-sex titles for men and for women as a minor literary campaign of third-generation settlers. See “Eighteenth-Centur y Literary Culture,” 468. 85. Foster, The Long Argument, 223–27. 86. The source reads: The Authors Advice. This Covenant I advise you to make, not only in heart, but in word: not only in word, but in writing; and that you would with all possible reverence spread the writing before the Lord, as if you would present it to him as your act and deed: And when you have done this, set your hand to it; Keep it as a memorial of the solemn transactions that have passed between God and you, that you may have recourse to it in doubts and temptations.

See R. Alleine, Vindiciae Pietatis, 209. 87. Doolittle, Call, 139; J. Alleine, Alarme, 170; Vincent, Wells of Salvation Opened, 150. Chapter 2 1. White, A Little Book for Little Children, 19. Hall argues that the image fuses the book with life, and he likens the three-page book to a mirror ( Worlds of Wonder, 28–29). Kevin J. Hayes notes White’s instruction for selective reading (A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf, 32). 2. Swinnock, The Works, 184. While designed for children, the Thomas White edition’s truncated state glimpses as well colonial publishing practices that would abridge English sources because of the need to economize on paper . 3. Historians of reading have posited a sociology of literacy for the early modern West, suggesting that in the limited print runs and distribution of the early hand-press period, readers owned fewer books and consulted the few they had intensively: repeatedly, deeply, with a reverence that corresponded to the often religious nature of the texts. In this thesis—which is debated—the late eighteenth centur y saw a shift to “extensive reading,” the consumption of a wide range of texts read cursorily. See Wittman, “Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Centur y?,” 285–86 and passim. 4. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 28; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 243. See also Smith, The Great Assize, 73 (“let them come to the word of God, and looke in this glasse, then they shall finde themselves much out of order: to have wounded Soules, and defiled consciences”), and Richard Alleine, “T o the Reader ,” in Joseph Alleine, Alarme, sig. B6v (“in this book there’ s a Glass that will shew thee thy face”).

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5. Jer. 15.16 reads, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts” (all biblical quotations in the main text are from the King James V ersion, unless noted). Scudder cited in Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 29; Calamy, The Godly Man’s Ark, 92; Mede, “The Interpretation of the Little Book,” 1–2. For Mede’s influence on early New England discourse, see Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 70. 6. Smith, The Great Assize, passim. 7. Mede, Daniels Weekes, Ephraim Huit, The Whole Prophecie of Daniel Explained. 8. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 76–77. 9. Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, title page; Drur y, “Introductor y Essay,” 3; Collinson, “‘The Coherence of the Text,’” 107. 10. Miles, God: A Biography, 388–89. 11. John Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 645, Alleine, Alarme, 148; Swinnock, The Door of Salvation Opened, 242. 12. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 246; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 1; Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium, 145–46. 13. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 247; Cotton Mather, A Boston Ephemeris, sig. B2; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 243; Webbe, “A Short Direction,” 128; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 316. 14. Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 631, emphasis added; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 142; Dent, The Plaine Man’s Path-way, 272. 15. Alleine, Alarme, 82; Ker, The Map of Man’s Misery, 124; Richard Bruch in Johann Gerhard, The Soules Watch, sig. A2v; Alleine, Alarme, 18. 16. Preface to Samuel Mather , Testimony from the Scripture against Idolatry, sig. A5v; Preface to Eleazar Mather, A Serious Exhortation, sig. A2r. 17. Webbe, “A Short Direction,” 123; Baynes, Briefe Directions Unto a Godly Life, 322; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 243; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 343. 18. Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 648; Baynes, Briefe Directions Unto a Godly Life, 296; Gerhard, Soules Watch, sig. A8; Dent, The Plaine Man’s Path-way, sig A3v. 19. White, A Way to the Tree of Life, sig. A3r–v, Cotton Mather, Boston Ephemeris, sig. B2; Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium, 82; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 648–49; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, sig. A4v. Downame likewise encourages skipping difficult passages or consulting commentar y. Downame even suggests that the routine reading schedule is a problem: “In which regard their practice bringeth little profit, who set themselves (as it were) to their taske, in reading over the Bible ever y yeere, and so many Chapters ever y day, if they rest in the deed done, and have little care how they doe it, and take more pains in reading over the words, then in attaining to their meaning” ( A Guide to Godlynesse, 645). To be sure, Downame’ s was a large folio of conduct literature that does not conform to the steady seller definition (see Foster , The Long Argument, 92). Downame does appear, however, in probate records for early New England and his tomes inspired the godly writers of devotional manuals (see HambrickStowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 10, 29). 20. Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, 185; White, A Little Book for Little Children, 56, 59; Thomas Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 73–74. 21. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 247; Alleine, Alarme, 145; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 643; Baynes, Briefe Directions Unto a Godly Life, 251; Beacon, Miscellanies on V arious Subjects, 27. See also Baynes, Briefe Directions Unto a Godly Life, 296; and White, A Way to the Tree of Life, sig. A4. 22. Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 646; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 129;

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Notes to Pages 83–91

Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium, 80; Bayly , The Practise of Pietie, 343; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 640; Joseph Alleine, “Discourse of Self-Examination,” Remaines of that excellent minister of Jesus Christ, Mr. Joseph Alleine, 15; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, sig. A4r and 127–28; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 1; Wilson and Mitchel in Whiting, A Discourse of the Last Judgment, sig. A6r. Cotton Mather effuses about the results of reading, acoustically imagined: “Turn the Lessons into Prayers, and send up the Prayers unto the GOD . . . send them up with Lively Ejaculations unto the Heavens. What Exercise can be more Enlightening, more Sanctifying, more Comfortable, than such an Intercourse, of GOD uttering His Voice, and, Lo, a mighty Voice!—unto you, an your Holy Returning of it, unto Him, in such Echo’s of Devotion,” Manuductio ad Ministerium, 80. 23. Clark, “‘The Crucified Phrase,’ ” 285; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 1; Baynes, Briefe Directions Unto a Godly Life, 296; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 137, 4. For prayers before reading, see Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 640; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 128; Webbe, “A Short Direction,” 123. 24. Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 647; Dyer , A Cabinet of Jewels, bound in “Dyer’s Works,” 39; Baynes, Briefe Directions Unto a Godly Life, 298; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 312–13; Alleine, Alarme, 41. 25. Keach, Tropologia, 72. 26. Alleine, Alarme, 92; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, sig. A5v; Stubbes, Conscience, 28; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 810, which draws on the scriptural language of blotting in Acts 3.19 of the King James V ersion. 27. Smith, The Great Assize, 56–57; Scudder , The Christians Daily Walke, 206; Stubbes, Conscience, 16. 28. Belcher, Commonplace book (1688–1723), Ms. SBd-110 (Massachusetts Historical Society); Stubbes, Conscience, 40–41, 42; Alleine, Alarme, 117. 29. Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 191–92; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 243; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 148; Whiting, Abraham’s Humble Intercession, sig. A4r. 30. White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 136; Dyer , A Cabinet of Jewels, bound in “Dyer’s Works,” 29, 28; Cotton and Wilson in Richard Mather, The Summe of Certain Sermons, preface; Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 192. 31. Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 19. 32. Dyer, Christ’s Famous Titles (London, 1675), bound in “Dyer’s Works,” 192; White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 60; New-England’s True Interests, sig. A2r; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 651–52. 33. Vincent, Words of Advice to Young Men (London, 1668), sig. A2; Alleine, Alarme, 118; Whiting, Discourse, sig. A4r–A4v; Charles Chauncey , preface to Richard Mather, A Farewel Exhortation (Cambridge, 1657), sig. Av. 34. Doolittle, Call to Delaying Sinners, 22; Alleine, Alarme, 24, 91. 35. Webbe, “A Short Direction,” 122; Baynes, Briefe Directions unto a Godly Life, 297; Swinnock, The Door of Salvation Opened, 242; Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice, sig. A2v; Mead, The Almost Christian Discovered, sig. a4v. Charles HambrickStowe establishes the pilgrimage metaphor’ s salience for Anglo-American identity, with puritans cast as devotional migrants; see The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 70–72. Patricia Caldwell discusses the Bible as a book with anchoring power for the dislocated pilgrim; see The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 168. 36. White, A Way to the Tree of Life, 8; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 29; Swinnock, The Door of Salvation Opened, 186; Smith, The Great Assize, 77. 37. Scholarship on bookbinding has followed three paths normally: one, it lo-

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cates binders, discusses their biography , catalogues their work, and identifies their tools, exemplified in early American studies by Hannah French and Wilman Spawn; two, it examines the preferences of collectors, as they gather and organize bindings; or, three, it studies especially elaborate or ornate bindings. I rely on the work of French and Spawn, but have also been inspired by Mirjam Foot, Gar y Frost, and Keith Smith, conceptual thinkers who provide historical context for their insights as well. See French, “Early American Bookbinding”; Spawn, “Bookbinding in America, 1680–1910”; Foot, The History of Bookbinding as a Mirror of Society, 55–61; Frost, “Reader’s Guide to Book Action”; Smith, Structure of the Visual Book. We are left with the challenge of a sample that is per haps abnormal and atypical. Class dictated the affordability and relative detail of a binding, and class affects what is collected and preser ved. A corollary to this premise, specific to the devotional steady sellers, is that ordinar y texts such as these were used to the point of deterioration and abandonment. Because the sample cannot be “representative,” my effort is to specify , not generalize: to highlight what is evident about conventional and plain bindings, so evident that it has been neglected for its functional presence. 38. Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” 95–126. 39. Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles, 1660–1800. 40. Houghton Librar y, Har vard University, call no. AC6 Ad198 Zz683t. The Adams volume contains the local version of Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice and Thomas Thacher’s A Fast of Gods Chusing, which will be explored in Chapter 3; the learned holdings of the Mathers at the American Antiquarian Society and the Houghton likewise features such combinations. 41. Amory, “‘A Bible and Other Books,’ ” 69. 42. Weld, Commonplace book, 237. 43. Houghton Library, Harvard University, catalogued under the call number for John Yates’s God’s Arraignment for Hypocrites (1615), as STC 26081. 44. Two examples of full bindings in contemporary sheep by steady-selling author John Flavel are in the Houghton Library, Harvard University: A Saint Indeed (Boston, 1726), call no. EC65.F6183.668sk and Sacramental Meditations (Boston, 1729), call no. C 1337 .47 *. 45. See Lewis Bayly , Meditations and Prayers for Household Piety: Taken out of the Practice of Piety (Boston, 1728), American Antiquarian Society , call no. “Dated Pams”; Daniel Dyke, The Mysterie of Self-Deceiving, 8th edition (London, 1624?), Boston Public Librar y’s Thomas Prince collection; English Bible, Authorized, 1680 in Winthrop Library, Massachusetts Historical Society. 46. Winans, “Bibliography,” 178–81. 47. Along with copies mentioned in the next endnote, scabbard can be found on the following cheap devotional works at the American Antiquarian Society: the Boston, 1711, and Boston, 1713, copies of The Psalms Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, of the Old & New-Testament, catalogued under Binding Collections B; Edward Pearse, The Great Concern (Boston, 1711); and Henr y Stubbes, Conscience (Boston, 1714). The Massachusetts Historical Society holds “Bay Psalm Books” for 1709, 1716, 1726, 1729, and 1730 (catalogued as E187) with covers of scabbard. 48. Examples of devotional steady sellers with tooling at the board edges are Pearse, The Great Concern (Boston, 1711) and Stubbes, Conscience (Boston, 1714), catalogued as “Dated Books” at the American Antiquarian Society; the “Bay Psalm Book,” 23rd edition (Boston, 1730), catalogued as E187 at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Dyke, The Mystery of Self Deceiving, 8th edition (London,

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Notes to Pages 95–104

1624?), bound abroad and held in the Prince Collection at the Boston Public Library; Flavel, Sacramental Meditations (London, 1700) 4th edition enlarged, catalogued as BV824 .F53 1700 and held at the Boston Athanaeum. 49. Willman Spawn argues that this cover décor was used on “a few books” and was intended “for inexpensive books” (“Bookbinding in America, 1680–1910,” 32); yet it is certain that the unexceptional style was more characteristic of binding work than the singular craft upon which he focuses. Examples of this plain style are found in devotional titles held at the American Antiquarian Society, including Benjamin Harris’s Holy Bible in Verse (Boston, 1717), catalogued as “Reserve 1701”; Boston copies from 1704, 1722, and 1731 of William Dyer’s Christ’s Famous Titles, catalogued as “Dated Books”; Thomas Doolittle, A Call to Delaying Sinners (Boston, 1700), Joseph Alleine, Remaines . . . of . . . Joseph Alleine (Boston, 1717), Joseph Alleine, Alarm to the Unconverted (Boston, 1727), Joseph Alleine, Alarm to the Unconverted (Boston, T. Fleet, 1727) [copy 2], Samuel Smith’ s The Great Assize (Boston, 1729), and John Fox, Time, and the End of Time (Boston, 1729), all catalogued as “Dated Books”; and two copies of Thomas White’ s A Little Book for Little Children (Boston, 1702), Reserve 1702 and Reserve 1702, copy 2. The Boston Public Librar y holds similar examples: Samuel Smith, The Great Assize (Boston, 1727), call no. Reser ve 7447.144; Matthew Mead, Almost Christian Discovered (Boston, 1727), call no. XH .B727 . AI 5A; and John Fox, Time and the End of Time (Boston, 1701), Prince collection. The Houghton Librar y’s copies of Flavel’ s A Saint Indeed and Sacramental Meditations are complemented by a 1723 copy of the New England psalmbook (call no. Mus. 489.1723) that likewise reflects early modern binding’s plain style. But even a classic steady seller, Bayly’s The Practise of Pietie, received decorative treatment in England at the least. The Newberry Library’s 1617 copy of Bayly’s The Practise of Pietie witnesses tie-holes that date roughly to the edition, and in the Houghton’ s 1616 copy the remnants of metal fittings, with the clasp’s catch on the back cover . These copies almost certainly circulated in England, given the gilt seal of James I that decorates the Newberr y copy’s leather and the royal ornaments and gold tooling of the Houghton copy . 50. Boston Athanaeum, BV824 .F53 1700; American Antiquarian Society , Bindings Coll. B.; Houghton Librar y, Bible K.697. 51. Amory, “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” 54. 52. The Barber family Bible in the Massachusetts Historical Society is catalogued as follows: Bible. English. Amsterdam? 1683. E187; Bibles L 1683; the Dexter family Bible in the MHS is catalogued as Bible. English. 1708. Amsterdam 1708. E187 (Bibles L) 1708. 53. Amory, “‘A Bible and Other Books,’ ” 67. 54. See the “1727 bible” at the Massachusetts Historical Society . For psalmbooks, note the 1640 Bay Psalm Book in the Library of Congress and the Boston Public Librar y’s 1642 copy of Ainsworth (H 46.28 Prince Collection); W eld, Commonplace book. Hannah French mentions the Sewall journal, Bookbinding, 16. The Houghton Librar y holds the Cambridge Church records, MS Am 1672–1672.1. 55. Ford, The Boston Book Market, 180, 114. 56. Swinnock, The Door of Salvation Opened, 184; Flavel, Divine Conduct, unpaginated signature, S*1; Smith, Great Assize, 70; Vincent, Wells of Salvation Opened, 120; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 652; Fox, Time, and the End of Time, 82. 57. For background on Renaissance title-page images, see Corbett and Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece. 58. The number fifty thousand is arrived at by taking the roughly one hundred

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thousand copies that would have been produced across the sixty-odd editions up to 1701, and then halving that figure to accommodate editions without title-page illustration or copies with a lost engraving or woodcut. 59. Yet even here, we have a clue to the steady seller’s ordinary readership. As Corbett and Lightbown explain, “the Tetragrammaton was,” for Protestant worshippers, “non-representational and at the same time a symbol enshrouded with reverence; the letters of a strange alphabet incomprehensible to all but the few who were Hebrew scholars, enhanced the effect of awe which it was meant to convey” (Comely Frontispiece, 39–40). But further, the letter forms of the majority of the Bayly frontispiece editions are a faux Hebrew , marks that signify learnedness without being readable, in their transliteration, as JHWH. Illustrators of course may be respecting the sacred referent, the letters standing for the unknowable divine left deliberately illegible; or they may be disregarding accuracy, given the expectations of a non-Hebrew reading audience. For the use of the Tetragrammaton and other visual conventions of the Protestant frontispiece, see Watt, Cheap Print, 161–62. 60. The Elstrack engraving was the template for anonymous woodcuts in use by the 1620s, with blank compartments allowing for customized title and imprint information. Letterpress title pages for Bayly’s work circulated as well. A variant on Elstrack’s design appeared in English-language publications of the 1630s associated with Amsterdam and Delft. William Marshall signed a 1638 engraving with this pattern, which placed Aaron, Moses, and Hur in the right foreground of the bottom panel. The Elstrack image was reprinted, however , throughout the century. While misattributing the original engraving to Marshall, Hannibal Hamlin comments relevantly on Psalm 51.16–17 as an intertext for the image’s upper tier, given the flaming heart icon and the Davidic posture of the Pious Man, though the commentary misses the presence of Psalm 51.17’ s paraphrase in the illustration itself; see Psalm Culture, 194, 197. 61. The image differs significantly from scripture. The Bible text (Exod. 17.12) has Moses sitting on a stone, while the Bayly image shows Moses kneeling. The variant deemphasizes Moses’ s role as war leader—the biblical stress—and instead displays his humble devotion. Chapter 3 1. A current edition annotates the text with “Meaning of Heb uncertain”; see Metzger and Murphy , The New Oxford Annotated Bible, OT 964. The crux was partly generated by the status of the line, which has been understood as either superscription to the verse or as part of the main text. The Hebrew , Greek, and Syriac sources all witness variants for the line: the Masoretic reads “O generation (?) you”; the Septuagint reads an entirely different text (“Hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord.”); and the Peshitta reverses the syntax of the Masoretic (“You, O generation”). With, respectively , “O generacion, take hede to the worde of the Lord” and “O generation, see ye the word of the LORD,” the Geneva and King James translations include the line as 2.31’ s opening statement, rather than as superscription; and their apparatuses do not mention the conflicting sources. Rowlandson focuses on the particular crux of “generation” in the Masoretic text, for the Hebrew sense and syntax seem bafflingly incomplete. For discussion of the crux, see Holladay, Jeremiah I: A Commentary, 55, 107. 2. Bible versions circulating at Harvard where Rowlandson was trained include

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Notes to Pages 108–116

Menassah ben Israel’s editions of the Hebrew scriptures, editions of the Septuagint published in Frankfort (1597) and London (1653), and a Latin edition of the Old Testament from Hanover (1603). Calvin’s commentary on Jeremiah also circulated among the learned; without embracing the ambiguity of the crux, the theologian nevertheless worries the diction of “see” and “generation” (translated as “age”) in 2.31; see Calvin, Two and Twenty Lectures upon the Five First Chapters of Jeremiah, 119. 3. Rowlandson, The Possibility of God’s Forsaking a People, 13–14. 4. Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch established this tradition with attention to occasional preaching such as Election-day and fast-day sermons. But little connection has been made between the sermons founding the myth and the actual practices of fasting informing the jeremiads. See Miller , From Colony, 27–39; Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” 2–15; and Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad. 5. Cotton Mather, Humiliations, 21. 6. Cotton Mather, Humiliations, 25. 7. Stout, The New England Soul, 92. I depend on Stout’ s careful analysis of the difference between regular and occasional sermons in this paragraph, though I apply his comment about the Sunday sermons’s “grand truths” to the occasional preaching as well. 8. Amor y, “‘A Bible and Other Books,’ ” 65; Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying, 21–22. 9. Indeed, within the means, fasting might be called liminally liminal, if you will: somewhere between the ordinar y activity of prayer or Sunday churchgoing available to all and the extraordinar y activity of sacramental piety , such as baptism and the Lord’s Supper, available to church members. 10. The weekly Lecture sermon was theoretically a day of preaching set aside for ministers to learn doctrine from one another; but it quickly became another occasion for worshippers to hear the W ord through prayer, psalm, and sermon on weekdays. The annual Election sermon, held in late spring and called by magistrates, permitted leading ministers to preach on the function of civil society and the role of governors, church leaders, and member -settlers in the Bible commonwealth. 11. John Eliot, quoted in Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 100; for general discussion of the calendar and its modes of worship, see Davies, The Worship of the American Puritans, passim, HambrickStowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 93–103, and Stout, The New England Soul, 13–104. 12. Bay Colony records quoted in Gildrie, “The Ceremonial Puritan,” 4; Thacher, A Fast of God’s Chusing, 5–6. See also Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 518–19. 13. For the record of fast days, see Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England, 464–89; for the restricted sample, see Gildrie, “The Ceremonial Puritan,” 16; for the comparison with Lent and agricultural r hythms, see Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England, 239–55 and Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 101–2. 14. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 464–65; Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, 113–14; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 122–23. 15. Vincent, Wells of Salvation Opened, 78; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 479; Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, 117; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 469; Mead, The Almost Christian Discovered, 80; Baynes, Briefe Directions Unto a Godly Life, 209; Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, 117; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 467. 16. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 462–63; Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flow-

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ers, 118–19; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 468–69; Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, 117. 17. Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, 14–38. 18. Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 194; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 652. See Dyer, Christs Famous Titles, in “Dyer’s Works,” 190–91, 236, for extended skepticism about ministerial learning and preaching. 19. Vincent, Wells of Salvation Opened, 18; John Sill’ s conversion relation is found in “Thomas Shepard’s Confessions,” 47. 20. Brinsley quoted in Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, 32, 33. Shelton, Tachygraphy, sig. A4r. 21. Weld, Commonplace book, 1. 22. Cotton Mather, Humiliations, 4–5. 23. Hambrick-Stowe discusses the “composition of place” method as one that ministers used to create an imaginative space for listeners or readers, a channel for sensory affect and sensual meditation (The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 31). Here Mather uses it for less therapeutic ends. 24. Cotton Mather, Humiliations, 4, 16–17. 25. The Director y prompts worshippers to arrive “early at the Congregation,” marking a slippage between where a private family’s fast-day observance ends and a public ceremony begins (75). Indeed puritan holy days in seventeenth-century Anglo-America were distinguished from traditional ones by this conflation; see Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 100. 26. Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 84–85; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 671; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 499–500, 498–99; Scudder , The Christians Daily Walke, 77. 27. Danckaerts quoted in Miller and Johnson, eds., The Puritans: A Sourcebook, 407; Westminster Assembly, “Director y,” 78. For covenant renewals, see Foster , The Long Argument, 223–27. 28. Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 88–89; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 504–5; see Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 142, on reading with your family on a fast day . 29. In the Massachusetts Historical Society, John Hull’s notebook reveals fastday notes appended to the beginning and end of his bound book, while Mar y Rock’s fast-day notes interrupt the Sunday series. 30. Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 671; for the Shepard testimonies, see Joanna Sill, Nathaniel Sparrowhawk, Alice Stedman, and an anonymous maid in “Thomas Shepard’s Confessions”; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 493–94; Swinnock, The Door of Salvation Opened, 242. 31. “Thomas Shepard’s Confessions,” 63. Shepard’s transcripts shift from first person to third person and I have adjusted accordingly . 32. Vincent, Wells of Salvation Opened, 160–61; Baynes, Briefe Directions Unto a Godly Life, 302. 33. The Israelite army fasted after their loss to the Benjaminites in Gibeah near Jerusalem (Judg. 20.26). Samuel’s judgment of the Israelites and his exhortation that they put away the false idols of the Canaanites led to a tribal fast of repentance, intended to express their sinfulness (1 Sam. 7.6). Hearing of the threat of Moabite and Ammonite enemies, Jehoshaphat, king of the southern territory of Judah, called a nationwide fast (2 Chron. 20.3). A similar preparatory fast is held by the priest Ezra with the clans of Israelites he leads from Babylon, on the groups’ return to Jerusalem; they supplicate themselves in hopes of safe deliverance (Ezra 8.21).

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Notes to Pages 125–140

34. All Bible quotations are from the King James V ersion. 35. Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 86–87; Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse, 672; Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 74–75; Mead, The Almost Christian Discovered, 222. For attention to the inward manner of fasting, see Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 500–505. 36. Cotton Mather, Humiliations, 19; Increase Mather , preface to Thacher , A Fast of God’s Chusing, sig. A2r–A2v; Joseph Alleine, Alarme, 95; Keach, War With the Devil, 61; Scudder , The Christians Daily Walke, 79; Urian Oakes, A Seasonable Discourse, 4; Wheelwright, “A Fast-Day Sermon,” 157. 37. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 194–95; Cotton Mather , Humiliations, 23–24; Rogers, Seven Treatises, 317; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 516–17; Scudder, The Christians Daily Walke, 146, and see 143 for a discussion of efficacy; Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 44; Cotton Mather, Humiliations, 18. 38. Increase Mather, preface to Thacher , A Fast of God’s Chusing, sig. A3. Another revival is Thomas Shepard’ s 1645 sermon “Wine for Gospel W antons,” published in 1668. 39. Increase Mather , preface to Thacher , A Fast of God’s Chusing, sig. A2v; Thacher, A Fast of God’s Chusing, 4–6. 40. Thacher, A Fast of God’s Chusing, 8; Urian Oakes, A Seasonable Discourse, 5–6; Thacher, A Fast of God’s Chusing, 20–21, 9; Increase Mather, “The Day of Trouble is Near,” 24; Thacher, A Fast of God’s Chusing, 9. 41. Thacher, A Fast of God’s Chusing, 10, 18, 19. 42. Thacher, A Fast of God’s Chusing, 16. 43. Rock’s notebook is in the E. Bromfield Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society. For the brief critical treatment of note-taking practices, see Miller and Johnson, eds., Puritans, 13; and David Leverenz, who dismisses note-taking as unfeeling, arguing that “Puritan audiences quite consciously squashed affective associations”; see The Language of Puritan Feeling, 17. Study of a quantitative sort would require further caution, given that the sur viving notebooks are a fraction of what might have been in use, and that those in the archive belonged predominantly to ministers and ministers-in-training; comparison of a textual sort is precluded by the lack of a version of the sermon in note or written form by Moodey . 44. In the transcriptions of Rock’s notes, I will attempt to reproduce the image of the text in the notebook. I will break the lines where Rock does; I will use ellipses when text is omitted from one of these lines. When the space on the line is blank, I will attempt to recreate that effect, and thus will not use ellipses. 45. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 141. 46. Chartier, “Texts, Printings, Readings,” 171–74; Hall, “Readers and Reading in America,” 184. 47. The way has been led here by scholars of women’ s culture, such as Caroline Bynum (Holy Feast and Holy Fast), Cathy Davidson, (Revolution and the Word), and Jane Tompkins (Sensational Designs). Chapter 4 1. Cotton Mather , Preface to “A Poem Dedicated to the Memor y of . . . Mr. Urian Oakes,” A Poem and an Elegy, reprinted on simulation of sig. A2v. 2. Scheick, “Tombless Virtue and Hidden Text,” 287. 3. Ford, ed., “Massachusetts Broadsides, 1639–1800”; Ola Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse.

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4. Murdock, ed., Handkerchiefs from Paul. 5. Jantz, ed., “The First Centur y of New England Verse.” 6. Silverman, ed., Colonial American Poetry; Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry. 7. Reese, ed., “Recent Acquisitions.” 8. Determined by the elegiac discourse’ s rhetorical construction, occasional status, and per formative existence, the choice of the terms “mode” and “impulse” to describe verse written about the moment of death is strategic. It attends not only to the dynamics of readership, but also to the dynamics of composition. Genres are fluid forms, incorporating other genres within their expressive shape. Accepting Alastair Fowler’s premise that epitaphs are records of commemoration while elegies are works about mourning and feeling ( Kinds of Literature, 65), a scholar would have to account for the many puritan epitaphs that serve to admonish and warn, while noting that elegies can feature plain portraits of the deceased’s timeless virtues. The conditions of authorship also complicate an analysis of the elegy that defines the form strictly as a poem by the bereaved in response to the death of loved one. An anonymous writer sent Governor Thomas Dudley an elegy for his mortal perusal, while many others wrote verses to commemorate their own death. 9. Falling back on the antiaesthetic image of puritan writing, early commentators (and numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century local historians) discredited the quality of the verse; the conventionality of the rhetoric and rhymes and the labored wordplay met with the disapproval of critics seeking Romantic originality and failing to examine the verse on its own terms (Draper , The Funeral Elegy, 155–77). Another tendency has been to treat them as transparent representations of the lives of the deceased, extensions of the biographies offered by Mather in the Magnalia (where many elegies ser ve to end his entries; see Ola Winslow’ s introduction to American Broadside Verse for this approach). Robert Henson’ s genre study in 1960 drew formal parallels between the funeral sermon, the religious biography, and the elegy. For Henson, all three follow a pattern of portraiture and exhortation, representing the idealized virtues of the deceased saint and then admonishing the audience to imitate the dead. While the overlap between these forms is important, descriptive genre criticism too easily ignores the dynamism of the mode: Henson quickly subsumes the elegy to the conventions of these other models. Henson evades accounting for the crucial formal differences between verse and prose; the genre study neglects other conventions, such as broadside publication, anagrams, acrostics, and ritual oration, equally determinant of the elegy’ s meanings; it also fails to account for the elegies that simply do not follow the sermon/biography model (Henson, “Form and Content,” 12). In 1985, William Scheick usefully turned attention to readership, explaining that while the deceased is the nominal subject of the elegy, the audience is the actual one; but like Henson, Scheick held that the poetry indicts readers for their worldly failings (“Tombless Virtue and Hidden Text”). Other secondary criticism on the colonial puritan elegy includes Silverman, Colonial American Poetry, 121–32; Hahn, “Urian Oakes’ s Elegie”; Ann and Dickran Tashjian, Memorials for Children of Change, 39–44; Scheick, “Standing in the Gap”; Schmitt-v. Muhlenfels, “John Fiske’ s Funeral Elegy on John Cotton”; Daly , God’s Altar, 113–17, 147–51; Elliot, “The Development of the Puritan Funeral Sermon and Elegy”; Schweitzer, The Work of Self-Representation, 41–74; and Cavitch, “Interiority and Artifact.” 10. Tashjians, Memorials for Children of Change; Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death; Geddes, Welcome Joy; Watters, “With Bodilie Eyes.”

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11. Brietweiser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning; Hammond, The American Puritan Elegy. 12. Hammond discusses the sanctioning of grief when the devout followed a redemptive sequence of grieving for sin: they were to acknowledge it and then repent for it; see Hammond, The American Puritan Elegy, 90. 13. Watters, “With Bodilie Eyes,” 35–62. 14. Geddes, Welcome Joy, 27–31. 15. Watters, “With Bodilie Eyes,” 23; Sewall, The Diary, vol. 1, 391; Watters, “With Bodilie Eyes,” 24–25. 16. Karen Kupperman recounts English preoccupation with Native American mourning in Indians and English, 137. 17. Henson, “Form and Content,” 26. 18. Anonymous, “Thomas Dudley. Ah! old must dye,” in Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 505; Nicholas Noyes, “Upon the Much Lamented Death, of that Pious and Hopeful Y oung Gentlewoman, the wife of Mr . Samuel Gerrish,” in Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse, 29; John Fiske, “Upon the departure of The worthy aged useful ser vant of god mr . Sa: Sharp,” in Jantz, ed., “The First Century of New England Verse,” 341. 19. Jantz, ed., “The First Centur y of New England V erse,” 284; Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 218. 20. Silverman, “The Puritan Elegy,” in Colonial American Poetry, 124–25. 21. See John Saffin, “On the Deploreable Departure of . . . John Hull Esqr.,” in Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 199; Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 348–49; John Cotton, “In Saram. In Rolandum. In Utrumque,” in Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 382; Murdock, ed., Handkerchiefs from Paul, 7; Benjamin Tompson, “The Amiable Virgin memorized—Elizabeth Tompson,” in Murdock, ed., Handkerchiefs from Paul, 9–11. For the gravestone’s voice, see Danforth, “Epitaph on Josiah Flint,” 382. 22. Anonymous, Epitaphs, 71; Pole, “Epitaph,” 381. 23. Westminster Assembly, “Directory,” 73–74; Lechford, Plain Dealing, 39. 24. F . D., “T o the Memor y of the learned and Reverend, Mr . Jonathan Mitchel,” in Morton, New England’s Memoriall, 193; Ann and Dickran T ashjian, Memorials for the Children of Change, 22; John Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism, 112–15; and Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, 110; Geddes, Welcome Joy, 120–23; Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, 110–22. 25. John Norton, “A Funeral Elegie upon the death of the truly Reverend Mr. John Cotton,” in Morton, New England’s Memoriall; Benjamin T ompson, “The Grammarians Funeral, Or an Elegy composed upon the Death of Mr . John [sic Robert] Woodmancy . . . But now Published upon the Death of the V enerable Mr. Ezekial Chevers” (1667/1708); John Norton II, “A Funeral Elogy, Upon that Pattern and Patron of Virtue . . . Anne Bradstreet.” (1672; 1678); Stephen Chester, “A Funeral Elegy Upon the Death of . . . John Winthrop Esq.” (1676); Benjamin Tompson, “A Funeral T ribute to the Honourable Dust of . . . John Winthrop esq . . .” (1676); Joseph Capen, “A Funeral Elegy upon . . . Mr. John Foster.” (1681; 1909); Thomas Tilestone, “Funeral Elegy , Dedicated to . . . Mr. John Foster.” (1681); Deodat Lawson, “A Funeral Elegy . . . Thomas Savage . . . ” (1682); John Danforth, “A Funeral Elegy . . . to . . . Thomas Danforth, Esq.” (1699); Cotton Mather, “A Lacrymatory; Design’d for the Tears let fall at the Funeral of Mrs. Sarah Leverett” (1705); John Danforth, “A Funeral Poem in Memory of Mr. Hopestill Clap” (1719); Edward T aylor, “A Funerall Tear dropt vpon ye Coffin of [that holy man of] God, Doctr Increase Mather” (1723).

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26. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, 113; “Elegy at the Funeral,” qtd. in Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism, 115. 27. On the staging devices, see Sacks, The English Elegy, 19; Anne Bradstreet, “To the Memor y” (1653), in The Works of Anne Bradstreet, 201. Cotton Mather , Preface to “A Poem Dedicated to the Memory of . . . Mr. Urian Oakes,” in James Hunnewell, A Poem and an Elegy (Boston, 1896), reprinted on simulation of sig. A2r; Cotton Mather, “An Elegy on . . . Nathaneal Collins” (1685), reprinted on simulation of sig. A2v. 28. John Saffin, “On the Deploreable Departure of . . . John Hull Esqr .,” in Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 199; Cotton Mather, “An Elegy on . . . Nathaneal Collins,” 2; Sewall, The Diary, vol. 1, 66; Draper , The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism, 105; Cotton Mather , “An Elegy on . . . Nathaneal Collins,” t.p.; Cotton Mather , “A Poem Dedicated to the Memor y of . . . Mr. Urian Oakes,” 2. In the Magnalia Mather fancifully notes of the hearse custom, when commenting on John Wilson’s funeral: “it looked like a piece of injustice, that his own funeral produced (among the many poems afterward printed) no more anagrams upon his own name, who had so often handled the names of others, and some thought the muses looked ver y much dissatisfied, when they saw these lines upon his hearse” (Magnalia, vol. 1, 318). The journalistic mention of the funeral itself may make this reliable evidence. 29. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, 110; Geddes, Welcome Joy, 133, 128–29; Samuel Danforth, “An Elegy in the Memor y of the W orshipful Major Thomas Leonard, Esq.,” in Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 488. 30. On the sensationalist context, see Rollins, ed., The Pack of Autolycus. For examples of illustrated English broadsides, see Draper , ed., A Century of Broadside Elegies; for New England examples, see Anonymous, “Upon the Death of the virtuous and Religious Mrs. L ydia Minot,” and “Carmen Miserable,” in Winslow , ed., American Broadside Verse, 7, 23; for the black ink border, see John Wilson, “A Copy of V erses . . . on the sudden Death of Mr . Joseph Brisco” (1657/8), in Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse, 5 [Figure 16 in the main text]. 31. Higgins, Pattern Poetry; Sparrow, Visible Words; and Bradford, “Speech and Writing in Poetry and Its Criticism.” For the blank verse, see Jantz, ed., “The First Century of New England V erse,” 453; for the ballad stanza form, see J. Burt, A Lamentation Occasion’d by the Great Sickness, and Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 488. 32. See John Saffin, “On the Deploreable Departure o f . . . John Hull Esqr.,” in Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 199; John Wilson, “An Anagram of Mrs. Tomson . . . Abigayll Tomson. I am gon to al blys,” in Murdock, ed., Handkerchiefs from Paul, 79; Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 348–49; John Cotton, “In Saram. In Rolandum. In Utrumque,” in Meserole, ed.,SeventeenthCentury American Poetry, 382; Behjamin T ompson, “The Amiable Virgin memorized—Elizabeth Tompson . . . ,” in Murdock, ed., Handkerchiefs from Paul, 9–11. 33. Peter Bulkeley , “A Lamentation for the Death of that Precious and W orthy Minister of Jesus Christ, Mr . Thomas Hooker,” in Morton, ed., New Englands Memoriall, 127; Ichabod Wiswall, “Upon the death of . . . Samuel Arnold,” in Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse, 15; Draper, ed., Century, 21; John Fiske, “Upon the much-tobe lamented desease of the Reverend Mr. John Cotton,” in Meserole, ed.,SeventeenthCentury American Poetry, 187–89; John Wilson, “Thomas Shepard. Anagr: o a map’ s thresh’d,” in Murdock, ed., Handkerchiefs from Paul, 85–86. Ivy Schweitzer studies the use of apostrophe in the Fiske elegy on Cotton; see Schweitzer , Work, 41–74.

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Notes to Pages 150–161

34. Thomas Shepard II, “Upon the Death of. . . John Wilson,” in Morton, New Englands Memoriall, 188. 35. Nicholas Noyes, “Upon the Much Lamented Death, of that Pious and Hopeful Young Gentlewoman, the wife of Mr. Samuel Gerrish,” in Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse, 29; G. H., “An Elegy Upon the Death of . . . Richard Dummer Esq.,” in Jantz, ed., “The First Centur y of New England V erse,” 384; Bradstreet, “As W eary Pilgrim,” in The Works of Anne Bradstreet, 295 (emphasis added); Clap, “V erses on Increase Nowell,” 227–28; Anonymous, “Upon the Death of the virtuous and Religious Mrs. L ydia Minot,” in Winslow , ed., American Broadside Verse, 7. 36. Benjamin Woodbridge, “Upon the Tomb of the most Reverend Mr . John Cotton” in Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 410–11. 37. Fox, Time, and the End of Time, 230; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 729–30. 38. Doolittle, Call to Delaying Sinners, 22; Fox, Time, and the End of Time, 87; William Dyer, A Cabinet of Jewels, in “Dyer’ s W orks,” 38–39. For pilgrimage as preparation for death, see Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines, 197–241. 39. Rogers et al., A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, 25; Dyer, Christ’s Voice to London, in “Dyer’s Works,” 112 ; Swinnock, The Door of Salvation Opened, 205. 40. Fox, Time, and the End of Time, 231; Dyer, Christs Famous Titles, in “Dyer’ s Works,” 193; Bayly , The Practise of Pietie, 335–36; Dyer , Christs Famous Titles, in “Dyer’s Works,” 195. 41. Smith, The Great Assize, 133–34; Doolittle, The Mourner’s Directory, 83; Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 191; Vincent, Wells of Salvation Opened, 98. Similar images of hell appear in Doolittle, A Call to Delaying Sinners, 134. 42. Doolittle, The Mourner’s Directory, 83, 170–71, 169, 172; Swinnock, The Door of Salvation Opened, 161, 163; Pearse, The Great Concern, 137. 43. Doolittle, The Mourner’s Directory, 120, 60; Flavel, A Token for Mourners, 82; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie, 750; Doolittle, The Mourner’s Directory, 173. 44. Pearse, The Great Concern, sig. A2–A3. 45. Robinson and A ylmer in Pearse, The Great Concern, sig. A3v–A4v . Green comments on this advertisement in Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, 367–68. The advertisement appears in 1678, 1682, and 1694 editions of The Great Concern, the former issues roughly consistent with 1680s colonial bookseller invoices where Pearse appears repeatedly. 46. Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 26. 47. Of course practically , such “finds” in white graves would be nonexistent, due to the paper’s decomposition. But in principle, I differ from the implications of the most stunning recent bibliographical research on colonial America: Hugh Amory’s work with a fragment of an English Bible leaf found in a medicine bundle, left as a grave good at a Pequot burial site and preser ved due to the chemical reaction between the bundle and a metal spoon. Amor y not only locates the edition the leaf appeared in but also comments on, following Nicholas Thomas, the entanglement of European and Native American trade objects, where meaning is recast by recipients, not imposed by providers. Y et nowhere does Amor y note the asymmetry of our knowledge here. In the sacred mores of burial, devotional English culture avoided the appropriative tactics of the Ninnimissinuok. It sought purity. See Hugh Amory, “The Trout and the Milk,” 11–33. Robert Blair St. George discusses the secular appropriation of Native American goods for household use and economic exchange by the white English in Conversing by Signs, 161–62. American Indian studies have debated the varied meanings of

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mortuary ritual in southern New England, arguing that kinds of grave goods reflect the social strata of an Amerindian society; that the presence of grave goods serve an ideological function, symbolically presenting the deceased to sur vivors and the spirit world, without direct relation to the class status of the deceased; or that the presence of grave goods became a reaction to contact, asserting Amerindian identity and marking resistance to colonization. These debates are summarized in Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 236–41. 48. Editorial scholar G. Thomas Tanselle defines the text as an artifact, referring to “the evidentiar y role of physical details in any attempt to read a verbal work as a product of the past[.] . . . [O]ne needs the evidence that can only be provided by the artifacts dating from or used at the particular time being studied” (Literature and Artifacts, xii). In Robert Gross’ s introduction to a classroom sourcebook, “bibliography becomes a form of literar y archaeology, as we probe multiple layers of meaning buried in its record of publication and reader reception”; see “Texts for the Times,” 13. With a sense of its limitations, Adams and Barker think through the analogy between bibliography and archaeology (“A New Model for the Study of the Book,” 6). Houston Baker situates “artifact” in the light of cultural studies and African American expressive aesthetics (“Beyond Artifacts,” 183–86). T rue, Jonathan Franzen’ s caustic satire in The Corrections of a High Theor y cultural critic—a self- and institutionally-described professor of “T extual Artifacts”—may have poisoned this term; though in the Oprah debate, which was this novel’ s more memorable text, Franzen’ s literar y elitism—sky-brow?—makes book histor y and cultural studies look pretty good. See Franzen, The Corrections, 17. 49. Amory, “The Trout and the Milk,” 11–33. 50. The name supplies colloquial American English with its derisive term for an out-of-the-way town. 51. Qtd. in David Watters, “With Bodilie Eyes,” 1. 52. Handbook of the North American Indians, vol. 15, 144; Lenik, Picture Rocks. 53. Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative; Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal; Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines; Cohen, God’s Caress. St. George accounts for the projective techniques of English colonial psychology in Conversing by Signs, 154–58 and passim. 54. Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse, 5, and Meserole, ed., Seventeenth Century American Poetry, 384–85. 55. Qtd. in Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes, 13. 56. Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse, 11; Jantz, ed., “The First Centur y of New England Verse,” 367–70; Green, John Foster, 128–29. 57. These three options derive from, respectively , Breitwieser (American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning), Henson (“Form and Content”), and Scheick (“Tombless Virtue and Hidden Text”). 58. Hammond, The American Puritan Elegy, 39. 59. The supplements do not supplant, however, the 1676/77 broadside; we cannot simply dismiss the defective version and rest with the relatively complete edition from 1943. So, at another level, a comparative study of the versions explains the documentar y significance of both texts to analyses of archival knowledge. By this term I mean both the set of documents that make up an archive and the histor y of criticism that shape the meaning of those documents. The contingencies of the broadside’ s transmission histor y record different ways of viewing elegiac mourning. As I have suggested, the broadside without the missing sections reflects a canonical view of the genre as constructed by scholars such

234

Notes to Pages 173–181

as Henson and Scheick. For me, an approach that stresses the roles given to Christ and the Amerindian in the supplements offers a view of death in early New England that engages with modes of sensor y feeling. There are political stakes in neglecting the roles played by the figures of Christ and the Native Americans which I hope to clarify in analyzing the texts. But my general claim is that both versions testify to the historical process, to what is admitted and repressed in reconstructions of the past; a comparative study dramatizes the production of archival knowledge by throwing into relief the differing interpretations of the documents. 60. Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse, 11, ll. 43–45; and Jantz, ed., “The First Century of New England Verse,” 368, ll. 43–52. 61. Jantz, ed., “The First Centur y of New England Verse,” 368, ll. 53–56. 62. Winslow, ed., American Broadside Verse, 11, ll. 98–100; Jantz, ed., “The First Century of New England Verse,” 369–70, ll. 98–110. 63. Sewall, Notebook, 30–32. Collection of The New-Y ork Historical Society. 64. Sewall, The Diary, vol. 1, 34. 65. G. Thomas T anselle, Textual Criticism Since Greg, 109; Benjamin, Illuminations, 256. Chapter 5 1. Qtd. in Winship, The Cambridge Press, 160. 2. The emphasis on literacy distinguished the puritan missions from French or Spanish counterparts. See Axtell, “The Power of Print,” 309. 3. As suggested in the Introduction, the book as thick, technological wonder is a motif of contact literature, but its function as psychosocial projection by European colonists requires analysis. The Eliot tracts consistently betray this iconophilic worship of bookish media, in what might be called the puritan mission’s bibliographical unconscious. 4. Eliot’s correspondence to Boyle is one instance of these writings, a constellation of related tracts which include: the eleven pamphlets printed in London between 1643 and 1671 promoting the southern New England mission, compilations of letters and reports which have come to be known as the “Eliot tracts”; the 1670 Indian Dialogues; the English-language apparatus about some of the titles produced in the native Massachusetts tongue; and correspondence to benefactors in London and New England. 5. My analysis seeks to understand, then, the r hetorical techniques of these fund-raising efforts as they pertain to the Eliot mission and its perception of the written word. The thorough histor y of this mission has been traced in many articles and books. Scholarship on the Eliot tracts and related writings usually situate the mission in the histor y of colonial invasion; many aim to detect its role in conquest, while others seek within the literature native voices and local resistances to English power . For this histor y, see V aughan, New England Frontier, 235–66; Salisbur y, “Red Puritans,” 27–54; Jennings, The Invasion of America, 228–53; Ronda, “‘W e Are W ell as W e Are,’” 66–82; Axtell, The Invasion Within, 131–241; Naeher, “Dialogue in the Wilderness,” 346–68; Canup, Out of the Wilderness; Lepore, The Name of War; Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians; Murray, Indian Giving, 147–53; Bellin, “‘A Little I Shall Say,’” 52–83; Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, 49–60. Especially helpful for my analysis of the rhetoric of conversion in the Eliot writ-

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ings have been: Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776, which details the mission’s relation to its funding sources; Holstun, A Rational Millennium, which studies Eliot’s puritan anthropology and praying town discipline in light of his larger goals to reform civil government; Axtell, “The Power of Print,” which examines the iconic power of the written word as deployed in French and English missions; and Cohen, “Conversion Among Puritans and Amerindians,” which, through a study of Native American confessions, explores the precise measures of conversion so crucial to ministerial epistemology . Rather than describing political theor y, technological mystification, or a native convert’ s theological experience, I emphasize the sacral quality of the book to English eyes and the consequences of such a view to conversionist r hetoric and textual production. 6. “The Epistle Dedicatory,” in The New Testament, A4r. My interest in the “perpetual monument” figure may seem to burden the diction excessively. But the address to the king is essential, both in the Indian Bible’ s status as a gift to Charles and in the missionaries’ need for the king’s patronage after the Interregnum. 7. Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes; Norton, In the Devil’s Snare. 8. “The Learned Conjectures of the Reverend Mr . John Eliot T ouching the Americas,” in Thomas Thorowgood, Jewes in America, 27, misprinted as “23.” 9. Dwight Bozeman and James Holstun discuss the metaphor , as well, with both scholars primarily focusing on the “blankness” of the tablet; but what the trope is careful to suggest is that the slate has been scraped, rather than easily or newly erased. See Bozeman, “To Live Ancient Lives,” 268; and Holstun, A Rational Millennium, 111. Indeed, the contact zone here exposes the complications of a metaphoric tradition that, as Peter Stallybrass shows, the West has maintained, from Plato to Locke to Freud to Derrida, of the mind as a blank slate or erasable tablet (“The Library and Material Texts,” 1351). There is a secularist fantasy behind this tradition, which obscures, in the Christian ethos, the indelibility of original sin. What Freud and Derrida worr y in the trope, the missionar y context avows: sin as the persistence of the trace, following the logic of Acts 3.19 and its similar figure of residual erasure (“Repent and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out”). 10. Salisbury and Axtell provide support for this explanation of puritan delay, which strikes me as more persuasive than Kellaway’ s theological argument; the latter attributes the delay to Calvinism’s easy (and thus presumably antievangelical) divide between the elect and damned. See Salisbur y, Manitou and Providence, 233; Axtell, The Invasion Within, 220; and Kellaway , The New England Company, 1649–1776, 56. 11. Jennings, The Invasion of America, 238. 12. These make up the final six of the eleven London-based tracts that publicized the mission. See Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776, 22. 13. Eliot, A Further Account of the Progresse of the Gospel, 76. 14. Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776, 36–39. 15. Whitfield, “Strength out of Weaknesse,” 178. 16. The mission run by the Mayhews on Martha’ s Vineyard sur vived into the eighteenth century, partly because of its island isolation. 17. Qtd. in Eames, ed., John Eliot and the Indians, 7. 18. Holstun, A Rational Millennium, 113–14. 19. “The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising,” 17; Whitfield, “Strength out of Weaknesse,” 186; Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England,” 181; on the Jewish lineage, see Cogley, “John Eliot and the Origins of the American Indians,” 215–20, Holstun, A Rational Millennium, 111–15, and Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 64–70.

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Notes to Pages 186–191

20. Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day,” 128; Winslow, “The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in New-England,” 73, 95; Eliot, A Further Account of the Progresse of the Gospel, A3r. Scholars have dismissed the relevance of the theor y of Jewish origins to early New England missions. Bercovitch points out that the theor y begins with Jesuit observers in the New W orld; of many conjectures, contemporar y historian Daniel Gookin traced Native American origins back to the Scythians; other New England settlers simply demonized the Indians as heathens; and Eliot’s thinking on the matter altered, having originally seen them as Tartarian (Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 75n; Gookin, “Historical Collections of the Indians in New England,” 146; Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 71–79; Cogley, “John Eliot and the Origins of the American Indians,” 216). Yet such arguments counter the notion that the Jewish theor y was representative of all puritan thinking on the subject; they do not discount its relevance to the Eliot mission. My claim is that the Jewish theory is specific to the rhetoric of the Eliot writings, and its emphasis on degeneracy enables the fund-raising drive. 21. Whitfield, “Strength out of W eaknesse” 190; Axtell, The Invasion Within, 141; Holstun, A Rational Millennium, 123–24. 22. Axtell, The Invasion Within, 141–42; Holstun, A Rational Millennium, 118–20; Bozeman, “To Live Ancient Lives,” 268–70. 23. Bozeman, “To Live Ancient Lives,” 269. 24. Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 215; Eliot, The Indian Grammar, preface; Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 63; Cotton Mather , Magnalia, vol. 1, 558; Eliot, “The Learned Conjectures,” 3, 9. 25. “The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising,” 14; Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day,” 109; Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 221; Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 62; Winslow, “The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in New-England,” 93–4; Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day,” 126; Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 254. 26. Winslow, “The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in New-England,” 93–94; Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day,” 122; Eliot, The Indian Grammar, preface. 27. Many examples of agricultural metaphors can be found in the Eliot writings. See “The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising,” 15–16; Winslow , “The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in New-England,” 93; Whitfield, “Strength out of Weaknesse,” 180; Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 109; also see Canup, Out of the Wilderness, 62–64. 28. Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 43, 44; Winslow, “The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in NewEngland,” 73, 78; Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day,” 112; Eliot, A Further Account of the Progresse of the Gospel, 54. For the comparative study , see Cohen, “Conversion Among Puritans and Amerindians,” 246–48. 29. Eliot, A Further Account of the Progresse of the Gospel, 35–36, 45. 30. Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 57; “The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising,” 5; Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 46; Whitfield, “Strength out of W eaknesse,” 178. 31. Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 65; Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Per fect Day ,” 108;

Notes to Pages 191–199

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Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 48; Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 223. 32. Holstun, A Rational Millennium, 130. 33. “The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising,” 16; Shepard, “The Clear Sunshine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 60; Eliot and Mayhew , “Tears of Repentance,” 232; Eliot, “A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel,” 274; Whitfield, “Strength out of W eaknesse,” 167; “The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising,” 14, 9; Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 53, 60. 34. “The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising,” 5; Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 231; Eliot, A Further Account of the Progresse of the Gospel, 31, 72. 35. Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 66; Eliot, A Further Account of the Progresse of the Gospel, 66. 36. Eliot, “Learned,” 18–19; Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 62, 63; Winslow , “The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in New-England,” 94; Eliot and Mayhew , “Tears of Repentance,” 202. 37. Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day,” 144, 121; Whitfield, “Strength out of W eaknesse,” 167–8, 169; Eliot on “the Translation of the Holy Scriptures,” qtd. in Winship, The Cambridge Press, 167; Whitfield, “Strength out of Weaknesse,” 178. 38. Cohen, “Conversion Among Puritans and Amerindians,” 250; John Eliot, A Further Accompt of the Progresse of the Gospel amongst the Indians, 20. 39. Cotton’s diary (1665–78) is an unpublished manuscript in the Massachusetts Historical Society, held in the John Cotton Jr . Collection; Amor y, First Impressions, 39; Lepore, The Name of War, 29–47; Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, 49–60. 40. Qtd. in Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776, 123. 41. Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day,” 121; Eliot, A Further Accompt of the Progresse of the Gospel amongst the Indians, 2; Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Per fect Day,” 136, 129; Eliot, “Learned,” 22. James Axtell suggests that exposure to literate, nonclerical settlers demystified the book for native peoples (“The Power of Print,” 308); yet we can speculate similarly that the dramatic presence of scribal and print work in a native oral language made both Anglos and Indians highly sensitive to the Western media that moved language from sound to image, from evanescence to document. 42. Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776, 127. 43. Edward Reynolds in Eliot, A Further Accompt of the Progresse of the Gospel amongst the Indians, A4v–B, 2–3, 4. 44. Kellaway, The New England Company, 1649–1776, 128–31. 45. Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 71. 46. Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 139; Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 254; Eliot and Mayhew, “Tears of Repentance,” 253; Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 141. 47. Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day,” 131; John Eliot, “The Epistle Dedicator y,” The New Testament, A4r; Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 143. 48. Eliot, A Further Account of the Progresse of the Gospel, 46; Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 139; “The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising,” 10, 11; Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 62; Whitfield, “The Light Appearing More and More towards the Per fect Day,” 110.

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Notes to Pages 200–207

49. Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 64; Winslow, “The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in NewEngland,” 94; Eliot, Indian Dialogues, 139–40. For gathering into church-estate, Eliot also preferred written confessions to circulate prior to live per formance. 50. Eliot, The Dying Speeches of Several Indians, 2. 51. Kristina Bross valuably positions W aban’s speech as a response to the discourse of vanishing traditionally used to understand Native American representation. See Dry Bones and Indian Sermons, 204–5. The actual W aban was a complicated figure. Francis Jennings indicates that, since W aban was not a sachem and yet he did become a justice, he sought power through Eliot and Eliot through him, undermining traditional power structures among the tribes; see The Invasion of America, 240. 52. See Rowland, The Century Bible: Job, 171–74; and The Geneva Bible. 53. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” 109–13. Seeking funds, Eliot was in regular correspondence with Robert Boyle in the 1680s and it is likely this patron would have seen a copy of The Dying Speeches. 54. Arnold Krupat (Ethnocriticism) provides a theoretical perspective on American Indian literatures. An important literar y critique of Eliot has emerged through the work of Thomas Scanlan ( Colonial Writing and the New World) and Kristina Bross (Dry Bones and Indian Sermons), and a cultural critique through the work of David Murray (Forked Tongues). Yet the pivotal role of the mission in early American literary history has gone unremarked. 55. Spengemann, A New World of Words, 49, 37. 56. Philip Round argues that the puritan mission was not hurt by the Restoration, when backing for conversion efforts continued, and he notes the symbolic role played by a copy of the Indian Bible as “honor culture” repayment (“By Nature and Custom Cursed,” 266). I would only add that the presentation copies exerted a force in addressing the contingent status of the mission and allowing for this secure funding. This force exemplifies Paul Duguid’s more general caution to those book historians following the functionalist model of Robert Darnton’ s “communications circuit”: that when a book enters its communications circuit, it can alter the terms of its meaning, becoming an agent of signification in its social locations. See Duguid, “Material Matters,” 78–80. 57. Amory, “Printing and Bookselling,” 85. 58. Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” 2–15. Contrast the 1956 publication with the 1953 offprint and its appended exhibition catalogue, published by the William and Mary Quarterly for distribution to the Associates of the John Carter Brown Library. 59. Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” 15; Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 17; Scobey, “Revising the Errand,” 3–31, quotations from 21–23; Elliott, “The Jeremiad,” 255–78. 60. Tompkins, “ ‘Indians,’ ” 61–63; Kaplan, “ ‘Left Alone with America,’ ” 3–11. 61. Shepard, “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth,” 44. Karen Kupperman recounts this story in passing; see Indians and English, 35. 62. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” 102–22; Jehlen, “Why Did the Europeans Cross the Ocean?,” 55.

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Index

Abbot, George, 36 Achinstein, Sharon, 9 acrostics, 36, 142, 149 Adams, William, 92 Alleine, Joseph, 8, 35, 66, 75, 84, 89, 90, 126; on reading, 77, 78, 81, 82 Alleine, Richard, 8, 60, 66, 100 almanac-diaries, 53–54. See also Paine, Thomas almanacs, xi, 25, 34, 53 Amory, Hugh, 6, 99, 106, 110–11, 144, 204 anagrams, 139, 142, 145, 149, 150, 151, 167–68 Andrews, William, 8 Andros, Edmund, 24 antinomianism, 10, 165, 184 appropriation, 13, 14–15, 106, 112, 133, 137–38 archival practice, xi, 116–17, 144, 160–61, 162–63, 178, 202–7 Arnold, Samuel, 149 artifactuality, 58, 89, 143, 163, 178, 179–80, 184, 193, 195–202. See also book history, and artifacts Augustine, 1, 47, 79, 83 Baily, John, 128–29 Bales, Peter, 117 Barthes, Roland, 15 Bayly, Lewis (The Practise of Pietie): and fasting, 120, 121, 123, 127, 135, 137; and mourning, 153, 154, 157; on reading, 68, 76–77, 79, 81–85; as reference work, 34; and Sabbath worship, 114, 115, 116; and sales, 7; title page, 102–6 Baynes, Paul, 79, 83, 90, 115, 124 Bay Psalm Book, 36–38, 40–41, 42, 52 Baxter, Richard, 8, 68

Beacon, Joseph, 81 Behn, Aphra, 6 Belcher, Joseph, 85–86 belles lettres, 10, 51 Benjamin, Walter, xiv, 178 Bennett, Stuart, 92 Bercovitch, Sacvan, xiv, 18–19, 74, 205–6 Bhabha, Homi, 207 Birkerts, Sven, 11 Blake, William, 13 “bodilie eyes,” 143, 151, 201 bookbinding, 91–102; colonial practices, 95; as defining the book format, 144; fastenings, 99–100 book history, xi, 5, 13, 182–83, 202–7; and artifacts, 20, 144–45, 161–62; and literary historiography, 10–11, 204; methodology, 13–15, 112, 161–62; and reception studies, 9, 14–15, 61, 112, 137–38; and the study of format, xi, 14, 20, 71, 162. See also appropriation Book of Common Prayer, 28, 92, 116 Book of Conscience, 4–5, 13, 14, 16, 84–85 books: as “bricks,” 7, 34, 95, 143; as icons, 27–28, 70; as “mirrors,” 71–72, 83, 121; portability of, 4, 89, 90, 95; as puritanism’s unconscious, 4, 28 books as storage devices, x, 23, 33, 46, 48–50, 91, 153; and almanac-diaries, 56; devotional anthologies, 3; and Psalm 119, 36, 40; and reader records, 58, 61, 62. See also codex format; commonplace books; thick style bookselling, 24 book trades, 7, 23–25 Boulter, Robert, 45 Boyle, Robert, 179, 202 Bozeman, T. Dwight, 18–19, 30, 69, 187 Bradford, Richard, 149

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Index

Bradstreet, Anne, xii–xiii, 140–41, 147, 151, 173 Brayman Hackel, Heidi, 9 Brietweiser, Mitchell, 141, 145 Brinsley, John, 117 Brisco, Joseph, 145, 163, 167–69 broadsides, 14, 20, 33; preser vation, 143, 172; publication, 148–49 Bromfield, Edward, 132 Browne, Thomas, 57 Bruch, Richard, 78 Bucer, Martin, 187 Bulkeley, Peter, 149 Bunyan, John, 7 Burton, Robert, 57 Byrd, William, 6 Calamy, Edmund, 23, 25, 34, 45–50, 58–60, 67 Caldwell, Patricia, 165 Calvin, John, 36, 40, 44, 47 Carter, John, 21 Casely, William, 8 Charles II, 45, 181, 204 Chartier, Roger, 12, 162 Chauncey, Charles, 89 Chicken Soup for the Soul, 3 Clap, Roger, 140, 151 Clark, Michael, 83 Clifford, James, 202 Cockenoe, 184 codex format, x, 1–2, 4, 19–20, 62, 71; contrasted with orality, 88–91; contrasted with the broadside, 152–53; cultural work of, 5, 50–51, 88, 106, 159; and meaning generation, 22, 32–34, 199–200; and page turning, 70, 100, 104, 105; and preservation, 143–44, 152–53, 159. See also bookbinding; books; books as storage devices; reading; thick style Cohen, Charles, 29, 165 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 161 Collins, Nathaneal, 147–48 Collinson, Patrick, 74 commonplace books, xii, 8, 32, 33, 50–51, 85, 99, 111; Thomas Weld’s, 19, 23, 51–53, 92 composition of place, 31, 119 conventional literacy, 2, 4–5, 11, 22, 70–71, 77, 79, 180, 193–95. See also reading conversion, 16, 26–27, 29–31, 59, 109, 134

Cotton, John, 37–38, 87, 149, 150, 151–52, 168, 184 Cotton, John, Jr., 195 Cotton, Theophilus, 92 covenant theory, 26–27, 29, 39, 47–48 covenant vows, 66, 121, 184, 190 Cutshamoquin, 184 Danckaerts, Jacob, 121 Danforth, Samuel, 128, 148, 204–5 Daniell, David, 39 Darnton, Robert, 15 Davenport, John, 204 Davidson, Cathy, 15, 17 death: cultural meanings of, 30, 142–43, 153–54, 171; and the glorified body, 155–57; and imaginative exercises, 47, 142, 147, 154–56, 173; theological status of the corpse, 155. See also elegies; mourning de Certeau, Michel, 138 Dee, John, 9 Delbanco, Andrew, 165 Dent, Arthur, 7, 34, 68, 78, 79, 92 détournement, 138 devotional subject, 16, 30, 139, 158, 165–66, 180; in reader records, 59, 61; and sermon audience, 110; as targeted reader, 46–47. See also discipline; “melancholic nomad”; puritan piety; redeemed subjectivity Dickinson, Emily, 5, 13 Dillingham, Sarah, 8 discipline, 16, 67, 88, 89, 106, 118, 158; and affliction, 35; and civic reading, 18; and codex use, 100; and divine judgment, 71–72; and fast-day worship 109–10, 122; and note-taking, 117 Dodge, William, 99 Doolittle, Thomas: A Call to Delaying Sinners, 35, 66, 90, 153; Mourner’s Directory, 155, 156, 157 double-bind communication, 31, 48, 107, 123, 135, 138, 139, 159 Downame, John (A Guide to Godlynesse): and fasting, 115, 120, 126; on reading, 72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 88, 91, 100 Drake, Sir William, 9 Drury, John, 74 Dudley, Thomas, 145, 147 Dummer, Richard, 150

Index 257 Dunster, Henry, 40, 196 Dury, John, 200 Dyer, William, 35, 83, 87, 88, 154, 155 Dyke, Daniel, 8 Eccles, Richard, 7 Edwards, Jonathan, 18 elegies, xii–xiii, 61, 139–45; broadside publication of, 148–49; communal readership of, 145–46, 149; and early American literary history, 140–41; and funerals, 28, 140, 146–48; as gifts, 61, 144, 159–60; oral and aural meanings, 147–50; reception history of, 171; transmission history, 140–41; and visual meanings, 148–49, 150–51. See also death; mourning Eliot, John, xiii, 40, 179–200, 203–4 Eliot mission, xiii, 182, 183–88; and colonial publishing history, 182, 204; and literary history, 182; and native education, 180, 184–85, 194–95; and “praying towns,” 184–88, 195; and printing technology, 182, 196–97 Eliot tracts, 183, 189, 195, 197, 202, 206; as promotional literature, 180–82, 188, 192, 194, 201; and the tabula abrasa metaphor, 183–84, 194 Elliott, Emory, 205–6 Elstrack, Renold, 104 emblem books, 31 Endicott, John, 197 Erasmus, 50 evidences, xii, 58–60 eye piety, xii, 71, 102–6, 133, 136–37. See also “bodilie eyes”; visual culture fasting, 29, 30, 52, 62–63, 108, 118–23; fastday customs, 108–10, 120–21; fast-day sermons, 107, 110; institution of, 113–14; as a problematic ritual, 111–12, 122, 123–28, 133; and “will-worship,” 108, 113, 119, 123. See also means of grace; worship Fiske, John, 145, 150 Flavel, John, 8, 52, 60, 61, 63, 95, 100, 157 Ford, Worthington, 140 Foster, John, 204 Foster, Stephen, 7, 9–10, 69 Fox, John (Time, and the End of Time), 19, 100, 153, 154 Foxe, John, 25, 27–28

Franklin, Benjamin, xiii Fuller, Thomas, 2–5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 57 Geddes, Gordon, 141 Geneva Bible, 38–39, 41–42 Gerhard, Johann, 78, 79 Gerrish, Mary, 145, 150 gesture, 12–13, 20, 100, 114–15, 189–91 gift economy, 21, 25–27, 42, 47–48, 52, 61, 69, 75, 197; asymmetrical impossibility, 60, 75, 159; burials and, 142; funeral texts and, 144, 157–60, 175–78; sacramental imagery and, 175. See also grave goods Ginzburg, Carlo, 92 Goody, Jack, 11 Gortonists, 196 graphic design, principles of, 102, 178 grave goods: within gift economies, 159–60; along horizontal axes, 160; and the politics of exhumation, 143, 161–62; and preservation, 144; along vertical axes, 160, 167 gravestones, 31, 146, 163–66 Great Awakening, 18 Green, Ian, 9–10, 34 Green, Samuel, 23–24, 204 Greg, W. W., 15 Griffiths, Paul, 33 Hall, David D., 7, 10, 24, 50, 68–69 Hall, Thomas, 52 Hambrick-Stowe, Charles, 30, 165 Hammond, Jeffrey, 141–42, 144 hand piety, xii, 71, 91–102, 116, 133, 134–35, 153 Harriot, Thomas, 1 Harris, Benjamin, 23 heart piety, xii, 22, 35, 66, 70, 72, 86, 105, 115 Henchman, Daniel, 146 Herbert, George, 149, 159 Hiacoomes, 199 Hooker, Thomas, 149, 187 Hopkins, Anne, 17 Huit, Ephraim, 73 Hull, John, 147 Hutchinson, Anne, 17 Indian Bible, 179, 181, 194–95

258

Index

“Indian Library,” 179–80, 194–95, 204 intensive reading, 13–14, 70, 73. See also sacred internalization interpretive bibliography, 15, 183 interpretive play, 53, 112, 137–38 Iser, Wolfgang, 15 Jackson, Edward, 190 Jager, Eric, 22 Jantz, Harold, 140–41, 171 Jehlen, Myra, 207 jeremiad, 107–10, 128, 138, 140, 173; as a tradition of Americanist scholarship, xii–xiv, 18, 109, 182–83, 203–6 Johns, Adrian, 9 Johnson, Marmaduke, 197, 204 Jonson, Ben, 33 Kaplan, Amy, 206 Kastan, David Scott, 9 Keach, Benjamin, 84, 126 Ker, Patrick, 78 Kernan, Alvin, 11 Kibbey, Ann, 10–11 King James Bible, 36, 38–39, 41–42, 201 King Philip (Metacom), 185 King Philip’s War, 10, 114, 141, 145, 163, 169, 185 King William’s War, 51 Lake, Peter, 15 Lechford, Thomas, 146 Lee, Samuel, 63 Leigh, Edward, 52 Lemay, J. A. Leo, 5 Lepore, Jill, 10–11 literary history, xi–xiv, 10–11, 20, 128, 160–61, 182–83, 202–7; author-based, xii–xiii, 5–6, 110, 140; and canon formation, 205–6; and historiography, xi, 18, 37, 140; place-based, 5–6, 21, 110; reader-based, 4–5, 6–10, 108, 128, 140; relationship to mourning, 143 Locke, John, 50 Lord’s Supper, 30, 175 Love, Harold, 50 Love, William D., 114 Lyon, Richard, 40 Malvolio, 31 masculinity, 17

Mather, Cotton, 17, 25, 26, 29, 74, 187; and elegies, 139, 141, 147; on fasting, 119–20, 126, 127; on reading, 77, 80, 82 Mather, Eleazar, 78 Mather, Increase, 21, 126, 128–29, 131, 204 Mather, Richard, 21, 40, 87, 89, 191 Mather, Samuel, 78 Mayhew, Thomas, 185, 186, 189, 193 McGann, Jerome, 31–32, 40 Mead, Matthew (The Almost Christian Discovered), 68, 90, 96, 115, 125, 126 means of grace, 16, 29–30, 76, 82, 138, 193; and bodily erotics, 156; and fasting, 119, 123, 124, 127; and Great Awakening, 18; and reader records, 59, 62; and spiritual delight, 86–87; and worship, 109, 111, 113. See also devotional subject; discipline; redeemed subjectivity Mede, Joseph, 73 meditation, 16, 34, 46, 62, 111, 153, 154–56; and biblical diction, 38–39; at funerals, 146–47; and reading, 68–69, 81–82, 88–89; upon sin, 109. See also reading, the ruminating reader “melancholic nomad,” 163, 165–67, 169, 171, 178 memory, 41, 51–52, 116, 118, 181, 188–89, 199, 201 Meserole, Harrison, 140 Miles, Jack, 75 Miller, Perry, xiv, 15, 18, 29, 182–83, 204–6 Milton, John, 45, 149 Minot, Lydia, 151 miscellany, xii, 23, 50, 60, 170–71, 175–78. See also commonplace books Mitchel, Jonathan, 82, 204 Mitchell, W. Fraser, 117 Monotunkquaint, 192 monumentality, 11, 89, 180, 181, 183, 197–99, 201 Moodey, Joshua, 163, 169–78 Moodey, Samuel, 64 Moore, Elizabeth, xii, 23, 45–46, 49, 50, 58–60 Morton, Nathaniel, 141, 183 mourning, xiii, 30; and the body, 171; and the “grief taboo,” 141–42, 145, 163; and relationship to Native Americans, 143, 145, 162–66, 171, 174–75; social rituals of, 158; and violence, 163, 171, 174–75.

Index 259 See also death; elegies; “melancholic nomad” Murdock, Kenneth, 140 Muzzey, Robert, 8 Native Americans, xiii–xiv, 10–11, 28, 146; and the book, 1–2; and Jewish origins, 186, 193; and material cultures, 161, 163; as readers, 195; and white English devotional identity, 165–67. See also Ninnimissinuok New England Company, 184–85, 186, 192, 194, 196–97 Newman, Barnett, 70 Ninnimissinuok, 1, 161, 163, 181, 204 Norton, Mary Beth, 10–11 note-taking, xiii, 108, 112, 117–18, 122; and Mary Rock, 132–37; and blank space, 136–37. See also shorthand Nowell, Increase, 151 Noyes, Nicholas, 17, 145, 150 Oakes, Urian, 130, 147–48, 204 O’Donnell, James, 33 Old Mr. Dod’s Sayings, 52 Ong, Walter, 11 oral cultures, 11–12, 202 Paine, Thomas (1694–1757), xii, 3, 23, 50, 53–58, 93 paratexts, 21–22 Passaconnaway, 199 Pearse, Edward, 144, 156, 157–59 Perkins, William, 51, 74, 153 Perry, Michael, 24, 45 Peters, Hugh, 92 petroglyphs, 164 phenomenology, ix, xi, 13; of the book, 3, 5, 20, 21, 139, 143, 182, 202; and gravestones, 164–65 Phips, William, 146 pictograms, 164 Pierce, Richard, 23 pilgrimage and immigrant status, 76, 90, 165 “plain style,” 13, 22, 31, 37, 49, 133, 139 Plutarch, 33 Podunk, 163–64 Pole, William, 146 Ponampian, 189 Poole, Matthew, 57

postcolonial criticism, xiv, 6, 183, 203, 206 “Praying Indians,” 188–93, 201. See also Native Americans preaching, 115, 116–17, 118 preparationism, 165 preparatory humiliation, 30, 46, 62, 143, 181; as countergift, 48; and fasting, 109–10, 119, 125, 129; and mourning, 154, 157, 160, 167; in Psalm 119, 35, 38; as reading mode, 83, 104 presentism, x, 175, 203 Prince, Thomas, 18 “print culture,” 13, 14 Protestant vernacular tradition, 16, 17, 20, 29, 87, 106, 118, 196, 198 Psalm 119, xii, 23, 34–45, 67 puritan piety: the paradox of, 20, 30–31, 38, 47, 59, 122–23, 169, 191; as a style, 15–16, 35, 38, 124, 201; and worship calendar, 112–14. See also devotional subject; means of grace; redeemed subjectivity Raymond, Joad, 9 reading: the bee reader, xii, 20, 23, 33, 99, 138, 165; customized reading, 108, 122, 135; domestic, 111, 121; in family, 30, 77, 79, 82, 106, 116; and gender, 16–17; linear reading, xii, 14, 63, 70, 79, 92, 111; nonlinear reading, xii, 14, 19, 62–63, 67, 68, 72, 79–80, 106, 110–11; as performance, xii, 5, 12–13, 70–72, 75, 76–87, 105–6; the pilgrim reader, xii, 20, 30, 33, 35, 46, 75, 153; and Protestantism’s ideology of literacy, 16, 116–18; the ruminating reader, 20, 30, 33, 35, 46–47, 72–73, 81; and spiritual plight, xii, 106, 138. See also conventional literacy; intensive reading; sacred internalization redeemed subjectivity, 29, 35, 61, 72, 109, 142, 180, 201. See also means of grace, preparatory humiliation, the Protestant vernacular tradition Reiner, John, 163, 169–78 Reynolds, Edward, 52, 188, 196 Robinson Crusoe, 95 Rock, Mary, 112, 132–38 Rogers, John, 150 Rogers, Richard, 8, 80, 127 Rothko, Mark, 70

260

Index

Rowlandson, Joseph, 107–9, 112, 137–38 Rowlandson, Mary, 107, 141–42 sacred internalization, 21–22, 87, 105–6, 164, 180. See also heart piety, intensive reading Saffin, John, 147, 149 Schweitzer, Ivy, 29 Scobey, David, 205–6 Scudder, Henry (The Christians Daily Walke), 7, 34, 63; on fasting, 120, 121, 125, 127, 135; on mourning, 153; on reading, 85, 86, 87 Second Spira, The, 52 secret writing, 85 sermons: and early American literar y history, 110, 203–5; as a genre, 110–11; occasional versus Sabbath, 110; serial form, 118 Sewall, Joseph, 100–101 Sewall, Samuel, 25, 99, 123, 145, 148, 170–71, 175–78, 204 Sewall, Stephan, 26 Sharpe, Samuel, 145 Shelton, Thomas, 117 Shepard, Thomas, 7–8, 60, 117, 125, 150; missionary writings, 1, 184, 188, 190–93, 199, 200, 206 Shepard, Thomas, II, 45, 150, 204 Shields, David, 10–11 shorthand, 117, 132 Sibbes, Richard, 8, 30–31 Sill, John, 117–18 Silverman, Kenneth, 140 single-sheet formats, 4, 144, 160 Smith, Samuel (The Great Assize), 7, 73, 85, 92, 100, 155 social constructionism, 11–12 Sparhawk, John, 8 Sparrowhawk, Nathaniel, 123 Spengemann, William, 6, 10–11, 182–83, 203 Stannard, David, 141 St. Clair, William, 210 n.11 steady sellers, xi–xiv, 3, 5, 20, 35, 52, 53, 7 1, 106, 140, 160; and bindings, 93–102; and the book trades, 7, 24–25, 38, 45; as conduct literature, 71–72, 75, 82–87, 106, 109, 114–17, 120, 128; and death, 152–57; as a devotional canon, 68, 180; as a devotional literary culture, 8–10,

141–42, 144, 154, 159; and indices, 34, 42–44, 153; and prescriptions for reading, 71, 75, 76–82, 121–22; in readers’ records, 7–8, 57, 60, 66; titles of, 92, 125 Sternhold-Hopkins psalmbook, 36, 37–38, 40, 104 Stevens, Wallace, 163 Stoddard, Roger, 144 Stoughton, William, 88, 204 Stout, Harry, 39 Street, Brian, 11–12 Stubbes, Henry, 84, 85–86 Swinnock, George, 69–70, 75, 90, 91, 100, 123, 154, 156 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 178 Tashjian, Ann and Dickran, 141 Taylor, Edward, xiii, 17, 140–41 Tennent, Gilbert, 18 Tetragrammaton, 104 Thacher, Thomas, 112, 114, 128–32 thick style, 31–34, 39, 53, 153, 159, 168, 180, 194; and characterization, 188; and fast-day discourse, 112; and graphic interfaces, 102; and literary technique, 69, 199–200; and note-taking, 118, 133–34; in a personal miscellany, 62–64, 66; and the sermon context, 107–9; and steady sellers, 34, 48–50, 68–72, 165. See also double-bind communication Thomas, Isaiah, 24 Tilley, Grace, 96, 101 time consciousness, 18–20, 110–11 Tompkins, Jane, 17, 206 Tompson, Benjamin, 60, 140, 149 Tompson, Joseph (1640–1732), xii, 23, 50, 60–67, 93, 106, 140, 180 Tompson, William, 60 Toteswamp, 191 Toulouse, Teresa, 111 Towanquatticks, 189 Trumbull, John, 8 typology, 19, 72–76, 106, 111, 201–2 Underhill, John, 187 Usher, John, 45 Vincent, Thomas: God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 81, 90, 155; Wells of Salvation Opened, 66, 100, 115, 117, 124, 155;

Index 261 Words of Advice to Young Men, 35, 68, 89 visual culture, 90–91, 102–6, 116, 134, 148–49, 150–51, 156–57. See also “bodilie eyes”; eye piety Waban, 184, 190, 191, 192, 200–202 Wamporas, 191 Warner, Michael, 11, 160 Watters, David, 141, 163 Webbe, George, 77, 79, 90, 116 Weld, Thomas (1590?–1662), 40 Weld, Thomas (1653–1702), xii, 8, 19, 23, 26, 31, 50–53, 92, 99, 118 Westminster Directory, 120, 146 White, John, 76–77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 90 White, Thomas, 68–69, 80 Whitfield, George, 18

Whitfield, Henry, 190, 194 Whiting, Samuel, 86, 89 Whittingham, William, 40 Wilson, John, 82, 87, 132, 150, 185, 194; as elegist, 140, 145, 149, 163, 167–69 Winslow, Edward, 184, 189 Winslow, Ola, 140 Winthrop, John, 74, 184 Wiswell, Ichabod, 149 witchcraft crisis, 10, 183 Woodbridge, Benjamin, 151–52 worship, 28, 59, 109; behavior in church, xiii, 30, 114–18; “formality” in, 28, 111–12, 119, 123–24, 129–30; reformed calendar for, 112–14. See also fasting, and “will-worship” Yongs, Christopher, 8

Acknowledgments

In a book in part about a culture of giving, it is a joy to acknowledge the friends, teachers, and scholars who have generously shaped this work. The gifts they have provided are hardly reciprocated in the economy of an acknowledgments page, and may they feel neither obligated by these thanks nor implicated by the author’s errors. The project began in association with David V ander Meulen; his patience, acuity, and good cheer inspired me, and I deeply appreciate his support. I have benefited likewise from readings of the material by Thomas Scanlan and from commentar y on the work by Alan Howard and the late Stephen Innes. Two writing groups have sustained this project: I thank Glenn Cummings, Andrea Levine, Steve Shoemaker , and Suzanne Y oung for smart readings early and Kathleen Diffley , Corey Creekmur, Tom Lutz, Harry Stecopoulos, and Loren Glass for excellent discussion late. Some years ago, David Levin read a version of Chapter 4, and I wish he were with us to see this book; more recently , Kristina Bross read a draft of Chapter 5, and Julia Leonard, Gar y Frost, and Lori Branch read sections of Chapter 2. Each part is better for their commentary, and I thank them. Galvanizing the book was a question put by Robert Gross to a large room of us at a Society of Early Americanists conference. It is rare for an early American literar y critic to have a fellow scholar in the same department, much less two, and much less two with such spirit and intelligence: Phil Round and Laura Rigal read the manuscript at separate, crucial junctures and wholly improved it. Judith Pascoe and Ed Folsom helped at key moments and gave sage counsel about the publishing process. David D. Hall and Jay Fliegelman were scrupulous outside readers for the University of Pennsylvania Press, and Jerr y Singerman shepherded it through the press with grace. My colleagues at the University of Iowa Center for the Book are a wonderful stimulus. I am certain that the future will recognize their expertise in understanding the past. Those of us lucky enough to meet with them in the present learn across all dimensions of time and space. And their presence is a delight: thanks to Jon Wilcox, Julia Leonard, Timo-

264

Acknowledgments

thy Barrett, Gar y Frost, Kathleen Kamerick, Emily Martin, Sid Huttner , David Schoonover, Sara Sauers, Jim Snitzer , and Cher yl Jacobsen. I am indebted to the intellectual generosity of a number of thinkers whom I have met with over the years. With appreciation for their kind rigor , I thank David Walker, Robert Caserio, Deborah McDowell, Janice Knight, Barbara Nolan, Terry Belanger, Eric Lott, and, in a tangential but profoundly important forum, Paula Richman. For sessions on book histor y, I am similarly indebted to Sandra Gustafson and David D. Hall at an American Antiquarian Society summer seminar, and to Peter Stallybrass at a National Humanities Center seminar in literar y studies. Peter also highlighted the bee metaphor , which I lift, gratefully , to discuss pious reading. Colleagues at the various colleges and universities where I have worked have been supportive and intrigued, especially at moments when my interest was flagging: thanks to Ed Burke, Nick Mason-Browne, John Lowe, Rick Moreland, Michelle Massé, Jim Catano, Sean Shesgreen, Diana Swanson, Jim Giles, Bob Self, Bill Baker , Susie Phillips, Christine Pawley, Bluford Adams, Doris Witt, and the late and sorely missed Gustaaf Van Cromphout. A number of institutions assisted this work. A grant from the Commonwealth Center for Literar y and Cultural Change, led by Ralph Cohen at the University of Virginia, gave me faith in the project and a splendid audience for its ideas. T wo short-term Mellon research grants—one from the Massachusetts Historical Society and the other from the Huntington Librar y—enabled archival work. Librarians and researchers at these and other institutions answered questions and fielded requests to the great benefit of the project: thanks to Peter Drummey, Kim Nusco, and Conrad W right at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Roy Richie, Alan Jutzi, and Stephen T abor at the Huntington Library; Stuart Walker at the Boston Public Librar y; Paul Gehl and John Powell at the Newberr y Librar y; and the incomparable Joanne Chaison, Thomas Knoles, John Hench, Caroline Sloat, and Jaclyn Donovan at the American Antiquarian Society. A summer research grant from Northern Illinois University and an Old Gold fellowship from the University of Iowa spurred development of the book’s argument. A National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend allowed travel and time for further archival work. An Arts and Humanities Initiative grant from the University of Iowa permitted a trip to complete research and writing. LeDon Sweeney helped research key passages in the book. Heather , Josh, Nancy, and Richard Marsceau provided that rare space, a homemade institution, full of good company, great coffee, and various writing surfaces, for which I am ver y grateful. Portions of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 appeared in different form as “The Thick Style: Steady Sellers, Textual Aesthetics, and Early Modern Devo-

Acknowledgments 265 tional Reading,” PMLA 121.1 (January 2006), and are reprinted by permission of the copyright owner , The Modern Language Association of America. Sections of Chapter 4 were published within the essay “‘BOSTON/SOB NOT’: Elegiac Performance in Early New England and Materialist Studies of the Book,” American Quarterly 50.2 (June 1998), and are reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. Likewise, a portion of Chapter 4 appeared within the essay “Cultural Studies, Materialist Bibliography, and the New England Archive: Editing an Elegy from King Philip’ s War,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (Spring 1999), and is reprinted by permission of the Department of English, Georgia State University. Wilson and Elisabeth Brown made me care about books and reading, one of the best gifts parents could share. They stood by the present work with patience and good humor , virtues they passed down to my sister , Laura Cronin, and my brothers, Wilson, David, and Art Brown. All of them encouraged this quest with quiet support and benevolent razzing, and I continue to learn from their kindness and heart. Keeping me errant in the best senses of the word were Jim Mason, Jeff Hagan, T anera Marshall, Caleb Thompson, and John Chaimov . Murray and Ellen Hausknecht were unfailingly interested, and their camaraderie has been a heartening spur . There is one person who has nourished this work, who has always been dedicated bee to my dilator y pilgrim, and directed pilgrim to my dawdling bee. For conversation, radiance, and brick-books of love, I gratefully acknowledge Gina Hausknecht: thanks, dollink, for everything. And for more than ever ything, Jesse, that hearty gift, to whom, along with my parents—go ahead, flip back to the front, you’ll see—I dedicate this book.