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h Chapter 1 Unauthorizing the Sermon in a letter written to his old friend and colleague John Cotton in 1650, John Davenport requests advice regarding a sermon he is preparing for the press. some time ago, Davenport had lent his own copy of notes on a sermon on “the knowledge of Christ” to “Brother Pierce,” a lay auditor who took notes at the delivery of the sermon.1 Davenport comments: “The Forenamed brother dilligently wrote, as his manner was, but finding that his head and pen could not carry away some materiall expressions, he earnestly desired me to lett him have my notes, to perfect his owne by them.”2 after some delays, Davenport sends the requested notes to Brother Pierce in New Haven, extracting two promises. Number one, that Pierce will return his copy when done via “a safe land=messenger” (four years earlier, Davenport had lost an entire manuscript sermon series on board a vessel known as the “phantom ship”).3 Number two, that when Brother Pierce “had transcribed them, he would shew them unto [Cotton], and make no other use of them then privatly for himselfe but by [Cotton’s] advise.”“This i added,” explains Davenport,“because i feared that he had a purpose for the presse, from some words that i observed now and then to fall from him.”4 Brother Pierce fears that he may have missed some fundamental points of Davenport’s argument—what he calls “materiall expressions.” in turn, however, the very materiality of those incomplete notes enables Davenport ’s argument about“the knowledge of Christ” to circulate. The materiality of expression—created by his own hand as well as by Brother Pierce’s—makes Davenport’s preaching portable, accessible, and also vulnerable. at first glance, Davenport’s letter seems simply to confirm the conventional sense of anxiety over unauthorized publication associated with Puritan print 36 Chapter 1 sermons. Complaints about unauthorized publication are ubiquitous. Thomas shepard, for example, complains in a letter about the unauthorized publication of The Sincere Convert (a series drawn from his english preaching) that“it was a Collection of such Notes in a dark town in england, which one procuring of me, published them without my will or privity; i scarce know what it contains, nor do i like to see it, considering the many [typographical errors], most absurd, and the confession of him that published it, that [it] comes out gelded and altered from what was first written.”5 such disavowals (found in private writing as well as in the prefaces to subsequent editions and responses to unauthorized publication) are common among seventeenth-century clergy, especially (but certainly not limited to) New england ministers who may have felt the distance from the london publishing world even more keenly than their transatlantic brethren.6 laity of all denominations took notes, but the practice was particularly common among those auditors with Puritan leanings who sought to privilege the primacy of the Word in the work of redemption.7 Davenport’s letter to Cotton complicates our notion of the relationship between the publishing minister and the well-intentioned lay notetaker (and, perhaps, even the less well-intentioned notetaker). His letter suggests that manuscript notes, by ministers and laity alike, might be kept in circulation, be used to check and confirm each other, and ultimately provide a complex network of authorship that might enable clerical publication. in his letter, Davenport ’s primary concern is neither the return of his notes nor the suppression of any publishing ambitions on the part of Brother Pierce. (if Brother Pierce had succeeded in getting Davenport’s preaching into print, however, Davenport’s name, not his own, would be on the title page. in terms of both the notetaker and the publisher, there would be some combination of economic and pious motive rather than what we now may think of as personal, authorial ambition .) Davenport desires foremost that Cotton will comment on his explication. Cotton apparently takes up this request immediately and begins to draft his response to Davenport’s scriptural interpretation directly in the white space on Davenport’s letter.8 The letter as artifact becomes a palimpsest of communal interpretive endeavors. This particular shared endeavor implicates Davenport, Cotton, and Pierce in various overlapping roles. Davenport, of course, serves as the primary author or instigator of the text, while Cotton serves as the collegial advisor on matters of scriptural interpretation. Pierce serves primarily as messenger , bearing his own and Davenport’s notes. But Pierce’s...

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