A Divinity for All Persuasions: Almanacs and Early American Religious Life by T. J. Tomlin (review)

In the introduction to A Divinity for All Persuasions: Almanacs and Early American Religious Life, historian T. J. Tomlin mentions that his work draws upon “a close reading of just under 2,000 almanacs from across British North American and the early United States between 1730 and 1820” (5), from holdings at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Virginia Historical Society (ix). Tomlin’s work could be hailed for this labor alone, as the exhaustively footnoted book recovers and renders vibrantly provocative the well-known but little-read form of the almanac. Although the almanac is unread now, with the notable exception of Poor Richard’s aphorisms collected in Benjamin Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth” (1758), Tomlin points out that not only did the almanac saturate the early American print market, it was the one book that seemingly everyone read, causing Cotton Mather to lament that it “comes into almost as many hands as the best of books [the Bible]” (11). Or possibly Mather was celebrating this fact, for Tomlin points out that in addition to his myriad other religious projects, Mather also published an almanac. Ever attuned to his audience’s spiritual wants and needs, Mather saw his brief foray into the almanac form as an attempt to bring Puritan doctrine into the everyday lives of the New England colonists. Like Mather, Tomlin asserts that the almanac was a part of the larger religious world of early America, and uses this idea to interrogate an archive of these almanacs that is daunting in its volume and perplexing in its variety. What he finds reflected in these critically underutilized sources is not the intra-Puritan competition recorded by the clerical elite, or even the scholarly debate over doctrinal differences often grafted back onto this period; instead, he “came to see that pan-Protestantism . . . sat at the center of early American religious life” (158). Tomlin argues that between the years 1730 and 1820 the form of the genre and the demands of the market prompted almanacs to unify readers around a set of pan-Protestant beliefs that formed a generalized Protestant vernacular. Drawing on his thorough archival research, Tomlin finds in the almanac a genre whose popularity and diffusion both grew from and helped produce a universal religious life that bubbled below the surface of the sectarian divides.

Tomlin begins by familiarizing readers with the early American almanac in two chapters that describe its production, content, and use. The almanac was an “Annual Friend”—to use Tomlin’s title for this part of the book— that represented a lucrative source of sales for printers who depended on the yearly publication of the cheaply printed sixteen-to forty-eight-page pamphlet, containing “calendars surrounded by a variety of additional content” (11), including “poetry, essays, stories, and anecdotes” (12) known by scholars as “filler.” While publications such as Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac and the Farmer’s Almanac are the most recognizable, numerous local variations saturated the market, causing one printer to remark, “no pamphlet or book, not excepting the bible itself, is so thoroughly examined as these annual productions” (11), and Tomlin to suggest that “by 1800 there were enough almanacs being printed in the United States to place one in every household” (16). These steady sellers—as David Hall calls them—made up the backbone of many printers’ trade, and there was a fierce competition to capture the largest share of the market. For each almanac “a calculator (also known as a philomath), an author (or compiler), and a printer” (18) came together to produce a product that “had the appearance of an assorted, fragmented collection of poems, weather predictions, essays, anecdotes, maxims, and medical advice” (27). Tomlin’s great strength is his willingness to consider as important each aspect of the almanac, examining the work’s filler, calendar, illustrations, and at times even marginalia in his construction...