Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture by Jonathan M. Yeager (review)

Jonathan Yeager’s Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture joins Melanie Bigold’s Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (2013) and Tessa Whitehouse’s The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720–1800 (2015) as groundbreaking monographs uncovering the history of early evangelical writing and publishing in Great Britain, America, and the Netherlands, a history generally ignored or marginalized in studies of print culture of this period. Bigold’s volume explores three significant women writers of the eighteenth century, and Whitehouse examines the writings (many left in manuscript) of Philip Doddridge and how they were edited and published by a network of his friends, colleagues, and former students during the last half of the eighteenth century. Yeager, on the other hand, examines the career of the famous American divine Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), uncovering the various means by which relationships among ministers, church members, editors, printers, booksellers, and publishers in America and abroad, both during Edwards’s lifetime and after (a striking similarity with Doddridge), were instrumental in promoting his works through a variety of formats suitable to many audiences, all connected by an interest in, and in many cases, a devotion to evangelicalism.

Yeager begins with a detailed discussion of the reception of Edwards’s writings in the eighteenth century, with his chief attention turned to Edwards’s printers, booksellers/publishers, and editors (terms that have to be applied with some degree of fluidity and overlap at this time, as Yeager makes clear in his Preface) and their numerous American, British, and Continental editions (another term that Yeager distinguishes carefully from reprints that merely bore a new title page). In Appendix 1 Yeager provides a complete and detailed description of nearly 160 titles by Edwards, beginning with his first published sermon in Boston in 1731 and ending with the fourth London edition of John Wesley’s abridged version of The Life of David Brainerd in 1800. Of these titles, at least three—Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, and The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God—were bestsellers, going through some ten editions, reprints, or abridgments in the eighteenth century, along with various editions of his sermons. Edwards’s ministry in Northampton and later at Stockbridge in western Massachusetts gave him only limited exposure, so that he could never have enjoyed the success he experienced as a writer in his lifetime and after his death without the aid of networks of friends and followers in America and England who promoted, shaped, printed, and disseminated his writings. As Yeager argues, ‘these intermediaries’ contributed to the publishing of Edwards’s works by shaping ‘the public perception of him in the way that they packaged and marketed his publications’ (p. xi).

Chapter 2 presents a close examination of Edwards’s relationship with his Boston bookseller and printer, Samuel Kneeland (1697–1769), who produced most of the first editions of Edwards’s writings during the latter’s short lifetime. Kneeland operated one of four print shops in Boston in 1740, most of the time in partnership with his cousin, Timothy Green. An examination of his life and career, Yeager contends, improves our ‘understanding of Edwards as an author, his readership, and how he was interpreted by contemporaries’ (p. 27). In this chapter Yeager provides considerable details on the process of book production (binding, paper, type, and compositing) in early America, as well as Kneeland’s general affiliation with the evangelical ‘New Lights’ of the first Great Awakening in New England. Kneeland published (somewhat unsuccessfully) Edwards’s Treatise Concerning Religious Affections in 1746, but in all his other services to Edwards he served only as printer, fulfilling that role more than a dozen times between 1731 and 1758, and in the decade before his death printed another eight titles...