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h Introduction the distinguished scholar was absolutely correct when he quipped, “indeed, ours has been a notably sermon-ridden literature from the beginning.”1 The Puritan sermon has long been the elephant in the room for many teachers and scholars of early american literature. We know that we have to deal with it, but we are often not sure how to do so. Historical- and cultural-studies approaches often explicate—and accordingly reaffirm—the dominance of sermon culture as a manifestation of theological, intellectual, or sociological idiosyncrasies. literary approaches, by contrast, have particular difficulty gaining traction on the slippery slopes of shifting aesthetic judgment (we do not generally read like seventeenth-century readers) and seemingly insurmountable differences in faith perception (we do not generally believe like seventeenth-century Calvinists). accordingly, when trying to account for the phenomenal popularity of sermons in seventeenth-century New england, literary scholars favor predominantly historical- and culturalstudies approaches or, alternatively, deflect focus toward more familiar genres, such as poetry and autobiographical writing. early american literature may be “sermon-ridden,” but those sermons often remain at the margins of the literary canon. in retrospect, we should recognize that Puritan sermon literature has always been complicated by the fraught connotations of its peculiar rationale. Puritan ministers themselves struggled with the implications of sermon composition, eschewing rhetorical excesses and questioning the very efficacy of human language. The laity, in turn, articulated their own pious doubts in agonized dialogic responses to the experience of the meetinghouse. The question, finally, cannot simply be how modern readers can come to terms with a sermon-ridden literary past. We must instead begin by asking 2 Introduction how a modern critic might even phrase the question to which the conscientious Puritan writer, reader, or auditor would not object. illustrations of sermon popularity rely upon anecdote. Cotton Mather reports in the Magnalia Christi Americana (“the great works of Christ in america”), for example, that upon John Norton’s taking up the Boston pulpit, a certain “godly man” of Norton’s former congregation in ipswich would travel on foot to hear the weekly lecture.2 John Cotton’s famously“untrimmed sermons” must have achieved the rhetorical goals of plain style wonderfully, for John Wilson reports that he “preaches with such authority, demonstration, and life, that methinks, when he preaches out of any prophet or apostle, i hear not him; i hear that very prophet and apostle; yea, i hear the lord Jesus Christ himself speaking in my heart.”3 John Wilson spoke as an apostle, according to Thomas shepard, and his ex tempore skills were impressive enough that one of his few New england-based publications was based on a lecture that he had had only a day to prepare, owing to the absence of the expected speaker.4 Given the vicissitudes of such exemplary anecdotes, perhaps especially those preserved by the filiopious Mather, it is no wonder that explanations of sermon culture give way to a pathologizing instinct. That is to say, the question of what drove popular demand for preaching quickly becomes: What was wrong with people that they wanted to hear so many sermons? Part of the problem is that the Puritan sermon is a literature of disproportion . in practice, the proverbial Protestant principles of sola fide (by faith alone) and sola scriptura (by scripture alone) seem to be taken to curious extremes. The creators and consumers of Puritan sermon literature are a people who distinguished themselves by saying that faith alone is enough for salvation. so why, we might rightly ask, did they spend so much time in the pulpit and pew? (Harry s. stout estimates that the average person would have spent 15,000 hours in his or her lifetime listening to sermons.)5 Their sermon compositions are referred to as “plain style.” so why would they spend months explicating a single verse of scripture? (Thomas shepard spent four years explicating the Parable of the ten Virgins to his congregation, and the print edition of that sermon cycle runs to more than 600 pages.)6 They also thought of the Bible as a perfect book—in a sense, the only book that really counted. so why did they make so many more books, written in their own imperfect human language? (Print sermons were often based on notes taken by individual auditors who transcribed their own sense of the minister’s expository pulpit explication.) are such demonstrations of pious copia simply enactments of good piety, some [3.142.250.114] Project...

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