Southern Manuscript Sermons before 1800: A Bibliography (review)

Graduate students and historians studying religion in the colonial South and the early national period will be happy to see the publication of this book. This volume brings together citations, titles, and brief descriptions of more than 1600 manuscript sermons preached in the South before 1800 by more than 100 clergy representing a variety of denominations: Roman Catholic (forty-two clergy), Anglican/Episcopal (forty clergy), Congregational (three clergy), Baptist (seven clergy), Methodist (six clergy), Presbyterian (eleven clergy), and Lutheran (two clergy), as well as one Quaker preacher. Many of these document may have been unknown to many scholars before publication of Southern Manuscript Sermons before 1800.For instance, few historians were likely aware of the large number of sermons available at the F. Garner Ranney Archives of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. Other people may have been unaware of the relatively large body of Roman Catholic sermons preached in the colonial South.

The collection includes a number of helpful appendices, one listing the religious affiliation of the preachers whose sermons are represented in the collection and a keyword-short title index. The keyword index is broad in scope, listing topics as diverse as “Hail Mary, On the”; “yellow fever, epidemic in Baltimore”; “Holy Orders”; and “Green, Bishop William Mercer,” who had come to own at least one of Virginia colonial Anglican James Maury’s manuscript sermons by the 1860s.

Also available online in a searchable database (http://dlc.lib.utk.edu/sermons), this source should help scholars locate sermons that will eventually expand our understanding of the Southern religious mind in the colonial period. One might wonder whether historians will find more differences or similarities in the discourses preached by members of different denominations. How will historians address, for example, sermons that discuss “the new birth,” a term usually thought to suggest evangelical leanings, although Anglicans hostile to the Great Awakening (such as Maury) also used the term in their sermons?

This is an important collection of citations that will prove helpful to scholars from a range of fields—from history and literature to psychology. However, this book is not without problems. The Reverend Deuel Pead, previously identified by Richard Beale Davis as an Anglican, shows up here as a Baptist. In addition, the collection clearly does not include all of the collections of manuscript American sermons before 1800. The Bishop Payne Library at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, for instance, does not even appear in the list of “United States and British Repositories Investigated,” although the archives there include a collection of manuscript sermons written by the Reverend William Douglass.

These issues aside, Southern Manuscript Sermons before 1800 is a valuable source, not only for collecting in one place citations to so many relatively obscure sermons but also for the commentaries that accompany each entry, including a reference to secondary works that have already published edited versions of the particular sermon.