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Jeremiah's Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England
Contributor(s): Neuman, Meredith Marie (Author)
ISBN: 0812245059     ISBN-13: 9780812245059
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
OUR PRICE:   $75.95  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: June 2013
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American - General
- Religion | Sermons - Christian
- Religion | Christianity - Literature & The Arts
Dewey: 252.059
LCCN: 2013012713
Series: Material Texts
Physical Information: 1.2" H x 6.4" W x 9.1" (1.35 lbs) 280 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

New England Puritan sermon culture was primarily an oral phenomenon, and yet its literary production has been understood mainly through a print legacy. In Jeremiah's Scribes, Meredith Marie Neuman turns to the notes taken by Puritan auditors in the meetinghouse in order to fill out our sense of the lived experience of the sermon. By reconstructing the aural culture of sermons, Neuman shifts our attention from the pulpit to the pew to demonstrate the many ways in which sermon auditors helped to shape this dominant genre of Puritan New England.

Tracing the material transmission of sermon texts by readers and writers, hearers and notetakers, Jeremiah's Scribes challenges the notion of stable authorship by individual ministers. Instead, Neuman illuminates a mode of textual production that pervaded communities and occurred in the overlapping media of print, manuscript, and speech. Even printed sermons, she demonstrates, bore the traces of their roots in the oral culture of the meetinghouse.

Bringing material considerations to bear on anxieties over the perceived relationship between divine and human language, Jeremiah's Scribes broadens our understanding of all Puritan literature. Neuman examines the controlling logic of the sermon in relation to nonsermonic writing--such as conversion narrative--ultimately suggesting the fundamental permeability among disparate genres of Puritan writing.