Jonathan Edwards and transatlantic print culture

257 Pages·2016·11.846 MB·English

by  Yeager, Jonathan M

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Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture

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Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic
Print Culture
Jonathan M. Yeager
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ISBN 978– 0– 19– 024806– 2
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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To Charlie Phillips and Rick Sher

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{ Contents }
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
1. Introduction on the Reception of Jonathan Edwards’s Works
in the Eighteenth Century 1
2. Samuel Kneeland and Colonial Boston Printing 27
3. Jonathan Edwards’s Earliest Bookseller- Publishers
and Their Relationships with Printers 54
4. Jonathan Edwards’s Editors and Their Relationships
with Booksellers and Printers 84
5. Jonathan Edwards’s Later Printers, Publishers, and Editors 112
Conclusion 144
Appendix 1: Table of Jonathan Edwards’s Works 151
Appendix 2: G raph of Jonathan Edwards’s Publications
in the Eighteenth Century 181
Appendix 3: Prices and Formats of Jonathan Edwards’s Works 183
Appendix 4: Tally of Subscriptions for The Life of Brainerd 189
Notes 191
Index 227

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{ Preface }
I first envisioned this project as a single journal article on how Jonathan
Edwards’s books had been published in the eighteenth century. I had discovered
that Edwards’s chief printer and publisher in Boston had received scant attention
and wanted to draw out their significance in the American book trade and in the
dissemination of his works in the first half of the eighteenth century.1 The more
research that I did on this topic, the more material I uncovered not only on the
crucial role that Samuel Kneeland and Daniel Henchman played in the printing
and publishing of Edwards’s writings in Boston, but also on the contributions
that other booksellers, printers, editors, and intermediaries made in places like
New York, Edinburgh, and London.
Ever since I read Richard Sher’s landmark monograph, The Enlightenment
and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth- Century Britain,
Ireland, and America, I have been fascinated with the history of the book. Sher
opened my eyes to the wealth of information that can come from examining such
subliminal features as title pages and advertisements, in addition to the innova-
tive ways that books were marketed in the eighteenth century. Because Sher’s
monograph focused exclusively on Scottish Enlightenment authors, I became
convinced that much more work needed to be done on early evangelical authors
and how their works were published in the eighteenth century. I wondered how
evangelicals’ motivations for publishing compared with those of contemporary
authors like David Hume and William Robertson.
Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture seeks to provide answers to
questions about early evangelical publishing. It is intended to fill an important
lacuna in the history of the book and early American religious history, and was
written with two primary audiences in mind. The first is scholars of the history
of the book interested in learning more about evangelicalism and religious print
culture in the eighteenth century. In the last fifty years, several important mono-
graphs have come out, helping scholars to understand how books were printed,
readership, and the influence that specific titles had on American and European
culture. However, there are very few sources devoted specifically to religious
print culture in the eighteenth century, especially as it pertains to evangelicalism.
Sher’s award- winning Enlightenment and the Book, for instance, is devoted almost
entirely to secular and theologically liberal authors. A cursory reading of Sher’s
book and early religious historiography might lead to the misconception that
evangelicalism should be associated solely with poorly produced chapbooks and
small duodecimos, and that even the movement’s most prominent authors paid