Jonathan Yeager's meticulous research on the production of books by the eighteenth-century New England pastor, revivalist and divine Jonathan Edwards yields several insights. Yeager's defining conclusion, repeated several times, is this: the production of a book by Edwards involved several individuals, including publishers who financed the book, printers who produced it, booksellers who advertised it, agents who marketed it, and promoters who sometimes edited parts of it for sale overseas. This might at first glance appear to be a rather commonplace observation but Yeager does his best to suggest that the books that made Edwards famous as a defender of Evangelical Calvinism were collective efforts. A small cohort appears behind nearly every publication. Samuel Kneeland and Daniel Henchman led the production of Edwards's books in Boston. Thomas Foxcroft edited and promoted these books in New England; John Erskine did the same in Britain.
This focus on the social networks that sustained publication of Edwards's writings pushes us to consider the importance of personal association and acquaintance to a burgeoning print industry. Yeager portrays the work of eighteenth-century divines such as Edwards less as the effects of a solitary theological intellect and more as the articulation of a vibrant religious culture. Edwards's books were shaped to a public audience and intended to express a broad Evangelical mindset. Yeager extends this story beyond New England to London, Glasgow and the Netherlands. He also takes the story past Edwards's lifetime by tracking publications of his work in early national America.
The detail that supports this claim often concerns mundane matters of the physical features of Edwards's books. There is more than enough description here not only of paper, ink and binding but also length of texts, print runs, size of pages, quality of binding, title pages and other prefatory material. Throughout, Yeager shows how decisions about such matters rested on sometimes competing concerns: affordability, timeliness (engaging in a dispute at its most popular moment), estimation of audience and number of books produced, visible impressiveness of the book -- the larger and more elaborate the better -- and durability. Yeager insists that publishers of Edwards's works attempted to negotiate between financial interests and the overarching goal of publication: respect for and knowledge of the Evangelical message.
We read about which aspects of Edwards's version of Evangelical Calvinism appeared, at least to publishers, to have appealed to a wide audience. There are few surprises here. His most frequently published works included his account of the revivals, Faithful narrative; his analysis of the role of affections in the religious life, Religious affections; his redaction of the life of a pious and self-sacrificing missionary, Life of Brainerd; and his post-revivals analyses of human volition and religious choice, Freedom of the will. Two other works grab Yeager's attention. Edwards's Original sin, a dense theological treatise, was especially popular among English and European publishers. In early national America, Edwards's posthumously-printed History of the work of redemption, with its theology of history and millenarian implications, drew attention.
The title of this brief book, however, is a bit misleading. This study focuses so tightly on the cast of characters involved in printing and publishing that it fails to connect the print history to religious affairs at large. We read little of what the accumulated data about print runs and various publishers means for understanding Edwards, Evangelical culture or eighteenth-century religious issues: how the print history might inform our reading of the eighteenth century. What did it mean, for example, that the Life of Brainerd was so widely produced and circulated in so many venues and formats? What was it about the 1750s that made Freedom of the will such a valued publication? These questions go unasked.
This book also reveals little about transatlantic print culture. Instead, it resolutely adheres to the editing, production, marketing and selling of books by Edwards without substantive attention to other authors, the transatlantic book trade more widely, broad intellectual currents, or, indeed, the very meaning of print culture in the mid-eighteenth century. There is very little material on the publication of works by fellow Evangelicals from the period, theological opponents, writers from different American (or British) regions, or authors of different genres of religious writings. Without comparative accounts, it is a bit difficult to draw substantial conclusions about the importance of the history of the publication of Edwards's works to print culture, if by that term we include the ways in which the printing of books reflected cultural developments in society.
This is to say that the focus of this book is fairly narrow. It will serve specialists in Edwards and mid eighteenth-century New England well. It also sets the stage for other scholars to draw the intellectual implications of the data helpfully assembled by Yeager.
