1 As primary sources for this intriguing book, Meredith Marie Neuman examined manuscript notebooks of Puritan auditors of sermons that were delivered in colonial meeting houses in New England from the 1630s to the 1690s. Recognizing the limitation that “the greatest obstacle in understanding 17th-century New England sermon literature and culture is simply that we do not have easy access to the oral tradition that was its heart” (p. 8), she emphasizes the evidentiary value of these notebooks: “Lay sermon notes do not reconstruct ‘authentic’ oral performance; rather, they constitute a material record of discrete acts of listening that occur within specific communities of interpreters” (98). Her analysis of the aural experience, the ability of some note-takers to capture rhythms of the minister’s oral delivery and some lapses in attention to the minister’s words is significant. Furthermore, Neuman does an excellent job of presenting photographic illustrations of these manuscripts, along with her transcriptions of the manuscript pages, thus drawing our attention to the value of the materiality of historical manuscripts’ penmanship, orthography, shorthand, use of pen and ink and speculation about whether note-taking took place in the meeting during the sermon or afterwards.

2 I’ve spent many hours cataloguing early modern manuscripts, so I share Neuman’s deep appreciation of the material value of the physical, not just textual, information in these sources. I am also struck by the technological divide between the sources Neuman works with and 20th- and 21st-century audiovisual sources for the study of vernacular sermons—we have hundreds of hours of audio recordings of sermons at the American Folklife Center. Scholars of religious life of the 19th century and earlier must rely entirely on print and manuscript sources. Still, audio recordings of sermons were generally made by outsiders to the sermon traditions they captured, whereas Neuman is able to add to our understanding of Puritan communities from within, by introducing us to auditors whose notes are evidence “of the phenomenal event of the sermon and its subsequent dissemination in the lives and texts of the community. The relationship between auditor and sermon was far from passive” (p. 8).

3 Neuman’s strategy of creating personas for the anonymous notetakers such as “Correcting Auditor,” “Disposition Auditor” and “Elegant Auditor” in chapter two makes it more difficult to follow the comparisons she makes; I would have preferred that the notebooks be identified as objects by date and place. Another weakness is that her focus “away from content” (p. 30) is so complete that 17th-century beliefs and Puritan believers almost vanish, and the book might therefore have less value in a Religious Studies curriculum than it has for graduate courses in 17th-century literature and the history of the book. A description of the architectural setting of the meeting houses would aid readers in imagining the spaces where these sermons were delivered and recorded. Neuman’s final chapter, “Narrating the Soul,” on the relationship between the genre of the conversion narrative and the sermon is particularly strong and brings the reader to a closer understanding of the “soul’s story” rather than the “self ’s story” (p. 185). Neuman’s notes and references are extensive and provide valuable leads for anyone wishing to delve into the primary sources or the current scholarship on early American literature and religion.