Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture

Jonathan Edwards is widely considered to be the most influential Protestant theologian of colonial British-American history. Countless ministers and theologians have been influenced by Edwards since his death in 1758, and schoolchildren today within the United States are still exposed to his writings, particularly his sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’. But how did this happen? While Edwards's legacy, influence, and reception have been the subject of numerous articles and monographs, there has been no attempt to grapple with how Edwards drew such a wide readership within his lifetime and beyond. In this unique monograph, Jonathan M. Yeager demonstrates that Edwards was not a one-man publicity army. Like all success stories, Edwards relied on a wide network of booksellers, editors, printers, and readers to help circulate his ideas and works. While Yeager has published on this subject in Printing History (issue 11, 2012), this full-length monograph offers a systematic and enticing treatment of Edwards and colonial publishing practices.Drawing influence from Richard Sher's The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2006), Yeager highlights the lack of attention Sher and others have given to evangelical authors. Yeager describes the goal of Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture as a study to understand ‘how Edwards's works came to print, the various people who were involved, and the role that the formation of these texts had on early evangelicalism’ (ix–x). The monograph is divided into five well-organized chapters: beginning with an introduction that notes the reception of Edwards's writings within the late eighteenth century; a chapter on the Boston printer Samuel Kneeland and the business of printing in colonial Boston; a chapter on Edwards's various publishers; a chapter on Edwards's editors; and concluding with a chapter on the heirs of Edwards's works and the afterlife of his publications following his unexpected death.The main argument Yeager presents is that Edwards and his evangelical contemporaries ‘cared how their books appeared in print, even if they seemed more concerned about disseminating their particular beliefs than profiting from publications’ (xv). This meant taking into account their presentation and their cost in production, as well as their marketing. In other words, Edwards did not write just for writing's sake, but actively sought readers for his work and thus marketed them for an audience. Likewise, publishers printed books with the goal of selling them, and Edwards's books were no exception. Yeager invites readers to think of Edwards beyond the marketplace of ideas and to situate him in the transatlantic book market. This shift brings Yeager to his second goal, which is to highlight the ways in which ‘Edwards's printers, publishers, and editors shaped the public perception of him in the way that they packaged and marketed his publications’ (xi).In painstaking detail, Yeager comments on the cost of production, the size of paper, the quality of the binding, and its external appearance. Additionally, Yeager brings together unsung heroes of Edwards's success, such as his earliest bookseller-publishers in Boston, which should give scholars of Edwards pause in considering how Edwards was sold across the colonies and Atlantic. Edwardsian scholars shall also find Yeager's appendixes invaluable as they contain a chronological list of Edwards's publications (including format and publisher), a chart that maps the number of publications for each work, a list of the cost of each work, and the total amount of subscribers for the Life of David Brainerd. In investigating the lives of great thinkers like Edwards and their texts, Yeager's monograph reminds historians not to forget the paratext (the other material supplied by editors, printers, and publishers).Yeager offers an accessible but engaging text that should challenge students and scholars to consider the complex relationships and networks between author, editor, printer, merchant, and reader within colonial America and the Atlantic world. Such questions could provide examples of why some writers like Edwards dominated American Protestant thought during and after their lifetimes, while others never reached such heights of fame or did, but later faded into obscurity. While this is outside the scope of Yeager's enquiry, a related follow-up question I had after reading this monograph was Edwards's enduring legacy in today's print culture. How did a ‘religious writer’ like Jonathan Edwards make his way into the Norton Anthology of American Literature and other educational textbooks designed to teach ‘secular’ American history? But that is the subject for another article or monograph. Yeager's Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture does not disappoint as the first systematic study of the intersection of print culture and the works of Jonathan Edwards. It is truly a must-read for anyone interested in Jonathan Edwards and how books were produced in colonial British America.

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