While all three of these books participate in the ongoing “transatlantic turn in early American literary studies in general” (Gould, 7), Meredith Neuman’s does an especially helpful job of reminding readers how closely intertwined the expressions “early American” and “early modern” are. While she places New England ministers’ sermons in the context of discursive practices in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Karen Weyler and Philip Gould address later developments: Gould discusses the relationship between Britain and its North Atlantic colonies during the decades leading up to and including those colonists’ Revolution, and Weyler focuses more narrowly on North America vis-à-vis “the participation of working people in print culture from 1760 to 1815” (2).
Neuman’s readers will appreciate the way her title ties us, as early twenty-first-century readers, to members of the seventeenth-century New England ministers’ congregations. Her book immerses us in what she identifies as “sermon culture,” which consists of the...
