Godly Dispositions and Textual Conditions: The Literary Sociology of International Religious Exchanges, c. 1722–1740

Summary

From the seventeenth century onwards, English Reformed ministers engaged in lively correspondence and publishing exchanges with men from different countries and Protestant traditions. In the eighteenth century, appreciation of their shared intellectual and cultural heritage and a desire to sustain the patterns for religious living it encouraged inflected the content and style of textual interactions among Halle Pietists, English dissenters and New England Congregationalists. Interest in the present state of religious life was also important, and therefore news about awakenings and materials for pastoral care circulated around Europe and North America through existing channels and by new means. Their encounters and the texts that they produced were mutually generative, and the language and manner of the participants' personal interactions were important features of published works. These personal associations, publishing activities and discursive styles can be understood as aspects of the literary sociology of a religious culture that valued intellectual and emotional engagements and sought to inculcate religion through education and friendship.

Keywords:

• North America
• Halle Pietism
• religious dissent
• evangelicalism
• correspondence
• education

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Alison Searle, David Wykes and the two anonymous readers for their comments, and to the staff of Dr Williams's Library and Carmela Keller of the Franckesche Stiftungen for their assistance.

Notes

¹Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘Continental Pietism and the Evangelical Movement in Britain’, in Pietismus und Réveil, edited by J. van den Berg and J. P. van Dooren (Leiden, 1978), 205–36 (209).

²W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), 2.

³Isaac Watts and John Guyse, ‘Preface’, in Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Strange Surprizing Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (London, 1737), viii.

⁴Isaac Watts, ‘Advertisement’, in John Jennings, Two Discourses: The First of Preaching Christ, the Second of Experimental Preaching (London, 1722), xii.

⁵Early editions of Two Discourses cost sixpence and A Faithful Narrative one shilling.

⁶Francis Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (York, PA, 1994); Alison Searle, ‘“Though I Am a Stranger to You by Face, yet in Neere Bonds by Faith”: A Transatlantic Puritan Republic of Letters’, Early American Literature, 43 (2008), 277–308.

⁷David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Commerce Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 235.

⁸Searle, ‘“Though I Am a Stranger”’, 278–79.

⁹Bremer, Congregational Communion, 254, 253.

¹⁰Cotton Mather corresponded with Francke, but it has recently been argued that theirs was an intermittent and limited association. See Wolfgang Splitter, ‘The Fact and Fiction of Cotton Mather's Correspondence with German Pietist August Hermann Francke’, The New England Quarterly, 83 (2010), 102–22.

¹¹Richard B. Sher, ‘Transatlantic Books and Literary Culture’, in Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830, edited by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (Cambridge, 2012),10–27 (11).

¹²See Nuttall, ‘Continental Pietism’, in Pietismus und Réveil, edited by van den Berg and van Dooren, 226–27.

¹³Jonathan Edwards, Glaubwürdige Nachricht von dem herrlichen Werck Gottes, Welches sich in Bekehrung vieler hundert Seelen zu Northampton (Magdeburg and Leipzig, 1738). See Thomas H. Johnson, The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758: A Bibliography (Princeton, NJ, 1940), 7.

¹⁴For the importance Halle Pietists attached to epistolary networks, see Thomas P. Bach, ‘G. A. Francke and the Halle Communication Network: Protection, Politics and Piety’, in Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850, edited by Jonathan Strom (Leiden, 2010), 95–110.

¹⁵Nuttall, ‘Continental Pietism’, in Pietismus und Réveil, edited by van den Berg and van Dooren, 233.

¹⁶ Halle Pietism, Colonial North America, and the Young United States, edited by Hans-Jürgen Grabbe (Stuttgart, 2008); Pietism and Community, edited by Strom. See also Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1900, edited by Mark Noll, George Rawlyk and David Bebbington (Oxford, 1994).

¹⁷Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, CT, 2007); Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA, 2009); Mark A. Peterson, ‘Theopolis Americana: Boston and the Protestant International’, in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, edited by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 329–69.

¹⁸The focus of the present essay is those English dissenters who believed in the importance of a learned ministry. For nonconformist groups who did not prioritise this (particularly Quakers and Baptists), social and educational relations between America and Europe were rather different. See Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1991), especially 14, 116–18.

¹⁹Frank Lambert, ‘Pedlar in Divinity’: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton, NJ, 2002); Henry Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (London, 1989); Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons, edited by David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (Columbia, SC, 2003).

²⁰Strickland Gough, Free Thoughts on the Most Probable Means of Reviving the Dissenting Interest (London, 1730), 34.

²¹Susan O'Brien, ‘A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755’, The American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 811–32 (815–16); Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘The Reception of Jonathan Edwards by Early Evangelicals in England’, in Edwards at Home and Abroad, edited by King and Sweeney, 201–21 (204).

²²Isaac Watts, An Essay Towards the Encouragement of Charity Schools (London, 1728), 49.

²³Isaac Watts to John Christian Jacobi, 15 May 1722, in Archiv Franckesche Stiftungen, Halle [hereafter AFSt/H], MS A 149:19. For a full account of Boehm's activities in England, see Daniel L. Brunner, Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Boehm and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Göttingen, 1993).

²⁴AFSt/H MS C 504: 1–16.

²⁵Peter Damrau, The Reception of English Puritan Literature in Germany (London, 2006).

²⁶Isaac Watts, Reliquiae Juveniles: Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse (London, 1734), 202; Brunner, Halle Pietists, 144, 190.

²⁷I. Watts, Reliquiae Juveniles, 208.

²⁸Isaac Watts, ‘Recommendation’, in Johann Jakob Rambach, Memoirs of the Life and Death of the Late Rev. Anthony William Boehm, translated by John Christian Jacobi (London, 1735), xiv–xv.

²⁹Francke's account of the foundation of the institutions was translated into English by Boehm under the auspices of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, as Pietas Hallensis (London, 1705).

³⁰I. Watts, Encouragement of Charity Schools, 16.

³¹I. Watts, Encouragement of Charity Schools, 89.

³²For an account of the decline in SPCK-Halle relations, see Brunner, Halle Pietists, 177–97.

³³I. Watts, Encouragement of Charity Schools, 51, 84.

³⁴Massachusetts Historical Society [hereafter MHS], Proceedings, second series, 20 vols (1884–1907), IX, 337–410. For references to gifts to Harvard and Yale, see (for example) 347, 362, 371, 409; for donations to the Connecticut libraries, see 368, 377; for Watts executing commissions from Colman, see 366–67; and for receiving books and handwritten narratives from Colman see (for example) 342, 365, 380, 390.

³⁵See Anne S. Pratt, Isaac Watts and the Gift of Books to Yale College (New Haven, CT, 1938) 28–50; Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, edited by Paul Ramsey and others, 26 vols (New Haven, CT, 2008–2009), IV, 32–46; Jon Butler, ‘The Plural Origins of American Revivalism’, in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 164–93; Frank Lambert, ‘The First Great Awakening: Whose Interpretive Fiction?’, The New England Quarterly, 68 (1995), 650–59 (650–54).

³⁶O'Brien, ‘Transatlantic Community of Saints’, 823–31.

³⁷See W. R. Ward, ‘The Relations of Enlightenment and Religious Revival in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c.1500–c.1750, edited by Derek Baker (Oxford, 1979), 281–305 (283, 285–86); Lucia Bergamasco, ‘Évangélisme et lumières’, Revue française d’études américaines, 92 (2002), 22–46 (especially 31–35).

³⁸David D. Hall, ‘Learned Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, in A History of the Book in America: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge, 2000), 411–33 (414).

³⁹I. Watts to Benjamin Colman, 02 April 1737, in MHS, Proceedings, second series, IX, 356.

⁴⁰I. Watts to Colman, 13 October 1737, in MHS, Proceedings, second series, IX, 357.

⁴¹I. Watts to Colman, 13 October 1737, in MHS, Proceedings, second series, IX, 357.

⁴²I. Watts and Guyse, ‘Preface’, in Edwards, Faithful Narrative, viii.

⁴³MHS, Proceedings, second series, IX, 375, 387, 395–99.

⁴⁴MHS, Proceedings, second series, IX, 383, 387, 391–92, 394.

⁴⁵O'Brien, ‘Transatlantic Community of Saints’, 813.

⁴⁶I. Watts to Elisha Williams, 07 June 1738, in MHS, Proceedings, second series, IX, 335.

⁴⁷John Jennings, Two Discourses: The First of Preaching Christ, the Second of Experimental Preaching, third edition (London, 1736), x–xi.

⁴⁸Jennings, Two Discourses (1736), 15.

⁴⁹Jennings, Two Discourses (1736), vii.

⁵⁰Jennings, Two Discourses (1736), vii.

⁵¹Jennings, Two Discourses (1736), viii.

⁵²Jennings, Two Discourses (1736), 75–76.

⁵³Jennings, Two Discourses (1736), 75–76.

⁵⁴AFSt/H MS C 504:3, 7, 11, 14, 16; AFSt/H MS K 22.

⁵⁵I. Watts to Colman, 13 November 1739, in MHS, Proceedings, second series, IX, 371.

⁵⁶John Jennings, Two Discourses: The First of Preaching Christ, the Second of Experimental Preaching (Boston, MA, 1740), 14. Colman sent a copy to Watts, who thanked him for reprinting the work; see I. Watts to Colman, 18 March 1741, in MHS, Proceedings, second series, IX, 380.

⁵⁷Nineteen copies were listed in the Yale College library catalogues; see Pratt, Watts and the Gift of Books to Yale, 65–66. Jonathan Edwards read the English translation of Francke's letter; see Edwards, Works of Jonathan Edwards, XXVI, 222.

⁵⁸O'Brien, ‘Transatlantic Community of Saints’, 821.

⁵⁹Helena Rosenblatt, ‘The Christian Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge History of Christianity, edited by Margaret M. Mitchell and others, 9 vols (Cambridge, 2006–2009), VII, 283–301 (297).

⁶⁰Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), 394–464.