Volume 3, Issue 1
January 2008

   This newsletter follows “hot on the heels” of the December issue.  A couple of items missed the deadline, some information needed to be updated, and an opportunity to produce a special conference issue: all good reasons for another newsletter.
  Now that I’ve explained the accelerated publication schedule: on behalf of the ASCH’s leadership, Welcome to Washington, D.C.!  For those members who cannot attend the Winter Meeting, I hope to see you at a future meeting or hear from you by way of a contribution to a future newsletter...
   As Ken Minkema, the Executive Secretary, explains in his article, there will be a number of new and special events at the 2008 Winter Meeting.  As chair of the Membership Committee, I want to draw attention to one event: the graduate student reception.  This new event will be held in the Hemisphere Room of the Hilton Washington at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, January 4.
  Graduate students represent nearly 30 percent of the Society’s membership, up from 10 percent just three years ago.  The Reception represents one of several efforts to integrate graduate students more fully into the life of the Society.  Graduate students attending the Winter Meeting: I look forward to seeing you!

   Naturally, I hope that all members attending the Winter Meeting will introduce themselves to me if we have not met previously.  During my term as chair of the Membership Committee, I have had the opportunity to track the growth of the Society.  Equally important to me is to put faces to some of the names in the Society’s membership list.
    I also hope that those members attending the Meeting will take the opportunity to socialize with as many of their fellow members as possible.  I remember well being ‘taken in hand’ by Henry Bowden, Ken Minkema’s predecessor, at the first ASCH meeting I attended.  Professor Bowden’s friendliness made me feel welcome and want to be an active part of the Society.  All members should emulate that example.
   Last, attend the sessions and the social events but also take time to ‘see’ Washington, D.C.  This city is one of my favorite American cities: great libraries, great museums, the centers of American government, and great places to eat.  No matter how many times one has visited it, Washington, D.C. is worth exploring...

Keith A. Francis
Keith_Francis@baylor.edu

Welcome to Washington, D.C.
From the Executive Secretary

   Greetings from New Haven and the ASCH’s administrative office.  As the school year gears up and the nights chill down here in New England, I know it’s time to start thinking about autumn and winter events. This winter, the ASCH’s big event will be the annual meeting in Washington, DC, January 3-6, 2008. Further in this newsletter, there is a summary of the program and registration information.
  This year’s conference has many special events as well as old favorites. The usual will be the Women’s Breakfast, a tour of religious sites, and ceremonies for the Distinguished Career Award and President’s Address (Van Engen, not Bush).  In addition, we will have a special luncheon honoring senior members of ASCH.  This lunch will feature one of the true deans of American religious history, Martin Marty. Also, we will have a breakfast session considering a new documentary film on the Mormons.
  Finally, as highlighted elsewhere in this newsletter, we will host our first-ever reception for graduate students on Friday night.  This event will follow the reception for the Distinguished Career recipient. The latter reception is an opportunity for graduate students to socialize and to chat with members of ASCH’s leadership.

It will also be the forum for selecting a graduate student representative to the ASCH Council.
   We hope to make this a regular feature of our conferences from now on.

I look forward to seeing you all in DC.

Ken Minkema
asch@yale.edu

CONTENTS

Editorial  ......................................................1
Welcome to Washington, D.C.
            by Ken Minkema .............................2
Another Invitation to Independent Scholars
            by Ray Kibler III  …........................3
The British Pulpit Online Project
            by Bob Tennant  …..........................4
Notes from the Membership Committee .....9
Winter Meeting, January 2008:
            Overview of Program …................10
Winter Meeting, January 2008:
            Council Meeting Agenda ..............15
Winter Meeting, January 2008:
            Amendments to ASCH By-Laws ..16
Graduate Student Membership Form ........17

 

Another Invitation to Independent Scholars

   Greetings!  As a church historian, are you a scholar but not an academic?
   A number of you reading these lines replied at once a year ago.  I, the inviter, was unable to make further contact due to unforeseen circumstances.  I am now “back on track” to write to you again.
   Others may be reading these lines for the first time.  If so, I will be happy to e-mail you my full invitation from a year ago.
   If you intend to attend the Winter Meeting in Washington DC, then let’s meet for lunch on Saturday, January 5.  Details will be arranged by then. If you would like to meet with your fellow independent scholars, please let me know right away using my contact information below. In January, when you register at the ASCH desk in the Hilton Washington, put your name and Washington contact information on the sheet provided.

  But if you are unable to come to Washington, please contact me still.
   Over the coming weeks, I will contact all of you who replied to my invitation a year ago to ask if you would still be interested in participating in this initiative.
By even its name, our American Society of Church History is a community of scholars. All academics are scholars, but not all scholars need be academics. If you are an independent scholar who wants to meet other independent scholars – this invitation is for you!

Ray F. Kibler III, Intentional Interim Pastor
4249 La Junta Drive
Claremont, CA 91711-2351
Tel.: 909.596.5086
ray.kibler.iii@ecunet.org

Editor’s Note: Ray Kibler III is a member of the ASCH Membership Committee.

The British Pulpit Online, 1660-1901

“I have called—I hope I do not err—
I am looking for a purchaser
Of some score volumes of the works
Of eminent divines I own,—
Left by my father—though it irks
My patience to offer them …
…
I have wished, as I am fond of art,
To make my rooms a little smart,
And these old books are so in the way.”
(Thomas Hardy, “In the Study”)

   While Hardy’s poem might be the song of a modern e-librarian, it is actually a witness to the low esteem which English religious literature has enjoyed in the past century or so. This neglect should concern the student of English literature, and also the historian of religion, politics, economics and culture.
  While a literary corpus is misvalued by English Literature departments, it can hardly be properly assessed as an evidential resource by historians in general. If Fielding’s fiction, for example, were available as evidence for social historians without a corresponding critical assessment as imaginative literature, eighteenth-century historiography would be that much less sound.  The available evidence would inevitably not quite be what it seemed.
  And misvalued the sermon surely is. John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), otherwise a truly excellent history of eighteenth-century English culture, and a treasure house of detail, gives only four citations of “sermon” in its index. These references are associated with about two pages of text out of about 700.
   It might be unfair to blame Brewer.  He simply reflects the low level of modern literary scholars’ interest in pulpit rhetoric.  One might even say, adopting the language of analysts of the post-colonial economies of Africa, that the sermon has been subjected to a process of “undevelopment.”
   There have been pioneering projects to raise awareness of the sermon’s existence as literature.  The Carcanet Press three-volume anthology, The English Sermon 1550-1850 (1976), edited by Seymour-Smith, Sisson, and Nye, comes to mind.  Unfortunately, the sermon remains inadequately mapped as a genre.  Critical examination is frustrated by the sheer size and complexity of the corpus.  Many items are hidden in catalogs under designations like “lecture”, “address,” and “discourse.”  Further, perhaps 80 percent are not published singly. They are collected into volumes and sets whose contents are not cataloged individually.
   In the eighteenth century, somewhere between a quarter and a third of all British publications were sermons. Page for page, published novels equate only to about 7 percent of their production. The contemporary readership of the sermons about the 1745 rebellion probably fell little short of the number of the total population. In terms of sales penetration of the available market, Henry Sacheverell’s The Perils of False Brethren (1709) probably outsold twentieth-century pop classics like The Beatles’ She Loves You. To claim that 150,000 sermons were published in Britain in 1660-1901 is almost certainly to underestimate.
   None of these claims can be guaranteed accurate, but they are not very misleading. To adapt a journalistic cliché, sermons are the elephant in the library reading room. The fact that their statistical fuzziness is so difficult to clean up is a key justification for The British Pulpit Online (BPO), a project now being launched.  This project will make available, in proper scholarly form, all the English language sermons of all denominations which were published in the British Isles and Britain’s overseas territories between 1660 and 1901.
   The BPO catalog will contain all the sermons listed individually. The catalog will also contain elaborate bibliographical and historical metadata.  Scholars will be able to search and sort sermons in the database by author, biblical text, dates of preaching and publication, occasion, subject, key words, printer, publisher, church (building), denomination and sub-genre (the Library of Congress list).
   Each sermon will be linked to online page images, catalogs and other biographical resources, such as the Church of England Clergy Database and the newly-launched British State Papers project. Initial discussions with ESTC, ODNB, EEBO and ECCO have been cordial and positive.
   Scholars associated with the project will also develop a useful definition of “sermon,” launch an e-journal for sermon studies, produce critical and ecclesiastical histories, as well as individually and collectively written methodological articles.  We also hope to produce a multi-authored book mapping the genre and surveying current research.
 The critical histories for which I am personally responsible will treat the Anglican missionary societies, 1699-1914, and the general Anglican sermon corpus, 1660-1815.
   The project is international in scope: already scholars from Britain, America, Canada and France are involved.  To encourage this international scholarly collaboration, the project is divided into two.  With an administrative center at Oxford Brookes University, one group of scholars will concentrate on the period 1660-1815.  With an administrative center at Baylor University, another group will concentrate on the period 1816-1901. (The latter point reminds me to apologize to those who might like to participate but have not so far been approached through our necessarily rather random team-building process.)
 The BPO project is underpinned by experienced software designers and electronic librarians. The “British” component now has a long list of partner organizations, including the Lambeth Palace Library and Douai Abbey, plus an academic advisory board of British and French sermons scholars.
  Some object that the sermon genre was produced, typically, by a fairly narrow stratum of privileged white men. This seems to reduce not only its relevance to the present day but also its evidential value to historians of language and culture. Yet the restricted nature of its authorship makes for linguistic coherence in the corpus. The sermon becomes in itself an invaluable diachronic resource, a reliable comparator for other varieties of English.
   A future stage of the BPO project will, it is hoped, be the production of a large and scientifically representative sample of sermons in a form suitable for computer-assisted linguistic analysis. The lack of such a comparator, and the reliance on whatever digitized material has come to hand, has inhibited the development and application of the techniques of corpus linguistics.
  The recent revolution in computer and information technology dealt a blow to our academic penchant for theorizing. It provided us all with access to so much information that we saw our skills in extrapolating from a minimum of data to propositions of a general nature becoming obsolescent.  We could now hope to proceed by statistically significant sampling and even the techniques of census.
   Who needs theory when we can count? Of course, this is to exaggerate.  Certainly, the preoccupation with theory in the 1980s has been succeeded by – and arguably prompted – an obsession with information. The dominant phenomenon of the last few years has been the building of databases. If the academy’s intellectual immodesty has been suppressed in the one area, it has sprouted in the other.  This has generated an astounding growth of productivity.
  We are all familiar with the wealth of evidence which sermons provide about the great events and ideas of their time.  What has not yet been brought to our attention systematically is how central they were to political and social life.
   Some sermons are broken off in mid-flow by the insertion of the annual financial accounts of local or national organizations. Others resembled research papers. (Joseph Butler’s great classic, the Fifteen Sermons, and the various lecture series – Boyle, Moyer, Bampton and so on.) In some, preached in the least likely-sounding churches, the preacher set out his working conclusions about church music, the theater, methods of collating early Biblical manuscripts, the indigenous languages of North America, the nature of citizenship (this to an audience largely of children), or the economics of mercantilism. Later, Freemasons preached in favor of Darwin, Methodists on the evolution of religion, and evangelicals on the sexual practices of “Hindoos.”  (The latter in terms we might have supposed unsuitable for a Victorian family audience.) It was a messy and vivid genre.
   Those published singly, as pamphlets, were frequently preached on set-piece occasions to large gatherings. The churches were full with a standing room-only capacity of two thousand or so. One sermon was preached at the annual meeting of a district committee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in a remote rural parish in the Welsh Marches in the 1830s. In addition to the two thousand people packed into the church the same number again were crowded outside. Virtually the entire population of the district must have been present, women and men, girls and boys, of all denominations.
   Often sermons were repeated elsewhere.  In the nineteenth century, in particular, clergymen often advertised that they were available to deliver a prepared text, for example, in support of a particular missionary enterprise, and were prepared to travel widely to do so.
  Sermons were published because they marked important public occasions, such as civic and political set-pieces and national or local crises.  The publication was, typically, authorized by the congregation (in reality the relevant nobility or gentry) or by the senior clergy.  Both groups thus adopted positions which could be shaken only by intellectually more cogent replies – and then only if a similar weight of authorization could be found for publication.  Junior clergy preached at their seniors’ visitations, thereby, if successful, consolidating their careers by publication “at the request of” their diocesan.
   Sermons were usually published in print runs of 500 or 2,000. It is generally accepted that readership would be at least ten times the number of copies sold. Successful works were much reprinted, with separate editions appearing in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin and in America. Some were exported in the tens of thousands to the new dioceses of the British Empire.
   The practice of publishing by subscription was not confined to posthumous collections for the benefit of the widow.  These long lists were a very definite statement of public unity, with political or ecclesiastical implications.
   The clergyman who published without the approval of the relevant power structures quickly found himself on the intellectual and professional margins. On the other hand, some sermons, in Bunyan’s tradition, continued to be produced by artisans. Self-published, these were sold in their shops. Society was saturated by exegesis.
   Perhaps most important is the fact that the great majority of published sermons did not fall into the public categories. They were simply the best, or for a variety of reasons the most relevant, of the lifetime’s preaching of many hundreds of clergy ministering to their congregations. It is difficult to avoid imbalance when writing church history: the factions and denominations tried to out-organize, and out-shout, each other for the attention of their contemporaries and posterity.
   It is a truth, and not only a sentimental claim, that the parish priest’s work, and the life of the Church in general, carried on in all circumstances. Here the BPO database will be its most useful.  For the first time, the preaching part of the clergy’s work will be quantified.  This will enable scholars to gain a sense of proportion by revealing the processes through which clergy and publishers decided what to publish. Above all, it will become possible, through advanced word searches to discover what were the leading concerns, decade by decade, or how, through its rhetoric, the Church sought to formulate them. Further, how the clergy as preachers related to their audience will be clearer.
   Deep within the strata of what is now the archaeology of IT is material from which the BPO will benefit enormously.  Essential is the pioneering and largely unsung work of the late Professor John Gordon Spaulding (University of British Columbia), whose six-volume Pulpit Publications 1660-1782 was published posthumously in 1996 and lists sermons by author, biblical text, and date of publication.
   Spaulding devoted nearly thirty years to this project. He used several generations of computer hardware and software from the late 1960s onwards to produce an elaborate critical apparatus which compared his various sources and noted their divergences.  This sort of procedure was necessary for the scholar in the days before the silicon chip took computer speed and storage capacity to something like their present levels and enabled the range of procedures which are nowadays called digitization.
   Spaulding’s legacy remains of fundamental importance.  An annotated and sorted list of published English language sermons includes perhaps 98 percent of publications for the Church of England.  It also contains a large majority – perhaps up to three quarters – of the productions of English Dissent and Nonconformity.
  Spaulding’s weakness is intrinsic in his sources. The eighteenth-century parsons Letsome and Cooke, buyers and collectors of sermons in the mass, were strong in comprehensiveness but very weak bibliographically. Understandably, they were rather inaccurate in their methods.
   The pioneering slogan, “the network is the computer,” now applies not only to machines but to people. Increasingly, scholars are bringing into team-working their special skills and perspectives.  This enables collective cross-disciplinary enterprises and, with suitable colleague support, the adoption of interdisciplinary methods.
   Church historians and corpus linguists have very little in common. It also remains true that for most scholars librarians are scientists who serve us almost as remotely as the engineers who design power stations. But the World Wide Web helps abolish not only distance but intellectual boundaries. (I’m writing this article on a farm in one of the more remote parts of Scotland, a hundred miles from a major research library, and some of my American colleagues count miles in the thousands.)  The time we previously devoted to discovering the minutiae of our specialisms is increasingly becoming available for the more important tasks of discrimination and judgment.

   The British Pulpit Online cannot be built except by the collaboration of librarians, information scientists, philosophers, linguists, church historians and literary theorists. When in existence, it will even help theoretically, by enabling philosophers to sharpen our understanding of terms like “collection.” (Incidentally, that project is under investigation by a team – a philosopher, a librarian, and a statistician – here at Glasgow: contact James Currall for more details.)  All in all, for the first time in a century or so, it’s acceptable to be reading sermons...
   If you wish to become actively involved in the BPO, please contact us. The ‘British’ project (1660-1815) is led by Bill Gibson (Oxford Brookes), John Wolffe (Open University), John Morgan-Guy (Lampeter) and me; the ‘American’ project (1816-1901) by Keith Francis (Baylor) and Robert Ellison (East Texas Baptist).

Bob Tennant
b.tennant@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk