Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture

On March 20, 1760, a fire broke out in the Cornhill district of Boston, destroying nearly 350 buildings in its wake. One of the ruined shops belonged to the eminent Boston bookseller Daniel Henchman, who had published some of Jonathan Edwards's most important works, including The Life of Brainerd in 1749. Less than one year after the Great Fire of 1760, Henchman died. Edwards's chief printer Samuel Kneeland and literary agent and editor, Thomas Foxcroft, hadalso passed away by the end of the decade, marking the end of an era. Throughout Edwards's lifetime, and in the years after his death in 1758, most of the first editions of his books had been published in Boston. But with the deaths of Henchman, Kneeland, and Foxcroft, the publications of Edwards's writingsshifted to Britain, where a new crop of booksellers, printers, and editors took on the task of issuing posthumous editions and reprints of his books. In Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture, religious historian Jonathan Yeager tells the story of how Edwards's works were published, including the people who were involved in their publication and their motivations. This book explores what the printing, publishing, and editing of Jonathan Edwards's publications can tell us about religious print culture in the eighteenth century, how the way that his books were put together shaped society's understanding of him as an author,and how details such as the formats, costs, quality of paper, length, bindings, and the number of reprints and abridgements of his works affected their reception.

Yeager uncovers many heretofore overlooked treasures., this work demonstrates the positive contribution that social history and print culture studies provide to the construction of evangelical history, While scholars of the history of the book will find fascinating Yeager's untangling of the complex of factors shaping the book trade in this period, American religious historians will appreciate not only his discussion of evangelicalism's role in this enterprise but also his novel perspective on the well-known writings of Jonathan Edwards., Yeager's Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture is a well-researched volume telling a detailed, instructive story about the multifaceted efforts put into publishing Jonathan Edwards's works and the important people who made that happen. This monograph makes a valuable contribution to the fields of Jonathan Edwards, colonial America, the Atlantic world, and the history of the book., Jonathan Yeager's Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture joins Melanie Bigold's Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (2013) and Tessa Whitehouse's The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent CHDBCIBB (2015) as groundbreaking monographs uncovering the history of early evangelical writing and publishing in Great Britain, America, and the Netherlands, a history generally ignored or marginalized in studies of print culture of this period.

Jonathan Yeager is UC Foundation Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.