Genres of Puritan writing on meditation
General introduction
Within seventeenth century Puritan writings, there are countless references to, descriptions of and helps for meditation. However, there are a limited number of works which devote much or all of their purpose to describing, explaining, and exhorting believers to practice divine meditation. The works which do these things can be usefully divided into two categories:
(1) collections of two or more sermons, originally presented orally and then transferred into a print format.
(2) manuals, or works designed specifically for a print format.
Further explanation
The corpus of printed seventeenth century Puritan works on meditation contains at least two different literary genres: manuals, or comparatively long works which methodically lay out principles for meditation; and sermons, or shorter transcripts of spoken material (often copied extemporaneously by audience members and perhaps edited in some way) and containing more of an oral presentation style, typically with passionate pleas and creative illustrations.
Of course, these genres are not completely separate; indeed, many who wrote manuals would have had sermon notes available to them - possibly even from their own sermons. Many who wrote sermons were likely to have seen manuals on this subject at some point. Further, some works - perhaps most notably Nathanael Ranew's 1670 work, Solitude Improved by Divine Meditation, succeed in blending aspects of both genres.
Within these two large divisions much diversity exists, and the individual areas of each author's interests or specific focus become evident upon examination of the texts. Such a close examination is useful for understanding the range of ways that mid to late seventeenth-century Puritan authors understood this discipline.
Yet even while examining certain points that stand out in the following works or that make them unique, it is important to keep in mind the large amount of agreement among authors in terms of what meditation is, how and why Christians should practice it, what topics one should meditate upon, and more. Examining these works individually, in comparison to other works in the same genre, and in comparison with the other works on meditation, more clearly illustrates these points of similarity and diversity.
The first of these two genres, the treatise or manual, can take a variety of forms. Some manuals are more straightforward and didactic, even having some hint of late medieval scholasticism, with objections and answers to a proposition. Other manuals - and particularly Ranew's Solitude Improved - tend more toward a sermonic or oral style, with extensive illustrations and explanations of main points, and entreaties to the reader.
Authors of manuals whose work appears on this site include
John Ball, Thomas Watson, Thomas White and Nathanael Ranew.
A second major type of communication about the topic of divine meditation in Puritan circles, and certainly the foremost type of communication about it in a form other than print media, was the sermon. Puritan sermons were often recorded, typically by members of the congregation, and many of these came to be published either alone or in collections. Of these, four men whose work appears on this site,
William Fenner, Edmund Calamy, William Bridge and Thomas Manton, authored published sermon collections containing at least two sermons about the topic of meditation.
|
