Who Reads an Early American Sermon?

The literary worth of a sermon, we seem to have decided, is contingent on its relationship to instigators of significant social (Puritan migration and the Great Awakening) or political (elections and wars) events and change; the genre, as we have traditionally considered it, implicitly endorses a "great man" model of history and prioritizes individual genius, innovation, and influence over religious community.\n These are they who are represented as professing to love God whom they have not seen, whilst they hate their brother whom they have seen. [...]in recent years, tenure and promotion committees have not consistently accorded bibliographic work on and the scholarly editing of these or other manuscripts the same respect given to peer-reviewed articles and monographs, work in the field has lagged, but a recent announcement from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that it would provide generous funding support to forty scholars working in critical bibliography may suggest a welcome shiftin the relative prestige of these necessary labors.