The pastor in print explores the phenomenon of early modern pastors who chose to become print authors, addressing ways authorship could enhance, limit or change clerical ministry and ways pastor-authors conceived of their work in parish and print. It identifies strategies through which pastor-authors established authorial identities, targeted different sorts of audiences and strategically selected genre and content as intentional parts of their clerical vocation. The first study to provide a book-length analysis of the phenomenon of early modern pastors writing for print, it uses a case study of prolific pastor-author Richard Bernard to offer a new lens through which to view religious change in this pivotal period. By bringing together questions of print, genre, religio-politics and theology, the book will interest scholars and postgraduate students in history, literature and theological studies, and its readability will appeal to undergraduates and non-specialists.

Amy G. Tan is an independent scholar. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2015.

Introduction: Ministers and media

Part I: Religious goals: pastoral approaches to devotion, vocation, and print
1 The ubiquity of the devotional
2 The making of a pastor-author
3 The call to preach and the question of printed sermons

Part II: Audiences: imagining and fostering relationships with readers
4 If you learn nothing else: catechisms and the question of the fundamentals of the faith
5 Different audiences, different messages: explication and implication in anti-Catholic publications
6 A bit of parish trouble and a manual on giving: self-representation to insiders and outsiders

Part III: Innovation: Adapting content, genre, and format
7 A trial, a guide for jurors, and an allegory: one experience inspiring generically divergent publications
8 A puritan pastor-author in the 1630s: tailoring the presentation of theological content
9 That all the Lords people could prophesy: innovating in the reference genre (and turning against episcopacy?)
10 The paradigm of the pastor-author beyond Bernard

Index