Printing, Publics, and Pudding

For over thirty years, eighteenth-century Boston minister Charles Chauncy published his views about universal salvation outside of the printing press. While scholars have argued that he was reluctant to publish because of his heterodox views against a predominantly Calvinist public, the long history of a broadly circulating manuscript complicates any clear intentions toward privacy or secrecy. Instead, Chauncy strategized around the printing press and the pulpit. Using more discreet modes of publication, like manuscript circulation and scribal publication, he gathered a supportive public for universal salvation before his views even reached the printing press. The audience for his work grew even further through intimate conversations and private correspondence between readers of the manuscript and those they wanted to convert. By the time Chauncy decided to print his views, Congregationalist ministers' hopes for a largely orthodox public sphere had already been compromised through various means of sharing, exchanging, and distributing ideas outside of the printing press. In many ways, it was not strictly the allure of Enlightenment ideas that facilitated the liberalization of New England theology. It was also the ways writers like Chauncy attended to different modes of publications to situate different readers as a captive and receptive audience

Enlightenment · Heresy · Media studies · Orthodoxy · Political science · Politics · Printing press · Public sphere · Pulpit · Secrecy · Skepticism · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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