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.

Reviews

'Deeply grounded in manuscript research at the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Bodleian, British Library, the National Archives, Cambridge University, Chetham's Library Manchester and the Lincolnshire and Somerset Record Offices as well as in an enormous number of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century printed texts it seems no stone has been left unturned. The long list of secondary sources - and Tan's active engagement with them in the body of the book - proclaims a comprehensive and up-to-date awareness; the full bibliography runs to sixteen pages of dense print.'
Literature & History

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 Lord's people could prophesy': innovating in the reference genre (and turning against episcopacy?)
10 The paradigm of the 'pastor-author' beyond Bernard

Index