Godly and Learned Divines

Early printed sermons often contain textual and marginal references, which Arnold Hunt, in The Art of Hearing, describes as a “defensive barrier” that preachers erected for doctrinal and stylistic purposes as they transmitted their teachings from the pulpit to print (12). Their citations and quotations are drawn from not only the holy scriptures but also classical, patristic, medieval, and even contemporary sources that convey theological, philosophical, historical, and literary ideas. Indexing these myriad references at scale will illuminate different preachers’ preferred styles of doctrinal instruction in writing, particularly the extent to which they display their learnedness to support their moral authority. Using supervised machine learning, this project extracts and classifies cited authors and texts in the sermon-related sections of early printed books transcribed by the Text Creation Partnership for the Early English Books Online database. The results and documentation of this project will be publicized on the Early English Printed Sermons website (https://www.earlyenglishprintedsermons.org/).