David D. Hall. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 233 p. ISBN 978-0812241020. $49.95

Abstract

Expanded from a series of three lectures given in 2007, Hall describes the political, social, and cultural forces that influenced modes of authorship, publishing, and dissemination in 17th-century New England. Separate, but not wholly apart, Hall delineates how writing in New England developed along a different trajectory from the center of the English-speaking world in London. Hall begins by asserting that two keys to understanding New England’s text-making culture have been undervalued. The first is the essentially collaborative culture of how texts were written, spoken, shared, transcribed, annotated, and rewritten. The second is the fundamentally handwritten or scribal practices that . . .