David Hall's new book offers a welcome and, frankly, formidable challenge to anyone who has ever penned a phrase like, “The Pouring Out of the Seven Vials, by John Cotton.” Such a phrase, Ways of Writing demonstrates, obscures the complex and multi-agent process by which the preacher may have conceptualized an interpretation to scripture, while congregants or auditors may have taken dictation in shorthand, their manuscripts may have circulated to other readers, readers may have introduced these manuscripts to printers, and printers may have printed the text, which may then have been sold to other readers and been read, bound, or reprinted. This collective endeavor is called “social authorship,” and its mechanics and dynamics in and beyond seventeenth-century New England comprise the book's principal (and significant) contribution to the historical anthropology of media—or, in the book's own terms, to the study of “text making.”

Social authorship is not, however, the only variety of text making that Ways of Writing explores. Other topics include scribal publication (the production and circulation of manuscripts, which may or may not include printing), the purposes of paratexts (prefaces and other front or end matter, often not written by the text's principal author), the meanings of anonymous publication (and of authored publications which were nevertheless not authorized by their nominal authors), and the complex and nonlinear contours of textual transmission (across transatlantic space and historical time). Arguably the most impressive achievement of Ways of Writing is its ability to isolate these different dimensions of text making (such that, for example, scribal publication and anonymity can be shown to have distinct social and political valences) at the same time that the book engages case studies in which these different dimensions operated within the same texts, whether in tandem or in tension.

Though the subtitle and the introductory chapter announce that this book will also be a story of politics, Ways of Writing engages “politics” largely in the broad sense of “relations of power.” Somewhat surprisingly, the book discusses the politics of text making almost entirely independent of economic factors. Though it ably demonstrates how texts like Thomas Shepard's The Sincere Convert or Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America appeared in printed form without the intention—and largely to the embarrassment—of their nominal authors, Ways of Writing is generally unconcerned with questions like who profited by, or even who was liable for, the appearance of these volumes. Such questions may not be answerable—I say so in part because Ways of Writing's scholarship is otherwise fairly meticulous, and in part because unreliable data on book sales and royalties is a common frustration for history of the book scholarship. But the fact that a question cannot be answered does not mean that it should not be asked, and it remains unclear why Ways of Writing shies away from such unknowns.

The book does not, however, shy away from interdisciplinary engagement. Specifically, it sets historical concerns about Protestant literacy, style, and practice against concerns (familiar from media and communication studies) about access to literacy, writing, print, and, to a much lesser extent, markets. This combination of concerns brings into relief several concrete instances in which the complex idea of political and religious authority in colonial New England was adumbrated in more quotidian practices of reading, writing, and cooperating. As a result, Ways of Writing yields a fresh take on the ideas and meanings of authority in early New England, demonstrating—as have Hall's previous works, and as is a rising cohort of historians of the book—how many well-worn topics stand to be transformed when literature is imagined as a series of practices and books are engaged as material objects. While it would be an overstatement to claim that Ways of Writing transforms the meaning of “politics” in colonial New England, it is certainly not an exaggeration to say that the book opens that possibility to further investigation.

To be sure, Ways of Writing presents familiar texts—such as Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana or Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom—in unexpected ways. The stand-out example, to my mind at least, is the second chapter's discussion of A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antimomians. Familists & Libertines, which details both the politics of publishing about this controversy in the seventeenth century and the politics of attributing this text to John Winthrop in the nineteenth century. Here, Ways of Writing clearly and unequivocally proceeds with an analysis that follows from the suspension of conventional forms of authorship. If it is not ultimately knowable who wrote A Short Story, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct the parties who were served by the text's production, publication, and circulation. Accordingly, a more traditional scholarly agenda focused around Winthrop as great author, great man, and great mind is, in these pages, quietly supplanted by a far more subtle and compelling focus on historical contingencies of place, circumstance, and technology. Though this chapter pairs its discussion of A Short Story with a history of the inaccurate (or perhaps partially accurate) attribution of that text to Winthrop, this second part of the analysis nevertheless receives less attention. Ways of Writing offers nuanced historical readings but appears more restrained when dealing with the historiographic questions it also raises.

Such restraint is, however, most immediately legible as evidence of the book's intellectual scrupulousness. Ways of Writing's thorough research and significant implications are tempered by a finely tuned argumentative style, resulting in a book that breaks new ground but makes no self-satisfied claims about its own originality. For students of book history and of early New England, Ways of Writing is a monograph that can and should have profound effects on scholarly ways of thinking.