One of the distinctive remains of colonial American Puritan lay piety is sermon auditors’ notebooks, in which laypersons, fully steeped in a religious culture that stressed the centrality of preaching, copied out sermons as they listened to them. The Hartford (Connecticut) Sermon Notebook is one such collection, recorded by an anonymous sermon ‘gadder’. It contains sixty-two sermons from 1679 to 1680 by five ministers, most of them from the Hartford area. The majority of the sermons themselves are by Isaac Foster, the short-lived minister of Hartford's First Church, suggesting that the notetaker was a member of that congregation. The editor divides the transcript into thematic chapters that take the reader through the main doctrinal loci and sermonic occasions of early New England preaching: covenant theology, election and visible sainthood, civic sermons (for example, thanksgiving), jeremiads, funeral, ordination and sacrament. These sermons are significant because they represent, for the most part, a body of Connecticut River Valley preachers who, as scholars such as Norman Pettit have argued, formed a different school of homiletics from their colleagues in eastern Massachusetts. The dates of these sermons are of interest because they locate the speakers, first, in the immediate aftermath of the harrowing King Philip's War (1675–6); second, as contemporaries of (and possibly participants in) the Reforming Synod of 1679; and third, in the midst of local ecclesiastical formation as churches argued and split over the extent to which congregational or presbyterial polities should be incorporated into general practices. The church of Windsor had previously divided over that issue, and in 1670 Hartford had experienced a schism that resulted in the temporary establishment of the presbyterial Second Church. The volume includes a discussion of transcription methodology and historiography, and subject and Scripture indices.