This collection contains Jonathan Edwards’ theological notebooks called the “Miscellanies” and his “Catalogue.”
The “Miscellanies” were written over the course of Jonathan Edwards’ ministerial career. He filled a series of private notebooks with writings on a wide variety of theological topics, numbering his entries—some 1,400 of them—in sequence. Edwards used the “Miscellanies” as a repository for ideas that he intended to develop in future sermons and treatises, and these entries contain the seeds of such contemporaneous works as Justification by Faith Alone and The History of the Work of Redemption. In these volumes you’ll see into Edwards’ thoughts on a broad range of topics and how they developed throughout his ministry.
The “Catalogue” is a notebook he kept of books of interest, especially titles he hoped to acquire, and entries from his “Account Book,” a ledger in which he noted books loaned to family, parishioners, and fellow clergy. These two records, along with several shorter documents presented in the volume, illuminate Edwards’ own mental universe while also providing a remarkable window into the wider intellectual and print cultures of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. An extensive critical introduction places Edwards’ book lists in the contexts that shaped his reading agenda, and the result is the most comprehensive treatment yet of his reading and of the fascinating peculiarities of his time and place.