GEMMS (Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons 1530–1715): Confronting the Challenges of Sermons Research

This essay describes the first phase of the GEMMS project (2014–2019), the purpose of which is to increase access to early modern English manuscript sermons and sermon notes (1530–1715) by creating a freely accessible online bibliographic database of records for these materials. It reviews the need for this resource, the current state of its development, and the challenges and successes to date as well as proposed developments in its next phase. Resume Cet article decrit la premiere phase du projet GEMMS (2014–2019), dont l’objectif est de faciliter l’acces a des manuscrits et notes des sermons en anglais moderne naissant (1530–1715) en creant une base de donnees bibliographique en ligne et en libre acces des archives de ces documents. Cet article examine le besoin de cette ressource, l’etat actuel de son developpement, les defis et reussites jusqu’a present, ainsi que les developpements proposes pour la prochaine phase du projet. Mots-cles: sermons; manuscrits; base de donnees bibliographique; notes de sermons; Renaissance


Introduction
The GEMMS project responds to a need among early modern researchers for more effective and efficient access to records of manuscript sermons scattered among numerous archives in the United Kingdom and North America. While the project's primary goal is a freely accessible, fully searchable bibliographic database, an important secondary goal is creating a community of sermon scholars who will become contributors to as well as users of this data. This essay presents the rationale for the project and discusses three challenges it confronts due to the circumstances in which these materials were created and have been collected: the vast number and geographic dispersal of the manuscripts; the inadequacies of existing bibliographic tools for locating them; and the lack of taxonomies for describing their contents.
A summary of these challenges, progress to date, and future plans comprises the remainder of the essay.

The research context: Problems of access
Sermons are an important resource for early modern scholars in many academic disciplines. Early twentieth-century interest was largely confined to literary scholars who prized the sermons of well-known preachers such as John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes for their rhetorical qualities, but who ignored the vast majority of undistinguished performances (Shami 1992, 2-3). Later in the century, however, interest developed among a wider range of scholars for numerous reasons: increased popularity of literary and historical methodologies that expanded their research from a smaller group of elite texts to larger groups of more popular texts; easier access to a greater range of early modern printed texts through projects such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) that decrease the necessity for visiting specialized archival collections; and increased interest in oral culture, its relationship to print culture, and the circulation and reception of both print and manuscript texts.
Defined by contemporary John Deios as "the expounding of scripture and applying of it to the present state, by the working of Gods spirit in the mouth of a man called for that purpose" (Deios 1590, 139;Morrissey 2011, 50), the sermon functioned as an instrument of God, conveying saving grace to instruct, move, and convert. As lay James and Shami: GEMMS (Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons 1530-1715) Art. 21, page 3 of 24 access to scripture in the vernacular increased, preaching by appropriately trained and licensed ministers also offered the church a means of guiding and directing individual interpretation within a communal setting. As oral performances, sermons came to function as instruments of the state as well as the church by enabling public engagement on controversial religious and political topics, but even sermons conspicuously neutral, uninspired, or mundane are best understood as "radically occasional pieces of performed writing, contingent upon the contexts [including place and auditory] in and for which they were delivered" (McCullough 2011, 213).
These characteristics make them important sources of information for political, religious, and social historians, as well as theologians, church historians, and those interested in the histories of ideas, the book, performance, and women. Among nonacademics, genealogists and local historians also rely upon sermon evidence.
The Reformation made sermons the dominant cultural form of early modern English literature by encouraging the proliferation and development of sermonsthe most prominent of the preacher's ministerial duties -as part of the liturgy and as free-standing events, grafting these discourses onto a robust medieval tradition of Catholic preaching and sermon attendance (Carlson 2003, 254;Shami 2017, 186-7;Wabuda 2002, 26-7;Wooding 2011, 330, 332). Based upon the numbers of parishes and preaching occasions -which expanded to include not only traditional Sunday services, but also regular weekday lectures or combination lectures across the kingdom, and sermons on special public and political occasions -Godfrey Davies calculated that at least 360,000 sermons would have been preached in England and Wales between 1603 and 1640 alone (Davies 1939, 1). However, Edith Klotz's sampling of the Short Title Catalogue (STC) suggested that only about 1,600 of these sermons survive in print (Shami 1992, 1). While Klotz's estimate may be low, GEMMS research supports her conclusion: of the 14,000 sermons currently contained in the GEMMS database, we have so far identified fewer than 200 that were printed. The reasons for this dearth of printed sermon records likely range from preachers' disinclination or lack of time to prepare their sermons for print, to lack of demand for print copies (which were considered less efficacious than the spoken word in the early part of the period) and the sheer volume of sermons preached even by a single preacher in his career. and Quaker women (whose sermons do not survive, although we have evidence that they were preached) (Shami 2011, 169-71), were unlikely to be authorized for print.
Scholars have also become interested in traces of sermons that are entirely absent from the print record, such as notes and outlines by preachers, auditors, and readers (Hunt 2010). In other words, not only are many early modern sermons inaccessible to researchers through sources such as EEBO, but also relying entirely or primarily upon printed sermons may lead to limited or flawed conclusions.
Consequently, researchers, beginning with historians, began increasingly looking to manuscript sermons to provide them with a more accurate understanding of sermon culture (Cogswell 1990, 215;Eales 1996;Hughes 1987;Lake 1988;Walsham 1994

Inadequate bibliographic access
The bibliographic tools upon which sermon scholars have traditionally relied are the catalogues, online and print, of libraries and archives. Many of these catalogues were produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when sermons by ordinary parish ministers were considered to be of little interest to researchers. These institutions also purchased quantities of manuscripts containing sermons, which were often available cheaply during the last half-century, but as they were consulted relatively infrequently in most archives, limited staffing and budgets prevented full cataloguing even of complete sermons. In the catalogues of large repositories, individual sermons were seldom itemized, unless they were known to be preached by well-known preachers. Even works by such preachers could escape attribution: Plume's Library (to be accessible through GEMMS), a private collection where full cataloguing had not previously been possible.

Problems of classification
Given the increasing recognition of the importance of sermons in early modern culture and the growing reliance of scholars on sermons, a lack of appropriate and widely accepted taxonomies for describing these materials has become a serious problem.
These nature of sermon scholarship has rendered some assigned key words obsolete.
Equally frustrating is that terms one might expect to find, such as 'Calvin', ' election' or, more broadly, 'theology of grace', are not among the keywords used. Moreover, the database's coverage of repositories and preachers is idiosyncratic, since data collection was undertaken by individual researchers over a period of many years, and only complete sermons were included.
Several scholars have initiated collaborative projects to undertake the more labour-   Recognizing quickly that entering data directly into the database during these research trips was inefficient, we reverted to taking notes and photographing information that was difficult to decipher. RAs then entered the metadata into the database. While this working arrangement makes it possible to collect and process data efficiently, as well as to help to train RAs in palaeography, there are disadvantages. Not all repositories allow photography, and when incomplete or defective information is found in our notes, often months after it has been collected, we must either rely on our memories or send RAs to verify the correct information, a relatively expensive procedure for a single piece of missing data. Checking for

James and Shami: GEMMS (Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons 1530-1715)
Art. 21, page 12 of 24 accuracy occupies a significant amount of research time because we understand that accuracy is crucial to the long-term usefulness and survival of GEMMS.
Developing a taxonomy for the various kinds of sermon traces described above was a primary concern in the first stages of data collection and database design.
Because most scholars have made limited use of sermon traces other than complete sermons, there has been little agreement on how to classify or refer to these materials (Morrissey 2017, 294). GEMMS has classified items into Sermon Types (Figure 1) according to two criteria: structure and creator.
Short summaries or lists of sermons kept in sermon notebooks, commonplace books, letters, and diaries represent another class of materials. As some manuscripts contain large numbers of such brief traces, we have chosen not to attempt individual entries for each sermon mentioned, but to identify the lists or diaries as 'Sermon Reports' and to summarise their contents. 'Sermon Draft': a fully written out sermon with substantial revisions or corrections, not just changes to the occasional word or phrase. The revisions may have been made at any time, including for a subsequent preaching of a sermon. Sermon drafts will almost always have been written by the preacher, but someone else may have later revised the sermon.
'Sermon Fragment': a part of a sermon, either written by the preacher or someone else.
'Sermon Notes': notes of a sermon when it is not known whether they were written by the preacher or someone else.
'Sermon Outline': an outline of the heads or main points of a sermon when it is not known whether it was written by the preacher or someone else.
'Transcription of Manuscript Sermon': a copy of a sermon known to be transcribed from a manuscript sermon.
'Transcription of Printed Sermon': a copy of a sermon known to be transcribed from a print edition.
'Transcription of Sermon (Unknown Source)': a sermon that has been copied from another source, but it is unclear whether that source sermon was from a manuscript or a printed text. Sermons 1530-1715)

Art. 21, page 13 of 24
We add an additional means of classification, Sermon Genre, to indicate when a sermon is clearly of a particular kind, such as a funeral sermon, a fast sermon, or a sermon in preparation for communion. While these genres are often indicated fairly clearly in sermon headings, others such as Doctrinal, Instructional, Confutational, and Rehearsal can seldom be recognized without reading the sermons, which has not been possible given the time constraints of data collection. We anticipate that as researchers use the database they will be able to add such details to the entries and to offer corrections when necessary; however, the lack of such information in the shorter term may reduce the usefulness of the database for some potential users (full taxonomy available at Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons 2019a).
This range of materials complicates the processes of data collection and entry.
Often, we are dealing with incomplete or illegible information, requiring researchers and assistants -like detectives -to interpret exactly what they have in front of them. Incorrect and/or incomplete cataloguing offers researchers the pleasures of problem-solving, but also uses valuable time, sometimes to no satisfactory end. While a clearly defined taxonomy supports consistency in data entry, our experience also indicates that applying the taxonomy (which cannot account for every permutation of classification) is a compromise between precision and utility and is handled differently by different researchers. Despite training of RAs and detailed guidelines for data entry, the classification of the heterogeneous contents of many manuscripts is not always clear. As the number of contributors grows, the potential for variant interpretations also increases. Allowing users to contribute their own data offers an even greater possibility of eroding the value of the taxonomy.
Moreover, as our research continues, we discover materials that do not fit existing classifications. For example, RA Hannah Yip, in a recent blog post, has raised the question of sermons prepared by laypersons that do not focus on a specific biblical text, a category that many traditional definitions of the sermon exclude (Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons 2019b). We are faced with the question of expanding the classification system and perhaps correcting existing records, or simply using free text fields to note anomalies and ambiguities.
Identifying people associated with the manuscripts poses a second problem.
With the assistance of our RAs, we have supplemented the archival data to provide brief biographies for individuals who can be traced with the aid of online resources such as the Clergy of the Church of England database (2019)  with the year beginning 1 January, a system becoming more common by the late seventeenth century. When a manuscript follows a chronological order, it is generally possible to tell which style is being used; however, in many cases this is impossible, and we note any uncertainties.
These problems of classification, lack of biographical certainty, and vague dating create challenges that make effective searches difficult. The Advanced Search Function (Figure 2) allows researchers to search within the classification of Sermons, Manuscripts, or Sermon Reports, and to limit those searches by Repository, Manuscript, Date, Bible Book, Person and Role, Sermon Type, Sermon Genre, Preaching Occasion, and Preaching Location. Free text searching allows access to other relevant information including the identification of print editions or other manuscript witnesses, when they exist, to enable users to compare different versions of the same sermon, an exercise that helps researchers to better understand the transition from manuscript to print and the ways in which sermons might be adapted to different audiences. We also record physical characteristics of manuscripts that may be useful to book historians, such as unusual bindings or paper, or the presence of clasps.
Simple searches are impressively swift, but we are still working to ensure that users can drill down through many levels to arrive at very specific -and accurate -findings. Achieving consistent and reliable results from more complex searches remains a challenge. As an alternative to the search functions, users can browse tables including Sermons, Manuscripts, Repositories, People, Places, Bible Books, and Sermon Reports. However, browsing becomes less and less efficient as more records are added to the database.
As in any such project, search results depend upon the quality of the data as well as the functionality of the search structure. While our advanced search function is robust, it frequently encounters problems resulting from incomplete or ambiguous data. These problems lack easy solutions since they are intrinsic to the materials themselves.

Future directions
While creating a useful and viable database has taken, and continues to take, many of our resources, we have only begun to tackle our most complex challenge: creating an international, collaborative community of scholars who use manuscript sermons as evidence for their varied research objectives. This is a more formidable task.  (2008) notes, "the narrower and more specific the intended audience, the easier it will be to identify and define the uses of the data" (479). Aside from those scholars who study sermons exclusively or primarily, there is a large group of others whose interest in them may be specific to a particular situation or project. Drawing in these potential users will require engaging with them to determine their needs. To this end, we plan to turn our focus to developing partnerships with other researchers who are interested in manuscript sermons and sermon notes from this period for a variety of purposes.
We have established a partnership with the New England Beginnings project co-ordinated by Dr. Francis J. Bremer (2019): "a partnership to encourage and promote activities that commemorate the cultures that shaped early New England." Not only will this partnership facilitate collaboration with American scholars, but it also offers possibilities for links with non-scholarly organizations, since it focuses on engaging both academics and "a wide, general public audience" (2019).
We envision many avenues of participation with members of its loose federation that includes a variety of organizations and scholars: participation in their Guest Scholars program, an initiative that is committed to making the participants' views on New England available to schools, colleges, and community groups via technologies such as teleconferencing, Skype, etc.; and planning and co-hosting an international conference focused on interactions between England and New England involving sermons as a showcase for GEMMS as a research resource and as a collaborative initiative to bring these two worlds together, historically and culturally, for the education and mutual benefit of North American and European participants. Other future plans include offering workshops at universities that have suitable programs. Attracting casual or occasional users will require thinking beyond academic structures to historical and genealogical societies, perhaps using the New England Beginnings as a model for this kind of engagement. Of special importance will be working directly with librarians and archivists to develop relationships that progress beyond gaining access to their collections to genuine collaborations that could include digitization projects.
Migration to the Drupal platform during our next phase, set to begin in 2019, will also be challenging. We intend for this migration to enable us to create an enhanced search interface and to develop group-sourcing features. Drupal has been selected for its ability to be customized, as well as for its extensive usage among university libraries, which are the academy's primary dispensers and preservers of digital scholarly content. This new phase will also see increasing promotion of the database among scholars, and, most importantly, the addition of features that will allow users to contribute their own metadata and to add comments, upload images (with permissions), and attach files (including transcriptions) to existing records.
However, while early users and prospective contributors have expressed interest in the expansion of the project to include online images and transcriptions, we are unlikely to add these features systematically due first to the sheer volume of materials and secondly to repository policies and copyright restrictions. Additionally, while we hope to enable researchers to plan their time and travel more effectively based on the information the database provides, we see value in consulting these materials in person whenever possible to benefit from seeing the sermons in context and recognizing the manuscripts as material objects.
We were fortunate at the beginning of the project to secure hosting by Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2019), which has given the website a stable platform that ensures its future availability and free access. Iter's mandate is to provide "a flexible environment for communication, exchange, and collaboration" (Bowen, Crompton, and Hiebert 2014, 1) among Renaissance scholars, and it is therefore concerned not simply with hosting resources, but also with the potential use of these resources for scholarship and teaching, with opportunities for publication and "social knowledge creation" (Bowen, Crompton, and Hiebert 2014, 5). However, "Storage is not synonymous with sustainability [:] What sustains a scholarly text [or