The pastor in print is the first book-length analysis of the phenomenon of early modern pastors who intentionally pursued print authorship. With careful attention to audience, content, genre, and timing of publications, pastor-authors sought to complement parish work and achieve diverse religious goals through print.

Introduction: Ministers and media Part I: Religious goals: pastoral approaches to devotion, vocation, and print1 The ubiquity of ‘the devotional’ 2 The making of a pastor-author3 The call to preach and the question of printed sermons Part II: Audiences: imagining and fostering relationships with readers4 If you learn nothing else: catechisms and the question of the fundamentals of the faith5 Different audiences, different messages: explication and implication in anti-Catholic publications6 A bit of parish trouble and a manual on giving: self-representation to insiders and outsiders Part III: Innovation: Adapting content, genre, and format7 A trial, a guide for jurors, and an allegory: one experience inspiring generically divergent publications8 A puritan pastor-author in the 1630s: tailoring the presentation of theological content9 ‘That all the Lord’s people could prophesy’: innovating in the reference genre (and turning against episcopacy?)10 The paradigm of the ‘pastor-author’ beyond Bernard Index

The pastor in print explores the phenomenon of early modern pastors choosing to become print authors. Addressing ways print could enhance, limit, or change pastoral ministry, the book demonstrates how ministers tailored their publications’ genre, content, and timing as they sought to achieve religious goals among a range of audiences. In the process, it discusses multiple aspects of post-Reformation English religion, including censorship, private religious devotion, polemic, witchcraft, and religious education.The book centres on an extended case study of Richard Bernard, a prolific pastor-author whose career provides a coherent framework through which to analyse key features of early modern clerical publishing. It also addresses a number of other English pastors who pursued authorship as an intentional part of their religious vocation, notably George Gifford, Thomas Wilson, and Samuel Hieron. In contrast to studies focusing upon specific genres or audiences, this study offers a broader paradigm for understanding pastoral authorship, addressing different ways that pursuit of publication could be integrated, over the course of a career, with one’s parish work and overarching religious goals.Providing a remarkably comprehensive account of pastoral publishing, The pastor in print offers a new lens through which to view the intersection of print technology and clerical work in this pivotal period, which in turn points us toward a more complete understanding of post-Reformation English religion.

'Deeply grounded in manuscript research at the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Bodleian, British Library, the National Archives, Cambridge University, Chetham's Library Manchester and the Lincolnshire and Somerset Record Offices as well as in an enormous number of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century printed texts it seems no stone has been left unturned. The long list of secondary sources – and Tan's active engagement with them in the body of the book – proclaims a comprehensive and up-to-date awareness; the full bibliography runs to sixteen pages of dense print.'Literature & History