About JEC
About the Jonathan Edwards Center
The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University came into being in October 2003, on the three-hundredth anniversary of Jonathan Edwards' birth. The JEC grew naturally out of the offices of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, the contemporary critical print edition of selections from the Edwards papers. The JEC is directed by Professor Harry Stout, and is housed at the Yale Divinity School in New Haven, CT.
The Works of Jonathan Edwards letterpress edition
The Works of Jonathan Edwards was initially conceived by renowned literary historian Perry Miller in 1953. Its aim was to publish a modern critical edition of the entire corpus of Edwards' published and unpublished works. Nearly half of these writings, a total of twenty-six volumes, will be issued in book form by Yale University Press. To date, twenty-five volumes, along with A Jonathan Edwards Reader(1995) and The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader(1999), have been released. The concluding twenty-sixth volume is slated for release in 2007.
The Yale Edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards occupies a special place in the larger world of American scholarship. Over the past several decades it has emerged as the single most sustained, scholarly, editorial undertaking in the United States alongside the Founding Fathers papers projects. It is the only one of its scope in the field of American religious history.
The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online
In 2003, in anticipation of the completion of the publication of the Works of Jonathan Edwards letterpress volumes, the birth of the Jonathan Edwards Center was announced. The JEC exists to support research and inquiry into the life and writings of the man often dubbed "America's Theologian." The primary vehicle by which we do this work is the publication of the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, a comprehensive, fully-searchable, critical, annotated online edition of the papers of Jonathan Edwards, a corpus of some 100,000 pages of sermons, notebooks, letters, and treatises.
Our Daily Work
The controlling objective of the Worksis to preserve and accurately transmit the texts of Edwards' writings. The Edition has no cultural or theological agenda. The editors have never reflected a single or uniform view of Edwards, his ideas, or his writings. Collectively, they are committed to the finest scholarly standards for textual transcription, editing, and annotation. Safeguarding and presenting these texts as a cultural and literary legacy from early America drives the investment of time and energy on the part of the Edition's scholars, editors, and assistants. Edwards was a significant figure in early America. His writings, not only for their sheer volume, extent, and scope, but for their enduring importance, are major documents in the story of American history.
Since 1988, the Edwards Workshas been generously hosted by Yale Divinity School. Besides housing the editorial and administrative components of the letterpress and digital projects, our offices serve as a resource center. Staff members offer seminars on Edwards and early American religious history. They are also available to help students, faculty, and visiting researchers with questions and research on Edwards and related topics with the help of computerized transcripts of Edwards’s manuscripts and an archive of articles, books, and other materials relating to Edwards. A team of student editorial assistants, most of them Divinity students, assist the staff with the transcription of Edwards’s manuscripts at Beinecke Library.
