The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Material Texts) - Hardcover

Brown, Matthew P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812240154 ISBN 13: 9780812240153

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

We conventionally understand the book as a vessel for words, a place where the reader goes to have a private experience with written language. But readers' relationships with books are much more complex. In The Pilgrim and the Bee, Matthew P. Brown examines book culture and the rituals of reading in early New England, ranging across almanacs, commonplace books, wonder tales, funeral elegies, sermon notes, conversion relations, and missionary tracts. What emerges is a new understanding of the book at once as a material good, existing within the economies of buying, selling, giving, and receiving; as an object of reverence and a medium for the performance of reading; and as an organizational system for word, sound, and image.

The product of extensive archival research, The Pilgrim and the Bee brings together the disciplines of book studies and performance theory to reconsider the literary history of early America. Brown focuses on the reader's body, carefully studying reading practices during the first three generations of English settlement, with particular emphasis on the way such practices operated in the social rituals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Understanding Puritanism as a style of piety predicated on access to texts, he describes a canon of texts (devotional "steady sellers") that, with the Bible, served as conduct literature for pious readers. These devotional manuals were reprinted and read frequently and helped to shape the social identities of gender, race, class, faith, and age. To Brown, seventeenth-century devotional readers are both pilgrims, treating texts as continuous narratives of redemptive journeying, and bees, treating texts as flowers or hives, as spatial objects where information is extracted and deposited discontinuously.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matthew P. Brown teaches English and is Director of the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Preface
A Phenomenology of the Book

You have in your hand a book, which you are starting to read. Or had you already begun? You most likely encountered the title, on the spine or jacket, wondering perhaps about the inapposite figures and bearing patiently with the specialized, didactic, impacted—it's a monograph after all—subtitle. You perhaps met these words again, with less patience, on the title page. But wait, you first may have read more of the book's exterior, discovering a publishing house, an author's name, a visual image perhaps relevant to the book's themes, a summary of the book, and, maybe, blurbs. Did the summary say anything about bees? Good. You also felt—and feel—the book, its heft and creak, the stubble on a library binding, or the laminate sheen of a paperback. And then you opened it. Yet you were not here yet. You flipped through the blank endpapers, glanced at the copyright page and detected the work's date, its Library of Congress subject headings, its edition number, ran back across the title page and arrived . . . Well, no, not here yet, because it is possible you skipped to the bibliography and index, looked to see if books or persons of concern appear in the main text. In the index, you may have come across the word "phenomenology." I'm sorry. Still, no matter, you have found other books and ideas that were unexpected and which will, you hope, engage you. A turn to the table of contents: a chapter on fasting, you hate your diet, you don't go there. Better to return to the back, reading the endnotes, scouring their tiny font for references to debates in literary history or for leads for your own, more interesting research. At some point you came to this paragraph.

A writer should be so lucky as to have a reader as attentive as the one I have just imagined. Your reading experience is perhaps nothing like the preceding paragraph, which is partly my point. Acts of reading are unique, and the activity of reading changes from context to context, historical moment to historical moment. But that my opening scenario might describe a set of shared practices used on this or other books—practices amounting themselves to a kind of reading—is, I hope, a reasonable claim. Unlike the individual reading act, these shared practices, while here depicted as a set of academic customs, are part of a larger sociology of literacy generated by the handiness of the book format. And where does the social act of reading begin? Think of where you are and how you got this book. The shiny marketplace of a bookstore or exhibit, with its relative notion of choice? Or the shadowy space of the library stacks, where compulsion and leisure, labor and happenstance—the life of the mind—led you to it? Or was it passed on to you, in the odd psychodynamics of a gift economy, where obligation rather than choice informs the reading experience? And did references precede your encounter with the physical object: listings from a bookseller's website, subject headings from a library database, derisive comments in the hallway, or a recommendation from a gentle yet shrewd intellect, kind and discriminating, intent but not pushy, generous but without any of the casual lassitude that would mention a title offhandedly, a figure worthy of respect, indeed emulation, but never vain, a model of un-self-conscious integrity busy with the joys and sorrows of a life both examined and engaged? Or was the book a discard at the annual library sale? How do these environments shape your reception of the book?

That these literacy procedures are both radically different from and strangely akin to the reading habits of devout Protestants in early New England is, for now, my chief point. We are surrounded by books that we read indexically and discontinuously—cookbooks, travel guides, phone directories, affirmation titles, sacred texts—dipping into them for discrete fragments of information. And whatever we construe as the "main text" of a work, this content's meaning is always constrained and enabled by the institutions of, say, classroom, reading club, or McBooks superstore, through which the "main text" is encountered. Furthermore, the book format—a vessel for art and information, a container for the content—is itself endowed with meaning. Defined simply as a sequence of leaves of roughly the same size bound on one side, the codex is a specific vehicle of communication, a medium with storage capacity, a presence on shelves, in totes, and by bedsides, and a format distinct from flyers and letters, billboards and homepages. These general premises about indexical reading, textual environments, and the book format are starting points for analysis of communication in the seventeenth-century colonies.

Before a historicist commissar accuses me of presentism, I hurry to note the radical differences of early New England: a world of book goods defined by scarcity, not plenty; a hierarchical mode of access to books, rather than the relative democracy of consumer choice; a trade dependent on the European metropole; a very modest apparatus—ministerial reference, title page, frontispiece—for the "packaging" of books, with a knowledge that covers were mostly mute, and, when books were bought in sheets, nonexistent. I will detail such differences in the following pages. But how might these general premises, operative in the present and the past, apply to a specific historical context? What do discontinuous reading, textual environments, and the book format mean in early New England? And how might these habits and meanings relate to literary experience, to the sensory, imaginative, and affective knowledge prompted by book art?

This interaction of the reading subject with the book object is what I intend by the term "phenomenology," a soft use of a term borrowed from hard science and harder philosophy. Etymologically rooted in the Greek for "things that appear," phenomenology grants autonomy to objects in the world—"things"—while acknowledging the act of perception that apprehends such autonomous facts, making them "apparent." I hope to balance a study of reading's subjective life with an account of the book format's observable facts. Lending itself to such analysis, the core reading matter of early New England—scripture and almanacs—was complemented by a set of conduct books imported from England which were widely read, but which have been neglected by literary historians due to biases regarding authorship, genre, and country of origin. These steady-selling manuals of piety are the pivot for my inquiry.

This book's goals are threefold. First, I attempt to revise conceptions of early American literary history, through an effort to reconstruct the devotional reading habits of colonial New Englanders, with attention to the ignored but vital canon of steady sellers. Second, I rethink modes of culturalist readership history, which—defining itself against both quantitative literacy research and essentialist treatments of textuality—often neglects the specific properties of a work's physical format. While maintaining a critique of the quantitative and the essentialist, I also explain the written record's qualitative differences—its spatial, visual, and tactile properties—and their impact, within the myriad forms of communication in the early modern period. Third, I use the insights of book history to do this revisionist work, and—while suggesting new directions for the field—I thus advocate for book studies scholarship as an especially valuable method for pursuing a social history of culture. As a result of this method, I also tell a story about how the early American archive has been constructed. This historiographic narrative about the shifting meanings of literary culture in early New England accompanies a story that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812240154
• ISBN 13: 9780812240153
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande