The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (review)

In the first chapter of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Hugh Amory asserts that the “colonial book” is best defined not by the location of its imprint or the birthplace of its author but by its readers: “the ‘colonial book’ was what the colonists bought and read” (28). Matthew P. Brown’s The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England makes a compelling case for the value of this perspective. Brown’s analysis of the steady sellers read by the first three generations of New England settlers focuses on books unfamiliar to most literary scholars, even though they were ubiquitous for readers in England and its colonies throughout the early modern period. In this book Brown offers sustained, nuanced readings of devotional texts usually relegated to the role of context and provides fresh perspective on more frequently examined genres like jeremiads and elegies. Furthermore, by focusing on readership, Brown restores the importance of the transatlantic book trade for colonial readers, as books circulated in the rapidly developing Atlantic economy and in the “gift economy” Brown shows to be significant in Puritan devotion (25). More than simply expanding the early American literary canon with the addition of a few steady sellers, Brown calls attention to the contingencies of the surviving archive and the politics of the canon that emerged from it.

Beginning from the perspective of readers, Brown enriches our notion of New England devotion, recovering the importance of the sensory for readers who encountered the word in material form, in pages bound together into hefty books. Rightly acknowledging the importance of the Pauline discourse of “heart piety” in which God’s word is internalized and written on the hearts of the devout, Brown coins the terms “hand piety” and “eye piety” to discuss the significant roles of the tactile and visual for readers (91–106). Despite the avowed iconoclasm of New England culture, Brown demonstrates that imagery was significant in this early period, studying bindings, clasps, and title pages in the way others have analyzed gravestones and emblem books: the hearts tooled into the binding of Joseph Sewall’s copy of a devotional book become “the sacred externalization of the word” (88, 101). He also convincingly argues that the familiar trope of believer as pilgrim should be complemented with the metaphor of the Christian as bee, hovering in meditative stasis. Surviving records from the period show colonists struggling with paralyzing periods of anxiety along the narrow way to heaven, suggesting the importance of both pilgrimage and contemplation. Brown notes that the codex construction of books, in which leaves are bound in sequence, enables both linear and discontinuous modes of access (compared to the scroll or broadsheet, for example), and boldly asserts that this book technology goes to the core of New England devotion: “I argue that material objects shape religious subjects, that the paradox of puritan piety—its cyclical and teleological modes of anguish and fulfillment—is nurtured by the codex format” (20).

Chapters 1 and 2 analyze reading protocols in the Bible and other devotional steady sellers in order to expose the sophistication of the era’s most popular books and to refine current theoretical models of reading. Brown replaces the widely used “plain style” with his application of Jerome McGann’s “thick style”—while McGann defines textual criteria to distinguish canonical literature from other historical texts, Brown argues that understudied devotional texts offer this substantive complexity because they are simultaneously “informational and aesthetic,” “exist[ing] in multiple forms and voices thick with linguistic and bibliographic codes that mediate and reimagine its formation” (32). Moreover, Brown suggests that the concept of plain style has been frequently misapplied, leading scholars to underestimate some of the most influential texts of the early modern period. Brown reconstructs models of reading taught in the books familiar to both common readers and learned ministers, showing that selective reading was...