The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England
The devotional culture of early New England did not predict or facilitate a straight line from sin to salvation.
If you have even a passing involvement in seeing what the history of the volume looks like when it achieves intellectual maturity, thenThe Pilgrim and the Bee is certainly worth your fourth dimension. If (like many of the states) you wonder nearly how to forge productive links between shut reading and the enterprise of social history, Brown's carefully crafted examples volition illustrate how to brand a volume clasp and an end-rhyme resonate with equal force. This important study has implications for a wide range of readers. So outset the pilgrim, and and so on to the bee.
The pilgrim of Brownish'south championship is the reader we think nosotros know from history and the reader nosotros recollect nosotros are. Undertaking reading as one would undertake a pilgrimage, this reader advances line-by-line, discussion-by-discussion across whatsoever stretch of text. This reader cannot (and does non) abide distraction or filibuster; divergences from the straight and narrow path amount to intellectual and moral cul-de-sacs, sloughs of despond serving no ultimate purpose and asunder from the true chore at mitt. He'due south the reader whom studies of "the give-and-take" in early New England typically connect to the onset of "redeemed subjectivity." His progress every bit a reader leads to the progress of his self. It is as though the nineteenth-century realist novel reader—the reader of a genre organized around the linear unfolding of time—were transported dorsum to the seventeenth century. This reading subject accrues his sense of identify and of self through sustained attention to the (assumed) protocols of reading in Western culture: left to right, top to bottom, beginning to end.
Still Brownish's close and sensitive attention to the materiality of early New England'south steady sellers—commonplace books, sermon notes, elegies, and other devices of devotional literacy—discloses a constant companion to this first reading subject, one whose practice of reading has been largely ignored: the "alvearial" reader or bee. As Brown describes it, the "reading program" he unearths "is divers through two central tropes: on 1 hand, the pilgrimage, wherein readers treat texts as continuous narratives and follow a redemptive journey, a progressive telos or 'growth in grace'; and, on the other, the alvearial, wherein readers, like bees, extract and eolith data discontinuously, treating texts every bit spatial objects, as flowers or hives which keep readers active but anchored" (xii). The devotional civilisation of early New England did non predict or facilitate a direct line from sin to salvation. Likewise, early on New Englanders were incited to reach a form of sacred subjectivity that moved fitfully forrard and back, side to side, and occasionally hovered…like a bee. In Brown's account, the emphasis falls on book culture as opposed to the theological (although he does not neglect the relevant theology). He reminds us that the culture of the codex associated with the steady sellers of this menstruum—Christian conduct manuals—was distinctly unnovelistic and nonlinear. Not only did these conduct manuals mimic the various sermonic forms already familiar to the states from this period, which were themselves incomparably nonlinear, the indexical features of the codex encouraged episodic and selective engagement of the text independent therein. The pilgrim and the bee, information technology turns out, are one and the same. An ingenious figure who oversees the enterprise of Brown's "reader-based" reassessment of early New England's literature, Brown's reader is both more and unlike than we could have imagined (4). As Chocolate-brown writes, "the bee metaphor has a particular power for devout settlers. It integrates the other mutual tropes for reading in early New England: the bee suggests the directional move of the pilgrim, while it evokes the hovering stasis of the ruminator" (10).
If the pilgrim-bee conjunction is one of the prevailing threads knitting this rich study together, information technology has other notable features every bit well. First, Brown reminds the states merely how deeply it matters what kind of text—what genres, what printed formats—we designate as a period's primary literary archive. He also helps us to rethink what constituted the "literature" of early New England and to identify how this revised sense of the early on American "annal" should alter our view of this menstruum. He explains, "Book trades and probate inquiry has recovered, along with catechisms, primers, and schoolbooks, a set of devotional works…—manuals of piety, guides to conversion, psalmbooks, and sermons—that, with scripture and almanacs, were the popular literature of early New England." These devotional works, Brownish argues, "reorient our sense of literary culture in the period abroad from colonial-born ministers, private diarists, or unpublished poets" (7).
In addition to stressing this relative popularity and influence of the steady sellers,The Pilgrim and the Bee also emphasizes that whatever materials dominated daily life, their mode of usage also deserves attending. Early New England writing, like literary culture more than generally, is, according to Chocolate-brown, best understood in terms of the dynamic "communications excursion" that the history of the book encourages the states to recognize. Reader-based literary history yields a more than nuanced sense of non only this but of whatever menstruum's literature; and the history of the book, when practiced as what Chocolate-brown calls "interpretative bibliography" (15), has the potential to refigure in important ways the practice of humanities scholarship and teaching. Hither, Brown's attention to that communications circuit reveals the broad extent to which early New England'due south steady sellers were office of a performative "theater of literacy" (5) in which print culture—a term that Brown rightly questions for its abstracting tendencies (xiv)—functioned variously as a totemic object, equally a resource for oral reading, as a funereal gift, and equally part of the transaction of ritual fasting. Given these varied functions, it should non surprise us that the famous "heart piety" of early on New England "worked alongside what might exist called 'hand piety,' the tactile feel of and indexical movement within and across godly books, and 'center piety,' the visual contemplation of textile images" (71). Finally, Brown ends his volume with a highly suggestive affiliate on the human relationship of book culture to Amerindian literacy and its relationship to England. He demonstrates the cardinal disciplinary part that the "written record as artifactual wonder" played in the "civilizing" and "salvational" Protestant missions, as well equally the ways in which the requirements of those missions underwrote the emergence of a New England volume culture (181).
Nearly the showtime of his volume, Chocolate-brown writes the following:
[H]ere is my wager: if I tin can convince you that the physical properties of texts—their visual advent, tactile feel, and oral performance—were central to a guild conventionally understood every bit iconophobic and ascetic, where communication is in the "plain style" and where expressive aesthetics are feared, then the case for book history'south significance will be all the stronger when we turn to individuals and societies where such conditions do not prevail (xiii).
For this reader, at least, that wager has been won.
This article originally appeared in consequence 8.4 (July, 2008).
Lloyd Pratt is assistant professor of English and core faculty in African American and African studies at Michigan Land University.
Source: http://commonplace.online/article/first-the-pilgrim-then-the-bee/
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