Matthew P. Brown – författare

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.

Explores American colonial print culture's diverse output and how these texts shaped public life and modernity.Finalist for the SHARP Book History Prize by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, IncIn The Novel and the Blank, Matthew P. Brown uncovers the vibrant, overlooked world of the eighteenth-century British American print shop. Printing more than just novels and pamphlets, these workshops produced a kaleidoscope of printed materials—from legal blanks and almanacs to runaway slave ads and chapbooks—that reflected the complexities of colonial life. Brown paints a rich cultural history of the time, identifying and describing the steady sellers that stabilized the trade and the print surges ignited by religious revivals of the 1730s-1740s and political upheavals of the revolutionary era. He explores the connections among commercial caution, literary expression, and oppressive structures like the slave trade. The book advances our knowledge of early modern culture in several ways: by providing a rounded portrait of colonial and early national literary culture; by examining a steadily popular canon rarely read by modern scholars; and by depicting the lived religion of readers, writers, and printers who participated in this literary culture. With a sharp focus on everyday texts and readers—rather than on the canon of works constructed by modern scholars—Brown reimagines the public sphere of the eighteenth century as a vivifying experience. Through an innovative blend of historical rigor and cultural insight, The Novel and the Blank reveals how ordinary print shaped extraordinary shifts in religion, secularism, and the ways we understand modernity itself.