The Thick Style: Steady Sellers, Textual Aesthetics, and Early Modern Devotional Reading

Abstract

Research on the early modern book trades has uncovered a set of steadily reprinted devotional titles, a canon whose popularity challenges conventional notions of English and American literary history for the seventeenth century. My essay attends to these steady sellers as they helped structure the literary culture of early New England. The essay demonstrates that the pious conduct books rely on the performative literacies of sight, sound, gesture, and touch, on the sensory effects of literary expression, and on the cross-referencing collation of discrete passages, in a phenomenon I call–drawing on editorial theory and information history–the thickening of devotional textuality. With evidence from the prescriptive literature and its use in personal miscellanies, the essay revalues the aesthetic experience of devout colonists. Further, it examines the book format as a precursor to the modes of nonlinear reading associated with digital texts, and it historicizes such uses of the book format in the light of devotional sensibilities. (MPB)