Andrew David Mark Pettegree is a British historian and an expert on the European Reformation, the history of the book and media transformations. he holds a professorship at St Andrews University, where he is the director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project. He is the founding director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute.
His schooling took place at Oundle School.[1] Educated at Oxford University, Pettegree held Research Fellowships at the Universities of Hamburg and Cambridge before moving to St Andrews in 1986.[2]
In 1991 he was named the founding director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute.[2]
His early work was mostly concentrated on the subject of sixteenth-century immigrant communities.
In 2010 he published an interpretative work reassessing the early impact of the printing press, The Book in the Renaissance. In this he suggests that to understand the impact of print we must look beyond the most notable and celebrated books of the day, and consider the more mundane projects that underpinned the economics of the print era – the "cheap print" of pamphlets and broadsheets. The Book in the Renaissance was nominated one of the New York Times notable books of 2010,[3] and won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize of the Renaissance Society of America.[4]
In March 2014, Pettegree published The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself,[5] which was well-received.[6] [7] This charts the development of a commercial culture of news in ten countries over the five centuries before the daily newspaper emerged as the dominant form of news delivery at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The book demonstrates that this period was, like our own, a rich, multi-media environment of manuscript and print, correspondence and conversation, gossip and song. It shows in particular that newspapers were in some respects the least functional part of this system.
In 2015 The Invention of News won Harvard University's Goldsmith Prize. This prize, awarded annually by the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, honours the book that best fulfils the objective of improving democratic governance through an examination of the intersection between the media, politics and public policy.
In 2015 Pettegree published a study of Martin Luther's use and mastery of the printed media. The Washington Post described this as "a remarkable story, thoroughly researched and clearly told, and one sure to change the way we think about the early Reformation."[8]
In 2016 Pettegree and Flavia Bruni published Lost Books : Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-Industrial Europe which included essays about "lost books of polyphony in Renaissance Spain, how newspaper advertisements in the Dutch Republic can be used to identify lost works, how the Stationers’ Company Register can be used to reconstruct lost English print, lost broadsheet ordinances in sixteenth-century Cologne, and a consideration of the impact of looting and Nazi book burning on Polish-Lithuanian collections."[9]
Together with Arthur der Weduwen, in 2019 Pettegree published a book about the publishing industry in the Netherlands in the Dutch Golden Age.[10]
In 2021 Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen published The Library. A Fragile History, which was reviewed in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America and lauded for its bibliographical scholarship, notably "extensive use of auction lists, church library records, and sale catalogs." [11]
Pettegree was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to literature.
Pettegree has held visiting fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford, the Scaliger Institute at Leiden University, Netherlands, and at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Research at the University of Toronto. He is a former Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society.
Bibliographies