His schooling took place at
Oundle School. Educated at
Merton College, Oxford, Pettegree held research fellowships at the
University of Hamburg and
Peterhouse, Cambridge before moving to St Andrews in 1986. In 1991 he was named the founding director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute. and won the
Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize of the
Renaissance Society of America. In March 2014, Pettegree published
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself, which was well-received. 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." 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." Together with
Arthur der Weduwen, in 2019 Pettegree published a book about the publishing industry in the Netherlands in the
Dutch Golden Age. 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." In 2022, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, Pettegree was honoured with a two-volume
festschrift titled
Reformation, Religious Culture and Print in Early Modern Europe and edited by Arthur der Weduwen and Malcolm Walsby. Pettegree was appointed
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the
2024 New Year Honours for services to literature. ==Other roles==