Books and Religious Devotion - Allan F. Westphall Penn State Series in the History of the Book

Скачать книгу

patterns characterized in this study is a deep consciousness of the book and its rich signifying power.

      Laboring in books—writing marginalia and providing other forms of augmentation and decorative enhancement—means to become a co-creator, to infuse a book with additional meaning. In book use is found a space for textual and discursive meaning, and through it Connary maps his thoughts on subjects of theology and the moral life. But laboring in books is equally an aesthetic and devotional exercise, a prayerful activity that acknowledges God’s power and presence. Upsetting any bifurcation between surface and depth, interior and exterior that we may instinctively bring to such material, we will examine a mode of book use that fuses spirituality and the sacred with an attention to the manufacture and materiality of the printed book. The treasured object of the book, in its inscribed and augmented state, can preserve the owner’s past experiences of clarity and religious intensity.

      The following attempts to reawaken the voice of this book collector—a voice that would not speak to us were it not for the accidental survival of his books and papers. For that reason, the writing that follows will be punctuated by quotations from Connary (and longer quotations than is the norm in our scholarship) in order to give a sense of a distinct voice and a distinct vocabulary forged by him for the activity of reading and handling books. Most notably, the five main parts of this study will be interspersed with short sections in which I allow Connary to recount his own religious, epiphanic experiences, while offering some comment on how the experiential dimension lies at the heart of his Catholicism and spiritual self-articulation. From early adulthood, Connary purports to have had a series of spiritual experiences of a felt relationship to the divinity, and these are recorded with considerable precision and narrative force in his annotated books. By structuring this exercise around extensive quotation of Connary’s own words, I hope to go some way toward bringing back to life a past reader and a remarkable book-centered devotion with some interesting mystico-theological nuance. In particular, the aim is to convey a sense of an idiosyncratic voice on the margins of history. Connary establishes his own language to capture what, for him, is the essence of devotional literacy and spiritual authenticity.

      A reader can assert himself as author, and Connary tells and recounts and provides a considerable extension of the book’s signifying power. This study examines aspects of nonprofessional authorship and says something more broadly about the range of opportunities provided by the material book for recording and communicating religious fervor and personal history. But it is necessary to confront the constructed nature of the evidence under investigation. Connary’s writing is conditioned by memory, yearning, and narration, and it is as notable for its intensity as for its careful rhetorical craftsmanship, which draws on metaphorical and quasi-mystical registers. One voice entirely dominates the material, holding and asserting interpretive power. It is a voice of unquestionable sincerity, yet also, we need to recognize, one that offers its univocal, idealized depiction of a redemptive reading discipline and seeks to disseminate a distinct language for epiphany and Christian eschatology.

      The following chapters shift the focus from a conventional understanding of the author and a perceived fixity of print toward a reader-oriented study of devotional and didactic writing. They explore in detail how books (always spelled in Connary’s notes with a capital B) are precious inscribed objects, and how the process of inscribing them becomes a form of partaking in the nature of the divine and a mode of prayer. Pursuing such ideas further means that we need to think about dimensions of presence, the sacred, redemption, affective and somatic reading experiences, epiphany, and deixis—dimensions that we are perhaps rather ill-equipped in the present intellectual climate to bring into our study of book history and the history of reading.39 It is a central claim of this study that such dimensions are crucial to our attempts to understand the power of physical objects to materialize belief and to reconstruct the actual uses, individual and social, of religious writing in print and manuscript culture.

       IRISH AMERICAN PRINT CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: A PRIVATE LIBRARY

      This Book was printed for me.

      —Thomas Connary, undated note on the title page of Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales

      This chapter provides an overview of the books in the library of Thomas Connary, purchased, read, and annotated by him in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The focus will be on him as a member of the Irish expatriate in America and, especially, on the underexplored part of American book history and reading history which is the Irish diaspora print culture. Chapter 2 examines Connary’s complex practices of book use, but first I want to consider what the contents of his library tell us about the type of reading material made available by Irish American book publishers catering to Irish expatriate communities.

      The surviving collection of books and papers amassed by this farmer from rural New Hampshire provides a particularly interesting perspective on the energetic publishing program through which a trickle of Irish Catholic book publications in the first decades of the nineteenth century became a veritable flood in the 1840s and ’50s and thereafter, emerging from the Irish Catholic printing centers in America such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. This was a print initiative preceded, and in large measure made possible, by a Protestant print and marketing revolution from the early years of the nineteenth century, in which Bible and religious tract societies became large-scale, nonprofit manufacturers and distributors of print. Endeavoring to reach every American with Protestant Bibles and didactic tract literature, this movement paved the way for the mass production of print in America through the use of the latest manufacturing technologies, especially stereotype printing.1

      Thomas Connary systematically acquired the products of early Irish and Catholic publishing houses in America in a way that was motivated by a sense of nostalgia for “Old Ireland” as much as by the perceived practical, catechetic, and devotional needs of the head of a larger household. While one should always exercise caution in claiming the representative nature of such personal collections, which are the products of individual tastes and the contingencies of availability, such caution may be particularly urgent here: the sheer number of books collected by Connary, of which just a smaller part can be surveyed here, might well have been outside the reach of his fellow Irish Americans of lesser means, and certainly of those with less determination.

      The library of Thomas Connary is characterized above all by its clear utilitarian function and orientation toward practical and devotional guidance within a domestic setting. It shows how mundane concerns of household management and a general active interest in history, politics, and geography blended with spiritual ambition and an interest in moral instruction to provide a rationale for the acquisition of books and other reading materials. There is little place for recreational reading material, by which we may understand publications indulged in for the sake of pleasure (including lighter popular fiction, but not exclusively) rather than moral or religious edification. We also find very little of the earliest pre-Famine body of Irish American writing, which is a particularly rich and resourceful literature of folklore, history, novels, poetry, comedy, and satire and has been expertly surveyed in Charles Fanning’s Irish Voice in America.2 Far more prevalent in Connary’s library is the Irish immigrant print output of the 1840s and ’50s—a uniquely American tradition of ethnic writing designed to guide the Irish in their new setting. This literature was often prone to humorless didacticism and a sentimental moralizing rhetoric, but it also offered real guidance and emotional appeal to many, especially as much of it sought to kindle a devotional Irish Catholicism.3

      The appendix provides a catalogue of the contents of Connary’s library, and it conveys an impression of the reading

Скачать книгу