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       On Being Elsewhere: Inscribing Longing and Transcendence in the Spiritual Conferences of St. Francis of Sales

       The Spiritual Epiphany

       Reading Julian

       In Dialogue with Julian

       Finding Comfort in Julian: Reflections on Incorporation and Salvation

       “The Social Joys of Heaven” and the Problem of Contention

       EPIPHANY: “NO PRIEST OR BISHOP IN THIS CHURCH BUT HIMSELF ALONE”

       5 BOOK KEEPING, LONGING, AND BESETMENT

       In a Room of His Own: Book Enhancement and Besetment

       “We Must Never Be Too Full of Words”: Preaching in Stratford

       Madness in the Books

       Vessels of Nostalgia

       Peace and Communality

       EPILOGUE: ROME UNVISITED

       Appendix: The Contents of Thomas Connary’s Library

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

       1 St. Francis of Sales, Spiritual Conferences, 80–81

       2 Kinane, The Dove of the Tabernacle, title page

       3 Lewis [Louis of Granada], The Sinner’s Guide, title page

       4 The Lives of Eminent Saints, 142–43

       5 Chardon, Memoirs of a Guardian Angel, 24–25

       6 Haskins, Travels in England, France, Italy, and Ireland, advertisements

       7 St. Francis of Sales, Spiritual Conferences, 1

       8 Kinane, The Dove of the Tabernacle, 32–33

       9 Newman, Discourses, verso of title page

       10 St. Francis of Sales, Spiritual Conferences, verso of title page

       11 Newman, Discourses, 1

       12 Leatherman, Elements of Moral Science, 16–17

       13 Pope, The Council of the Vatican, iii

       14 Newman, Discourses, 16–17

       15 Chardon, Memoirs of a Guardian Angel, iii

       16 Balmes, Fundamental Philosophy, 2:331–32

       17 The Lives of Eminent Saints, 143

       18 Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, 224–25

       19 Kinane, The Dove of the Tabernacle, 210–11

       20 Pope, Council of the Vatican, 90

       21 Balmes, Fundamental Philosophy, 1:xvi–1

       22 Kinane, The Dove of the Tabernacle, 316–17

       23 Philippe, The Six Hundred Thousand Combatants, 74

       24 O’Leary, History of the Bible, verso of title page

       25 St. Francis of Sales, Spiritual Conferences, title page

       26 Julian of Norwich, Revelations, title page

       27 Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, front flyleaf

       28 St. Francis of Sales, Spiritual Conferences, 55

       29 Postcard of the New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane, Concord, ca. 1910

       30 Postcard of a scene in the New Hampshire Asylum grounds, Concord, ca. 1910

       31 Pope, The Council of the Vatican, 214

       32 Balmes, Fundamental Philosophy, 2:328–29

       33 Balmes, Fundamental Philosophy, 2:124–25

       34 Lewis [Louis of Granada], The Sinner’s Guide, end pastedown

PREFACE

       A Discovery and Serendipitous Journeys

      The seeds of this research project lie in the collector’s instinct. Having spent years researching the religious writing and devotional culture of the Middle Ages, I developed an additional interest in collecting early printed editions of medieval religious and mystical writers, primarily from England. These small-scale collecting endeavors concentrated on the writings of the so-called Middle English mystics, including Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, writers active in the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth. Many of these early texts were made available in print in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when English Catholic scholars promoted a new spiritual energy and did much to revive interest in England’s religious past. I had long desired a scarce nineteenth-century American edition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love printed by the Boston printers Ticknor and Fields in 1864. I had placed the book on a “wants list” with one of the biggest online marketplaces for rare and used books, and in the spring of 2008, I received an email alert that the book was available from an American bookseller in the small town of Bridgewater, Vermont. Part of the online book description ran as follows:

      The contemporary binding is firm. However, the previous owner of the book dating to the 1870s and 80s has inserted handwritten notes of a religious theme into the book and pasted numerous newspaper clippings onto blank areas. These clippings, however, do not affect any of the original text and make for some interesting reading of that time.

      I read the description with a mixture of curiosity and mild annoyance: curiosity, of course, about what a nineteenth-century reader (presumably American) would import into a copy of Julian’s Revelations and what the “interesting reading” might be, but also some disappointment that the book came with such invasive readerly additions, when all I wanted was a tidy copy of a familiar medieval text printed in the United States at the time of the Civil War. Conceivably, the bookseller thought along similar lines: the repeated “however” in the description, the firm reassurance that the insertions did not obstruct the printed text, and the very moderate price of the book all betrayed the assumption (shared by me) that collectors of antiquarian books prefer the pristine, unblemished copy.

      What arrived in the mail from Vermont intrigued me. The copy of Julian’s Revelations once belonged to an Irish immigrant to the United States, and this individual, clearly a Catholic of strong religious devotion, had converted the book into a repository of miscellaneous objects, including several newspaper articles, some private letters, and extensive handwritten religious reflections of a didactic and rather idiosyncratic nature. An email exchange with the seller ensued, and within a year I had purchased more than thirty volumes from the same collection, all containing the same Irish American owner’s imports and annotations. The seller could reveal little about the provenance of the collection: it was bought from an estate sale in Vermont, and the books “were all packed into a trunk and had obviously been there for some years.” The truth of the latter observation was confirmed by the layer of fungal growth found on several of the book covers and by the fact that the books were inhabited

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