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booklouse of the Psocoptera order) that greeted me whenever a book was opened but then sought refuge behind the spine to feed on the paste used inside the binding. Moreover, according to the bookseller, several volumes from the same estate had already been acquired by other buyers and collectors. I was provided with the relevant titles, but I never had the opportunity to examine these “lost” books myself. (The appendix lists the full range of titles.) This study is an attempt to make sense of the phenomenon that was presented to me in this way.

      If any term characterizes the inception of this project—and the trajectory of curiosity-driven research that was to follow—it must be “serendipity.” This idea captures the progressive questioning that has advanced this project, leading into what was for me unfamiliar and unexpected research territories, such as the Irish diaspora, nineteenth-century Irish American print culture, the religious culture of New England, the local history of Coös County in New Hampshire, and the history of psychiatry in North America. There may be a tendency today to deemphasize the significance of serendipity in academia (although we continue to cultivate myths of chance discoveries in science and other areas), but in this study, the idea has to be foregrounded. What follows charts a serendipitous journey and my evolving understanding and appreciation of an acquired collection of annotated books.

      Horace Walpole’s peculiar eighteenth-century coinage, “serendipity,” is derived from an ancient Persian tale and refers to a story about a journey.

      I once read a silly fairy tale, called the three Princes of Serendip [a medieval Persian name for Sri Lanka]: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right . . . (you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description).¹

      There can be no doubt that when Walpole coined his curious neologism, he had in mind the serendipitous discovery of the Sherlock Holmesian type: the three princes, sent out by their father King Jafer of Serendip to gain the practical experience that would complement their deep book learning, use their keen powers of observation to make subtle inferences from clues and traces which to others may go unnoticed or appear trivial. Thus employing skills in detection and inference, the three princes reconstruct that which remains unseen.

      With time, the meaning of the term “serendipity” has broadened to describe processes of discovery beyond the methodology of the subtle, detectivelike inference from signs.² We might find patterns of serendipity in planned discoveries and in the systematic investigation of the research project, in which one may set out in search of something without knowing exactly what will be found. We may dip into the archives to examine a particular corpus of material, conducting directed research while more or less expecting to find the unexpected: “systematic, directed (re)search and serendipity do not exclude each other, but conversely, they complement and reinforce each other.”³ Another form altogether of discovery by serendipity is the happy accident in which something is found but unsought. This is the chance discovery—inadvertent, unanticipated, fortuitous—happening when we do not look for it or seek insight of another kind.

      The discovery of the collection of annotated books from Vermont manifestly belongs to this last category of serendipitous finding. I allowed myself to become serendipity-prone—to follow, as it were, the path of the princes of Serendip—by trusting an early intuition that the material that more or less dropped into my lap presented some measure of cultural and intellectual significance. Developing this discovery into a structured research project, employing the finding academically and sagaciously (to use Walpole’s term), meant to explain, theorize, categorize, and contextualize on the background of a serendipitous discovery. First, however, the process was one of sharing an experience with the original owner, of becoming intimate with the books and, through them, with the owner’s pious and earnest voice. These books, which had lain dormant for decades, preserve traces of past passion and sincerity, and what follows is in part an attempt to reawaken the voice of a past reader and to mobilize a measure of sympathy with him (by which I understand a sympathy of comprehension that seeks to understand the motivations of his bookish labors, not so much a sympathy of either pity or approbation). Thomas Connary, the owner of these books, emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1833 at the age of nineteen. In fact, like any good serendipitist, Connary himself ventured forth alone in a manner inadvertent and fortuitous. As will be clear in what follows, he embarked on an unplanned journey across the Atlantic by an unanticipated route; he went where chance brought him, assisted by people he did not know well.

      The books of this strange and ambitious reader reminded me, as a medievalist, of the cultural mobility of a tradition of medieval spiritual writing and the appeal it can exert on much later generations of readers. As I will examine in detail, Connary’s library contains a wealth of medieval spiritualia, and it is invariably the case that he inscribes his own voice alongside, often in dialogue with, those of past spiritual authorities. Here was found another, to me unexpected, dimension of the reception history of medieval devotional writings. From my research on medieval religious culture, I also knew that we have precious little to go by in terms of recovering past acts of reading and past reading programs, but this material presented a superfluity of traces of acts of reading from a reader who documented his responses to books and his methods for engaging with them to an extraordinary degree. Here was one of the comparatively rare cases of a comprehensive source material for studying the reading and annotation practices of an obscure, non-elite reader from the past. Although it is as complicated methodologically to reconstruct the processes and psychology of reading with this nineteenth-century American reader as it is with a religious reader in fifteenth-century England, the annotated books seemed to me to offer substantial insight into how books can structure the religious experience and devotional regimens of an actual reader. In particular, they told me something new about how books can be adapted in myriad creative ways to structures of belief and religious praxis in a household.

      In Connary’s collection, I found later developments of recognizable medieval forms of religious books. Connary’s handwritten notes, for instance, captured reiterated routines of reading and reflection resembling the book of hours—that best seller of the Middle Ages—which structured people’s daily religious practices with its conventionalized medley of texts, prayers, psalms, and interplay of textual and pictorial components. Connary also imported numerous and diverse items into his books, echoing the late medieval devotional miscellany, a popular form of textual anthology compiled from miscellaneous sources, often a product of the tastes of an individual compiler and used by lay readers for personal religious guidance. Moreover, the way Connary’s annotated volumes became carriers of relationship, reinforcing social and familial bonds with injunctions to shared prayer, paralleled the medieval “common-profit” book that circulated in small devout reading circles, often carrying injunctions to pray on the behalf of others (such as a book’s previous owners or its donor). As I worked with Connary’s collection, such shared understanding of books across temporal and cultural removes presented itself with increasing clarity. My approach became less bound by disciplinary or chronological considerations, by any strict division between modern and premodern or between print and manuscript textual cultures. What came to interest me more was the complex material culture of the book artifact—specifically, the book’s capacity to elicit passion and religious affect, to reinforce patterns of friendship and kinship, to help structure a life of devotion, and to preserve traces of past acts of reading and reflection.

      Thomas Connary’s identity as a devout Irish American Catholic was unusually and intimately bound up with books, and he insists on and explores the symbolic and iconic depth of the book’s materiality. For him, the book object can be imbued with spiritual and salvific power by a God who is himself understood as a “Book,” containing all wisdom and all moral directive. Again, such notions are not foreign to a medievalist familiar with the ubiquitous image of the book of God’s creation and with scores of religious texts requesting that readers meditate on Christ’s crucified body as a book, his white skin signifying the manuscript parchment; his blood, the ink; and the five wounds, the vowels of the text. More than anything, Connary’s elaborate and spiritually motivated enhancements of

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