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Books and Religious Devotion. Allan F. Westphall
Читать онлайн.Название Books and Religious Devotion
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780271065120
Автор произведения Allan F. Westphall
Серия Penn State Series in the History of the Book
Издательство Ingram
Perhaps, as can sometimes be the case with serendipitous discoveries, the thing found was the thing sought. A collection of books that preserve a consuming religious fervor and the remnants of an elaborately structured reading and writing program had presented itself to me. It was what I had sought, but from a place I had not foreseen. My discovery happened to coincide with burgeoning interdisciplinary research into the history of the book. An overwhelming recent interest in the social and material culture of the book and the history of reading had of course prepared me for the finding, and it influenced my decision to invest labor and some measure of identification to understand the phenomenon of Thomas Connary’s library. In the pages that follow, I hope to contribute to these areas of scholarship by offering an illuminating and meticulous chronicle of one man’s universe of books.
Parts of chapters 2 and 4 have appeared as articles, and I want to thank the journal editors for allowing me to use this material. “’Laboring in my Books’: A Religious Reader in Nineteenth Century New Hampshire” appeared in Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 13, no. 2 (2012): 185–204; “’I am here’: Reading Julian of Norwich in Nineteenth Century New England” appeared in The Mediaeval Journal 3, no. 2 (2013): 137–68.
I am most grateful to two anonymous readers for the Pennsylvania State University Press for particularly generous comments and guidance on the first draft of this book. Thanks also to colleagues at the Press for their hard work and faith in this project—James L. W. West III, Patrick Alexander, Laura Reed-Morrisson, and Robert Turchick.
Some parts of this material have been presented at seminars and colloquia in the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, and in the Schools of English at the Queen’s University of Belfast and the University of St. Andrews. I have benefited greatly from discussions with audiences in these places.
Finally, I thank my family—Katie Ruan, Lone Westphall, and Bent Westphall—for their unfailing help and encouragement.
Early in the morning on Tuesday, the seventh of January, 1890, Thomas Connary—an Irish immigrant farmer living in the town of Stratford, New Hampshire—sits down in his study to read in one of his most treasured books, the Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love by the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich. As Connary, who is now in his seventy-sixth year, recounts, he occasionally looks up from his book at “her picture fitted by myself over the window facing northerly in the room I am now using for reading and writing purposes.”1 As has been his routine for more than three decades, he inserts numerous notebook pages with religious meditations between the pages of Julian’s writing. Some of these handwritten pages show prayer and reflection emerging from his reading of Julian’s visionary accounts. The following statement, written in Connary’s somewhat idiosyncratic prose, allows us to reconstruct a specific reading situation, and it begins to convey the particular esteem that this devout farmer has for his religious literature.
Tuesday, early in the morning clear and dry, January 7, 1890, I am working in my book, next to Titlepage of Revelations of Mother Juliana in 214 pages, see her picture directly over the northerly picture now of the window in the room in which I am busy much of my time as I am sighting northerly, for purposes purely heavenly thank God. Mother Juliana was an Anchorite of Norwich: Who lived in the days of King Edward the Third, and published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields in 1864. The publishers are protestants. I have had the Book most of the time since it was published. . . . No glossary is required in the Book for my use—I understand the full force of the Divine blessed holy Heavenly words without explanation thank God. . . . Books however many, cannot be heavenly if God will not bless them, make them pure with His own heavenly graces endlessly continually always forever, so with money, so with the whole of earthly property. Thomas Connary
For Connary, reading Julian of Norwich alongside a wide range of spiritual and didactic texts signifies precious moments of privacy, emotional reward, and prayerful reflection. Far more than just acquiring and reading his religious literature, Connary invests significant labor in filling his volumes with a plethora of material, such as newspaper cuttings, religious images, poetry, and, most noticeably, handwritten pages of religious prayers and reflections as well as diary records of daily events and personal reminiscences. The augmented volumes are the result of years of laborious accumulation—a process that appears to have begun in the late 1860s and continued until shortly before Connary’s death in 1899.
These annotation practices and the manifold ways in which Thomas Connary interacts with books are the subject of detailed examination in this study. What can it mean to be inside one’s books, to participate in them, and to be shaped by them? The following chapters focus on the writings of an eccentric reader and book collector in order to investigate the passion and fervent piety that he pours into his books. Connary’s library allows us to explore the opportunities provided by the material book for structuring the practical, spiritual, and moral life of readers. His annotations offer ample evidence of how a book’s physical properties can participate in the imaginative and spiritual life of a reader: more than anything else, they show how books can become the material conduits for a deeply felt relationship to one’s neighbor as well as to the divinity. As this farmer-bibliophile works in his private room, he puts his books to many and varied uses, but the cumulative effect of his labors is to convert his library into a comprehensive proclamation of faith. In it, we find elaborate records of religious reading as an ingrained habit of everyday life, one existing alongside the routines of agricultural labor and the domestic duties of a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic living in New Hampshire.
Occasionally, when reading Julian of Norwich and many other books, Connary writes in the margins a brief yet pregnant comment: “I am here.” This, I will argue, is particularly ripe with significance. More than merely marking a specific juncture in his reading, it is the assertion of someone determined to inscribe himself into the experiences recounted in the book, to testify to their veracity, and, finally, to convert the printed book into a signed testimony of a particular intensity of religious devotion. For Connary, noting that “I am here” means to assert affinity and proximity with past authors and their writings in a way that is concrete and aesthetic as much as it is existential and ethical.
Connary provides us with some details of his early life in a note he inserts into his book The Council of the Vatican and the Events of the Time, printed in Boston in 1872:
March 25, in the year 1833, I left Castlemarket, my native home in Old Ireland, in the Province of Leinster, Kilkenny County, near Ballinakill in the Queen’s County, expecting to return to my native home in three months of time: when on the way I met a few people who were on the way to America, I accompanied them, and worked for Mr Josiah Bellows 2nd, and his family, in Lancaster, Coos County, New Hampshire in June that year, my home from that time to this day has been in the United States of America.2
Born in 1814, Connary was only nineteen years of age when he left Ireland. He was part of the early wave of Irish immigrants who came to the United States before the trauma of the Great Irish Famine and who brought with them overwhelmingly positive memories of Old Ireland. Intriguingly, the above record provides