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a discernable, even symbiotic, association between text and readers’ markings. Book annotation can endorse, facilitate reference, function as a mnemonic aid, or talk back critically to the text and its author, but it is always understood to respond directly and often discursively to the text at hand. In Jackson’s words, “the essential and defining character of the marginal note throughout its history is that it is a responsive kind of writing permanently anchored to preexisting written words.”¹⁷

      This study adds to the valuable work carried out by Jackson, Sherman, and others, and it follows Sherman in preferring terms other than “reading” and “marginalia.” In the books under consideration here, annotated and enhanced by Thomas Connary, we find remnants of past reading and we come across extensive marginal annotation, but these form only part of a much broader spectrum of activities performed with and around books. Sherman’s consideration of hybrid book forms that merge print and manuscript, public and private, production and consumption are of particular relevance to my study of one book user who values books as much for the text they contain as for their capacity to function as a storehouse for miscellaneous items.¹⁸ The personalized library of Thomas Connary allows us to add further complexity to the reality of marginalia and book use and to see markings in books take a far greater diversity of forms than so far appreciated. His books constitute a complex record of use and reader response; the same material shows reading and book marking as structured, planned activities, but also as springing up spontaneously and as extravagantly unsystematic. Often this material defies the taxonomies developed by Jackson and Sherman and complicates their assumptions about writing in books as conventionalized, argumentative, corrective, or professional. Furthermore, Connary’s writing in books often cannot be said to be directly responsive to the print in any clear sense (i.e., engaging directly or argumentatively with the ideas in a text), although in some cases it obviously is. Even less can it be understood in any straightforward way in terms of the distinction between public and private that is integral to Jackson’s characterization of the genre of marginalia.

      For Connary, the use of books is one of co-creation, in which the object is augmented and embellished as a precious devotional memorial. Interleavings (i.e., clusters of densely written notebook pages inserted between the pages of print), instead of marginal annotation, are far more conspicuous features of Connary’s labors in books. For more than three decades, he performs the painstaking task of copious interleaving, inserting himself into books piously, prayerfully, and autobiographically.

      It is inevitable that we resort to terms such as “eccentric” and “idiosyncratic” to convey the striking nature of the material evidence under consideration here. We might do well to remind ourselves of what Anthony Grafton refers to as the “obstinate, irreducible individualism” of the reader, and Jackson’s observation that the collective profile of past readers “can only be a group portrait of individuals.”¹⁹ Indeed, when focusing on such singular evidence and conducting, as I shall do here, a detailed forensic exercise in order to partly reconstruct a reading history and a pattern of use, we should acknowledge that most conjectures about the use of books and past events of reading are epistemologically uncertain, with a somewhat solipsistic side to them. But, on the other hand, we should not be overly reluctant or embarrassed to use whatever material remains we may come across to assist us in the important endeavor of reconstructing past encounters with, and perceptions of, books. When we examine the archive of Connary’s books and documents we find material that is irreducibly individualistic and eccentric, but also understood by the owner to have profound social implications. In reading and book collecting we find welcome opportunities for silence and introversion, but books can also prepare a reader for social interaction, assist in the management of a household, and reinforce social bonds. The discipline that Thomas Connary refers to as his “Book keeping” always takes place within a larger continuum of activities that situate him in public life and in networks of social and domestic responsibility.

      The following chapters examine not only routines and methods of book collecting but also the complex motivations and the historical circumstances that underlie the use of books. By analyzing Thomas Connary’s writing and annotation habits in depth, and regarding these as always engaged in a form of intertextual dialogue with the contents of his books, we can gain new insights into the religious culture of New England Catholicism, religious tension and tolerance, the publishing of religious literature, and the capacity of such literature to guide religious desire, social activity, and moral discipline. Such an approach means to follow Jackson, Sherman, and others in moving beyond one dominant tendency in current book history research that examines books owned, purchased, or borrowed as recoverable and the source for quantifiable information, while marginalizing the book read as private and irrecoverable. Indeed, this study will foreground the physical remains of past acts of reading in order to examine creative uses and appropriations of the book object. The aim is to offer an interpretive account of a complex process that produces an enhanced aesthetic around the material artifact of the book and explores its phenomenal depth.

      Accounting for this process of creative book alteration leads one naturally to the term “appropriation.” Jackson, for example, refers to the production of marginalia as “an act of self-assertive appropriation,” and, as Matthew Brown notes, the term has become a dominant critical concept in readership studies, capturing more than any other a reigning paradigm:

      Readership history rightly suggests that readers in the past can be posited as neither fully dominated by the culture of a ruling elite nor fully free to make a text mean anything they want it to mean. A conceptual solution to this problem has been to cast reading as an act of appropriation. Readers are hemmed in by genres and traditions, and within such controlled contexts—even in a pious culture of humility and rote repetition—they actively appropriate textual matter. . . . Given this dialectic of freedom and control, of play and constraint, readership historians advocate, when turning to individual readers, a sensitivity to conscious uses and appropriations as means to measure the creative, critical, or submissive habits of readers.²⁰

      It is quite useful to see Connary’s interaction with his books as a process of appropriation, and as a particularly creative mode of appropriation at that. But, like Brown, I wish to use the term “appropriation” guardedly, especially when this is taken, as it often is, to suggest the reader’s subversive or consciously aggressive and transgressive approach to the book and reading. In his groundbreaking study of the rituals of reading among theocentric Puritans in early New England, Brown demonstrates in exemplary fashion how the concept of the reader’s appropriation of textual matter can be nuanced through an analysis sensitive to historical, geographical, and theological factors.²¹ In this study I take a similar path by devoting attention to the cultural, bibliographical, and theological contexts that surround Connary’s archive of annotated books. Ultimately, the term “appropriation,” as a single critical term, cannot capture the range of highly personal, often contradictory, modes of Connary’s interactions with his books. Probably no one single term can do justice to the numerous ways in which the book artifact can function crucially, and signify diversely, within the rhythms and reiterations of spiritual life.

      This examination of Thomas Connary’s book enhancements is centrally concerned with four subjects: reading, paratext, obsession, and epiphany. In the remainder of this introduction, I briefly introduce my approach to these subjects and outline a plan of the argument.

Reading

      I have already stated my preference for the term “book use” over “reading”: in some cases reading can take second place to other forms of interaction with the book, some of which may give little heed, or none at all, to the contents of the printed text. This is certainly true in Connary’s case, but he also reveals much about himself as a reader and about the flexibility and development of his reading processes. In the chapters that follow, we look first at what kinds of books he reads before proceeding to consider the question of how he reads and enhances his books. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the contents of Connary’s library and examines the supply end of Irish American book production that catered to the practical needs and ardent devotional Catholicism of the post-Famine

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