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

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studies of readers’ markings in books).28

      This study argues that Genette’s survey, which was never intended to be exhaustive nor directly concerned with development and historical context, can usefully be broadened to involve a broader range of phenomena that are in no direct sense authorial or editorial.29 Paratext can perform other functions than to ensure that a text is read “correctly” according to the author’s intention. It can include the co-creativity of the reader and those elements (sometimes highly distinct) inserted by the reader that impact and shape the reading experience and the full experience of the book. As Peter Stallybrass remarks, “if paratexts make readers, so readers both negotiate paratexts and make new ones.”30

      Thomas Connary is a reader who is highly responsive to the paratext of his books and who demonstrates extraordinary creativity in inserting his own paratextual framing. He fills the margins and the blank front- and endpapers with his own extensive writing; he comments on the author, publisher, printer, typography, book format, the year and place of publication, book binding, and number of pages; and he draws attention in various ways to prefaces, dedications, imprints, lists of contents, plates, and frontispieces. Furthermore, the very nature of the book medium encourages him to produce a voluminous paratextual expansion that is essentially a process of reconstructing the book through the addition of his own materials and written guidelines for reading. In the subsequent chapters, I refer to this more broadly as a process of book enhancement. Chapters 2 and 3 profile Connary’s various annotations and book enhancement practices, and they examine the self-styled paratextual apparatus that he layers in books to guide his own reading and that of others. Paratexts proliferate in these enhanced books, and their relation to main text is one of adjacency and collaboration. They take the form of, for example, handwritten dedications and rededications, reading directives, and exhortations, in addition to an elaborate visual paratext consisting of decorative embellishment, framing and dividing lines, and imported plates and illustrations.31

      All of these paratextual devices work to orchestrate reception and reading practices. They also make possible a multidimensional use of books in which reading directives and the highlighting of passages point to various points of entry into text and facilitate a dynamic navigation of books in which the boundary between text and paratext becomes indistinct. The reader’s inserted paratext is the trace of another authority who proposes a new way of processing, ordering, and prioritizing text. This acquires further significance when the owner assumes shared uses of books, intending annotation as paratext to become an integral part of the medium and to determine the experience and actions of subsequent readers. This is the type of socially oriented peritexts characterized by Jason Scott-Warren: “Prompted neither by the author nor by the publisher, these are ’accompanying productions’ which aim to influence how a copy of the text will be interpreted by the readers who will later share, or borrow, or buy, or steal, or inherit it. . . . they create a frame for future readers of that volume.”32

      Chapter 3 addresses in detail the social paratext of Connary’s books—a particularly performative dimension of the paratext where we find him addressing his family with dedications, reassurances, and directions.33 This part examines Connary’s attempts to influence the reading activity of his closest social circle, and it extends Genette’s idea of the epitext by suggesting that kinship can assert itself as an important part of the social epitext of annotated books: the affection for those closest of kin can be part of the exterior context through which a book is mediated to a reader, and it may become a determining factor in ensuring or constructing a proper reception. The books examined here are rooted in the domestic sphere and inscribed with paternal affection and a shared hope of redemption. When we consider the epitext of Connary’s books and the context of the reading situation in a household, we see how closely texts, spaces, and relationships can interpenetrate.

      In the following, I deal mostly with evidence internal to the book, using the forensic bibliographic exercise to provide an account of Connary’s book enhancements and reading habits. But aspects of social context and the external epitext that structure the reading experience and enrich its meaning need to figure prominently as well. Among these are lineage and kinship, Irish identity and the experience of emigration, the location of reading and the spatial arrangement of the reading room, and, finally but most overwhelmingly, Irish Catholic devotion. This factor of devotion becomes the overarching context and catalyst for the material enhancements preserved in the form of inserted correspondence, exhortation, and prayers. Devotion is the epitext—both private and social—which structures the mental world of a reader and which his volumes are made to incorporate.

      The Connary collection of annotated books immediately confirms the current scholarly orthodoxy that reading is not a passively receptive mode of consumption but co-creative, and it supports a widespread perception—expressed, for instance, by Adrian Johns in The Nature of the Book—that “an apparently authoritative text, however ’fixed,’ could not compel uniformity in the cultures of its reception. In practice, rather the reverse seems to have happened.”34 This is a study of a reader with considerable agency, and, like other studies of enterprising readers, it can provide nuance and challenge to general or statistical assessments of reading. Moreover, it allows us to understand aspects of readerly intensity and eccentricity in specific reception contexts and acts of reading.35

      I have already offered commentary on the inescapable idiosyncrasy and uniqueness that characterize any systematic annotator of books. But with Connary we move further into a territory of eccentricity and even obsessive behavior. In her book Marginalia, Jackson dedicates a chapter to “fanatic” readers who establish special relationships with particular books that become “dangerously emotional,” where the forms of interaction with particular volumes become, in her words, “manifestly over the top.”36 What is not always certain, though, is wherein fanaticism resides for Jackson and precisely how her case studies “define the outer limits of common usage.”37 Among her examples are three kinds of hybrid book forms: the commonplace book, which serves as a personal “filing system” with material culled from diverse sources; the “extra-illustrated” book, into which readers import decorative materials such as prints and magazine clippings; and, finally, treasured Bibles, which “[attract] supplementary materials, almost as an act of worship, certainly in a spirit of reverence.”38 What appears to be the common denominator for these kinds of volumes is that readers apply to them a particular measure of system and enthusiasm. With Thomas Connary, on the other hand, we abandon routine conventionality and the somewhat eccentric to observe a proper fanatic at work.

      The final chapter of this study examines the association that can sometimes exist between book annotation and obsession. We enter the realm of the personalized and obsessive to study a reader whose confrontation and collaboration with books appears compulsive at times. For Connary, the prodigious expansion of his books is the material effect of a bibliolatrous obsession and a desire to cling to words and pious proclamations. Pursuing these ideas further brings us into a discussion of issues of psychopathology and mental distress and an exploration of how the enhanced, inscribed book may function as a vessel for nostalgia, personal retrospection, and the retrieval of traumatic memories. Furthermore, by drawing on sources such as U.S. census records and nineteenth-century psychiatric manuals, we are able to understand something about Connary’s association with madness in the latter part of his life, when he increasingly came to feel the tenuous nature of physical and mental equilibrium.

      Studying Thomas Connary’s book use reveals inscrutable eccentricity and a reader for whom the tangible presence of annotated books can alleviate mental afflictions. This is a relationship with books rooted in substance and physical instantiation, as enlarged volumes are being felt, handled, and experienced in routine sessions. But it is also a relationship based on the idea—one not uncommon and with incalculable manifestations through the ages—that books possess redemptive power and are worthy of important ritualized activity.

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