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 his books remind me of a reader in late medieval England, Margery Kempe (ca. 1379–ca. 1439)—somewhat of an apparition in Middle English religious literature, yet another chance survival to our time, and, like Connary, a lay reader of extraordinary eccentricity and determination.4 Two avid readers who also create narratives, both Connary and Kempe bring idiosyncratic propensities to acts of reading, insisting on self-expression with a public dimension. Their writings make use of calculated rhetorical maneuvers and remind us that readers’ documents are themselves texts to be interpreted. Ultimately, both individuals may serve as a reminder that one person’s inspired mystic is another person’s madman!
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
