Description
Book SynopsisExamines the book collection of Thomas Connary, a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic New England farmer, to reconstruct how Connary read and annotated his books. Reveals how books can structure a life of devotion and social participation, and presents an authentic, holistic view of one reader's interior life.
Trade Review“Allan Westphall brings together an extensive knowledge of Thomas Connary’s sources (his books), the scholarship directly and indirectly dealing with a reader’s interaction with his texts, and the old Irish and medieval sources of Connary’s Catholicism. This fresh, original study explores the significance of a reader’s text embellishments and examines how a farmer and ‘book keeper’ can integrate himself into his books—making them an extension of himself.”
—A. Franklin Parks,Frostburg State University
“Allan Westphall’s book is more than an exhaustive account of one reader reading. It is a welcome excavation of the ways in which a non-elite New Hampshire farmer lived his reading, physically manipulating his books to reflect and develop his beliefs and devotional practices. Westphall’s meticulous insights into the material dimension of reading illustrate the surprising ways the physical text has been used for religious self-fashioning.”
—Michael J. Everton,Simon Fraser University
“Allan Westphall has made quite a remarkable find: a late nineteenth-century Irish immigrant who, deep in Puritan New England, left ample traces of his reading of devotional texts, including Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Westphall unfolds the significance of this material through an exceptional range of inquiries into the Protestant publishers in Boston who printed Catholic devotional texts; into Irish immigrant life in New Hampshire; and into reading practices and the purpose, status, and value of marginal annotations. This study is richly diverse in its illuminations and a model of what the history of the book might contribute to social and religious history, as well as to our understanding of the mind of a reader whose visions led Protestant authorities to declare him insane. As our acquaintance with Thomas Connary deepens, we reflect on our own practices and experiences as readers, not all of which we might wish to confide to posterity. Connary has found in Allan Westphall a most ingenious and sympathetic interpreter of his marginalia and interleavings.”
—Charles Lock,University of Copenhagen
Table of ContentsPreface: A Discovery and Serendipitous Journeys
Introduction
Chapter 1: Irish American Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century: A Private Library
Epiphany: “Seeing very plainly”
Chapter 2: “Labouring in my Books:” Thomas Connary’s Book Enhancements
Epiphany: The Lamp
Chapter 3: Redemptive Reading in the Connary Household
Epiphany: The Road to Lancaster
Chapter 4: The Farmer’s Treasure: Thomas Connary Reading St. Francis of Sales and Julian
of Norwich
Epiphany: “No priest or bishop in this church but Himself alone”
Chapter 5: Book Keeping, Longing, and Besetment
Epilogue: Rome Uninvited
Appendix
Bibliography
