Books and Religious Devotion

Preface: 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

“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