Connary on his love of books and the power of books to function as religious icons. Note from 1890 inserted in Julian of Norwich, Divine Revelations (Boston, 1864)

I have many Books and cannot think that I can ever be really happy anywhere without them: you will see that I speak of happiness now in this small paper, and when I speak of happiness in it, I speak of eternal everlasting heavenly happiness alone in it. For this one business purpose alone I love my Books, and for no other business purpose, from time I was born to this Wednesday February 12, 1890, I have loved my Books well only for the power which they give to me to have a heavenly home with our divine Creator continually for unending eternity. This way alone of Book keeping is God’s way to prosperity and heavenly happiness unending.

Extract from

Books and Religious Devotion: The Redemptive Reading of an Irishman in Nineteenth Century New England

(thanks to Pennsylvania State University Press for their permission to publish from my recently published monograph on this website)

Preface: A Discovery and Serendipitous Journeys

The seeds of this research project lie in the collector’s instinct. Having spent years researching the religious writing and devotional culture of the Middle Ages, I developed an additional interest in collecting early printed editions of medieval religious and mystical writers, primarily from England. These small-scale collecting endeavours concentrated on the writings of the so-called Middle English mystics, including Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, writers active in the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth. Many of these early texts were made available in print in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when English Catholic scholars promoted a new energy of spirituality and did much to revive interest in England’s religious past. I had long desired a scarce nineteenth-century American edition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love printed by the Boston printers Ticknor and Fields in 1864. I had placed the book on a wants list with one of the biggest online marketplaces for rare and used books, and in the spring of 2008 an email alert was received that the book was available from an American bookseller in the small town of Bridgewater, Vermont. Part of the online book description ran as follows:

The contemporary binding is firm. However, the previous owner of the book dating to the 1870s and 80s has inserted handwritten notes of a religious theme into the book and pasted numerous newspaper clippings onto blank areas. These clippings, however, do not affect any of the original text and make for some interesting reading of that time.

This was read with a mixture of curiosity and mild annoyance: curiosity of course about what a nineteenth-century reader (presumably American) would import into a copy of Julian’s Revelations and what the “interesting reading” might be, but also some disappointment that the book came with such invasive readerly addition when all I wanted was a tidy copy of a medieval text familiarly known to myself printed in the United States at the time of the Civil War. Conceivably, the bookseller thought along similar lines: the repeated “however” in the description above, the firm reassurance that the insertions do not obstruct the printed text, and the very moderate price of the book all betrayed some assumption (shared by me) that collectors of antiquarian books prefer the pristine, unblemished copy.

What arrived in the mail from Vermont intrigued me. The copy of Julian’s Revelations once belonged to an Irish immigrant to the United States, and this individual, clearly a Catholic of strong religious devotion, had converted the book into a repository of miscellaneous objects, including several newspaper articles, some private letters, and extensive handwritten religious reflections of a didactic and rather idiosyncratic nature. An email exchange with the seller ensued, and within a year I had purchased more than thirty volumes from the same collection, all containing the same Irish-American owner’s imports and annotations. The seller could reveal little about the provenance of the collection: it was bought from an estate sale in Vermont, and the books “were all packed into a trunk and had obviously been there for some years.” The truth of this latter observation was confirmed by the layer of fungal growth found on several of the book covers and by the fact that the books were inhabited by a thriving colony of minuscule book-feeding insects (probably the so-called booklouse of the psocoptera order) that greeted me whenever a book was opened, but which then sought refuge behind the spine to feed on the paste used inside the binding). Moreover, according to the bookseller, several volumes from the same estate had already been acquired by other buyers and collectors. I was provided with the relevant titles, but I never had the opportunity to examine these “lost” books myself (the appendix lists the full range of titles). It became clear early on that something had to be done with this material, which arrived in several installments over an extended period from my contact in Vermont. This study is an attempt to make sense of the phenomenon that was presented to me in this way.

If any term characterizes the inception of this project, and the trajectory of curiosity-driven research that was to follow, it must be that of serendipity. This idea captures the progressive questioning that advanced this project, leading into what was for me unfamiliar and unexpected research territories, such as the Irish diaspora, nineteenth-century Irish-American print culture, the religious culture of New England, the local history of Coös County in New Hampshire, and the history of psychiatry in North America. There may be a tendency today to de-emphasize the significance of serendipity in academia (although we continue to cultivate myths of chance discoveries in science and other areas), but in this study the idea has to be foregrounded. What follows, charts a serendipitous journey and the evolving understanding and appreciation of an acquired collection of annotated books.

Derived from an ancient Persian tale, Horace Walpole’s peculiar eighteenth-century coinage, “serendipity,” refers to a story about a journey. In the words of Walpole:

I once read a silly fairy tale, called the three Princes of Serendip [a medieval Persian name for Sri Lanka]: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right … (you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description).

There can be no doubt that when Walpole coined his curious neologism he had in mind the serendipitous discovery of the Sherlock Holmesian type: the three princes, sent out by their father King Jafer of Serendip to gain the practical experience that would complement their deep book learning, use their keen powers of observation to make subtle inferences from clues and traces which to others may go unnoticed or appear trivial. Thus employing skills in detection, the three princes provide inferential reconstruction about that which remains unseen.

With time, the meaning of the term “serendipity” has broadened to describe processes of discovery beyond the methodology of the subtle, detective-like inference from signs.  We might find patterns of serendipity in planned discoveries and in the systematic investigation of the research project, in which one may set out in search of something without knowing exactly what will be found. We may dip into the archives to examine a particular corpus of material, conducting directed research while more or less expecting to find the unexpected: “systematic, directed (re)search and serendipity do not exclude each other, but conversely, they complement and reinforce each other.”  Another form altogether of discovery by serendipity is the happy accident in which something is found but unsought. This is the chance discovery – inadvertent, unanticipated, fortuitous – happening when we do not look for it, or are in search of insight of another kind.

The discovery of annotated books that is the subject of this study is manifestly of this last category of serendipitous finding. It also reflects Walpole’s understanding that “no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description.” The decision to allow myself to become serendipity-prone – to follow, as it were, the path of the princes of Serendip – meant to trust an early intuition that the material that more or less dropped into my lap presented some measure of cultural and intellectual significance. It meant also letting the chance discovery develop into a structured research project: to employ the finding academically and sagaciously (to use Walpole’s term), meant to explain, argue, theorize, categorize, and contextualize on the background of a serendipitous discovery. First and foremost, however, the process was one of sharing an experience with the original owner of becoming intimate with books and, through them, with the owner’s pious and earnest voice. These books, which had lain dormant for decades, preserve traces of past passion and sincerity, and what follows is in part an attempt to reawaken the voice of a past reader and to mobilize a measure of sympathy with him (by which I understand a sympathy of comprehension that seeks to understand the motivation for his bookish labours, not so much a sympathy of either pity or approbation). The name of this individual is Thomas Connary and he emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1833 at the age of nineteen. In fact, like any good serendipitist, Connary himself ventured forth alone in a manner inadvertent and fortuitous. As will be clear in what follows, he embarked on an unplanned journey across the Atlantic by an unanticipated route; he went where chance brought him, assisted by people he did not know well.