Читать книгу Books and Religious Devotion - Allan F. Westphall - Страница 8
ОглавлениеA 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 endeavors 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, a time when English Catholic scholars promoted a new spiritual energy 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, I received an email alert 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.
I read the description 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 additions, when all I wanted was a tidy copy of a familiar medieval text 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, the firm reassurance that the insertions did not obstruct the printed text, and the very moderate price of the book all betrayed the 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 the 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 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.) 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 “serendipity.” This idea captures the progressive questioning that has 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 deemphasize 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 my evolving understanding and appreciation of an acquired collection of annotated books.
Horace Walpole’s peculiar eighteenth-century coinage, “serendipity,” is derived from an ancient Persian tale and refers to a story about a journey.
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).1
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 and inference, the three princes reconstruct 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, detectivelike inference from signs.2 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.”3 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 seek insight of another kind.
The discovery of the collection of annotated books from Vermont manifestly belongs to this last category of serendipitous finding. I allowed myself to become serendipity-prone—to follow, as it were, the path of the princes of Serendip—by trusting an early intuition that the material that more or less dropped into my lap presented some measure of cultural and intellectual significance. Developing this discovery into a structured research project, employing the finding academically and sagaciously (to use Walpole’s term), meant to explain, theorize, categorize, and contextualize on the background of a serendipitous discovery. First, however, the process was one of sharing an experience with the original owner, of becoming intimate with the 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 motivations of his bookish labors, not so much a sympathy of either pity or approbation). Thomas Connary, the owner of these books, 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.
The books of this strange and ambitious reader reminded me, as a medievalist, of the cultural mobility of a tradition of medieval spiritual writing and the appeal it can exert on much later generations of readers. As I will examine in detail, Connary’s library contains a wealth of medieval spiritualia, and it is invariably the case that he inscribes his own voice alongside, often in dialogue with, those of past spiritual authorities. Here was found another, to me unexpected, dimension of the reception history of medieval devotional writings. From my research on medieval religious culture, I also knew that we have precious little to go by in terms of recovering past acts of reading and past reading programs, but this material presented a superfluity of traces of acts of reading from a reader who documented his responses to books and his methods for engaging with them to an extraordinary degree. Here was one of the comparatively rare cases of a comprehensive source material for studying the reading and annotation practices of an obscure, non-elite reader from the past. Although it is as complicated methodologically to reconstruct the processes and psychology of reading with this nineteenth-century American reader as it is with a religious reader in fifteenth-century England, the annotated books seemed to me to offer substantial insight into how books can structure the 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.
