My first foray into organizing and working through my research has yielded an unexpected wider set of linkages between the Dublin Catholic printers and a transatlantic context...

The results are a good example of how research can be taken in a new direction due to an unforeseen coincidence. A call for papers from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies for a conference on the Irish-American Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey (1760-1839), brought to my attention by a colleague, prompted me to look into whether this Irish expatriate's path had crossed with any of the Catholic printers I had been investigating. As it turns out, Carey had indeed served as an apprentice amidst many of the bookbinders and booksellers whose devotional printing I had been tracing (my old standby reference, the historian Thomas Wall, had mentioned Carey many times in his 1958 study, but I hadn't been looking for such information when I first encountered this book seven years ago). Carey's master, Thomas McDonnel, was a colleague of Patrick Wogan and a number of the key Catholic printers of the 1780s and 1790s, while Carey himself was a friend of Patrick Byrne who later joined him in Philadelphia. Many of these printers shared connections to the United Irishmen in the 1790s.

As a result, this fortuitous turn of events has not only added a new American dimension to this investigation of devotional printing, but also prompted me to put together my first research results in a formal paper. I will be presenting this Carey dimension to the Dublin print world at the end of October at the McNeil Center's "Worlds of Mathew Carey" Conference.

As long as the page is active, a link to the paper can be found here.

Among the largest collections of 18th- and 19th-century linguistic corpora, as I've recently learned, is the library amassed by none other than Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813-1891), a nephew of Napoleon I.

One of Lucien Bonaparte's sons, Louis Lucien was born in England and educated in Italy. He held political office under the Second Republic and Second Empire before returning to England in the 1850s to dedicate himself to a full-time professional career in linguistic science. Over the next four decades Bonaparte managed to assemble a collection of over 13,500 publications (as far as I know, most of them were published materials rather than manuscripts) in as many of the world's languages as possible. Bonaparte, like a relatively small number of linguists of the time, was far more concerned with contemporary languages--and especially the study of dialects--than with classical writing. Aside from his collecting, he is most known for his systematic approach to Basque and its dialects, as this exhibit at the British Library reveals.

Taking stock of this huge collecting endeavor, one is immediately struck by the ways in which Bonaparte's approach to this project was so obviously fitting of the scientific ethos of the 19th century. Consider the description provided by Victor Collins, who took on the task of cataloging Bonaparte's books in 1894, of this particular bibliophile's method:

     "Every catalogue of importance came to his hand, so that there was not a book
     in the market but he knew of it. He valued money only as a means of obtaining
     books, being lavish in his expenditure on them in the time of his prosperity,
     and sometimes actually depriving himself of the bare necessaries of life in
     order to secure a rare work when the fall of the Empire had considerably
     circumscribed his means.
     During his travels he visited every bookseller of note; he entered every shop
     where he saw books exposed for sale; he never left any means in his power
     unemployed to secure a work he fancied. A record of his travels might almost
     be drawn up from the entries he made in his purchases as to where and when
     he acquired them. In judging his library it must be remembered that his one
     object in book-collecting was linguistic; he valued a specifimen of a South
     Pacific dialect, hitherto unrepresented in his library more highly than a rare
     edition of the classics; and, if a new langauge or dialect came to his
     knowledge, he had no peace of mind until he had secured a specimen for
     himself." (from Collins, Attempt at a Catalogue, 1894, p. v)

This brings to mind the Victorian "gentleman scientist," of course--the favored pursuit of a number of educated indviduals of the time whose constant search for "specimens" (whether insects, plants, humans--sadly--or, in this case, languages) provided the basis for the major museum collections of the time.  Such endeavors are looked upon with mixed feelings among historians today: on one hand, their one-dimensional concentration on gathering specimens helped form a basis for modern scientific classifications schemes and comparative understanding of the natural world; on the other hand, this collecting was thoroughly saturated with troubling views on race and hierarchy that had a profound influence on this century and afterward.

In 1901, the Newberry Library acquired Bonaparte's collection. Because of Bonaparte's strong interest in Europe, this made the Newberry, to my mind, the possessor of one of the best sets of published materials in minority dialects and languages of this continent. Hence also its relevance to my research into Irish, since there are a large number of devotional materials among its titles. Outside of Ireland, I am not aware of a more complete corpus of published Irish-language materials from the 19th century. An indication of its importance can be gained from the fact that the standard bibliographic compilation for materials published in Irish, Ernest McClintock Dix and Séamus Ó Casaidhe's List of Books, Pamphlets, &c. Printed Wholly, or Partly, in Irish (1905) cites Bonaparte's library as the only source for a number of titles they list. It would appear that more than a few of Bonaparte's Irish "specimens" are known to us only because of his bibliophilic affliction.

While the history of Irish Catholicism in the popular imagination is usually counted among the most distinctly "Irish" of cultural features, evidence from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century devotional material suggests otherwise. This should not be a surprise, since the the history of Catholicism cannot be told from a purely national standpoint--it demands an international perspective . . .

This project, which will have its start here at the Newberry Library where I am working at the moment, intends to follow up on various hints about that close relationship between the evolution of English Catholicism on the one hand, and Irish Catholicism of the so-called 'devotional revolution' on the other. The archival materials at the heart of my initial research are the numerous Catholic printed prayer books, spiritual guides, and translations of Christian classics that were churned out simultaneously on presses in Dublin, London, and elsewhere in the two countries between 1750 and 1850.

The idea for this topic had its origins in reading Thomas Wall's The Sign of Doctor Hay's Head, Being Some Account of the Hazards and Fortunes of Catholic Printers and Publishers in Dublin from the Late Penal Times to the Present Day (1958), a title that itself suggested the love that Wall (who was the head librarian at Ireland's National Library) held for the printers and printed works that provided his historical subject. Wall identified a network of Catholic printers active in Dublin who, in the wake of the careers of three notable bishops, the Englishman Richard Challoner (1691-1781), the Scotsman George Hay (1729-1811), and the Irishman John Carpenter (1729-1786), had managed to produce a whole slate of devotional materials to supply Ireland's Catholics.

The span of time in which these printers were most active, roughly the mid-18th century to the mid-19th, is the very same time that historians have identified as a period of major change in Irish Catholicism. These changes, first labeled a 'devotional revolution' by Emmet Larkin and other scholars actively considering this topic in the 1970s, have been seen as the basis of the later distinctiveness of modern Irish Catholicism--most notably its depth of devotion. Moreover, Wall must have been aware of the widespread perception that Ireland possesses a distinctivly Irish variant of Catholicism--a position held not just by many in the public at large before and after Wall's time, but also by many scholars then and now. This makes it all the more notable that Wall asserted that most of the Catholic works that Dublin printers selected to reprint were English in origin.

Although most subsequent histories of this time period have identified some sort of international dimension to Irish Catholicism, most have looked toward European continental devotion, not English trends, to explain Ireland. The exception--at least in my initial impression--appears to be lesser-known Irish-language writing in this field by earlier historians such as Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin (e.g. "Clódóireacht Chaitliceach in Éirinn sa Ochtú hAois Déag," Irisleabhar Muighe Nuadhad, 1964), who, along with Hugh Fenning and Malachy McKenna more recently, managed to heroically tracked down the titles of many of these works.

Although I haven't explored all of the secondary literature yet that will frame this project, I suspect that an account of this printed material will ultimately intrude on broader historiographical concerns. Not only the story of the developments of the Irish church is at stake here, but also a fuller understanding of how English Catholicism changed as it moved from a recusant church of the post-Reformation period to its renewal during the Oxford Movement of the 19th century. Shouldn't English Catholicism be seen as a product of Irish influence if the reverse is considered? And what of England's Irish immigrants of the 19th century who are said to have changed English Catholicism with their arrival?

These are just preliminary thoughts, but future posts will consider both these questions and larger issues as I work through some of the material.