of a native linen industry … and to the fact that such linen rags as were available tended to be exported, particularly to France.”103 Stories about paper have long focused on the human elements in the unbalanced rag-shortage equation Coleman describes: wool use, linen industry, rag exports. However, when we read between the lines—and beyond the linen—we realize that “rag shortage” is a euphemism for raw material shortage. Hidden below the canopy of the familiar, anthropocentric narrative in which “rags make paper” are dense understories of raw materials, of localized biodiversity, of bruised plant stalks and boiled animal hooves and of aching, dehumanized bodies. If we look closely, we begin to find stories in the fibers of historical paper that prompt us to recalculate the costs of supposed cheapness.
CHAPTER 2
The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper
A handmade sheet of paper provides documentation or physical evidence of a dialogue between human beings and nature.
—Timothy Barrett, “Aesthetics and the Future of the Craft”
In a controversial history of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sean Shesgreen claims that one of the three reasons for the anthology’s remarkable success in the 1960s and thereafter was its so-called innovational use of “Bible paper.”1 According to Shesgreen, “Bible paper had previously been shunned by anthologists: transparent and flimsy, it tears easily and bleeds profusely.”2 But the use of “Bible paper” allowed The Norton Anthology to offer 60 percent more content than its main competitor in a text that weighed 25 percent less, and more pages with less bulk allowed the printers to use a smaller size (octavo-size rather than quarto-size).3 The new, flimsy-paper anthology was an unprecedented success, but that success might be qualified by considering the degree to which substandard paper ultimately affected student perceptions of the literature printed on that paper. What message did the new media communicate? Is it possible that the “flimsy” paper emphasized functionality over form, coding its printed contents as means to an end (an acceptable course grade, for example) rather than as avenues of aesthetic exploration? In short, what is the rhetorical effect of cheap paper, especially as a medium for supposedly cherished literature?
Historically and conceptually, the anthology’s bookmaking innovation was hardly innovative. The flimsy paper is called “Bible paper” for a good reason: Bibles have a long history of being printed on cheap paper, as The Norton Anthology’s editors must have known. The trick of cutting paper costs to make a Bible more portable was used even before paper and printing: “Paris Bibles” from the thirteenth century were copied by secular scribes onto “tissue-thin parchment”4 to create a portable Bible “intended to meet the needs both of the student in the university classroom and the Mendicant preacher on a mission.”5 Printing-press technology itself developed only after papermaking technology reached Europe, bringing with it a cheaper alternative to parchment.6
In Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, Ian Green demonstrates that ”canny publishers used nearly every trick in the book to expand markets and maximize profits” on Bible sales, including the use of “cheaper paper.”7 As with Shesgreen’s discussion of Bible paper, scholars have focused on the increased portability, distribution, and ownership of cheaper Bibles. What tends to be overlooked are the aesthetic effects of the surfaces on which words appear. This oversight is particularly remarkable for three reasons. First, since current textual criticism has been deeply influenced by D. F. McKenzie’s work on the “sociology of texts” and the view that “forms effect meaning,” we might expect to read more about paper, one of the book’s most basic forms.8 Second, paper is one of the formal features most legible to historical readers, especially the seventeenth-century readers I discuss here, who may not have understood the nuances of the printing press, but who participated in and understood the nuances of the rags-to-paper economy. Third, as I will show, these same historical readers actively commented on the aesthetic effects of paper quality.
Conversations (and controversies) about cheaply produced Bibles range through the dates and geographies covered in The Norton Anthology, but in this chapter I consider the ways that the Protestant Reformation made the Bible—and, by extension, other books—more vulgar, to use a term deeply associated with Bible translation and transmission. The Reformation’s doctrinal emphasis on personal reading and interpretation dramatically increased book ownership and literacy rates in Renaissance England as the Bible was made to be both physically and intellectually grasped by readers-in-training.9 John Dryden famously decries the material effects of the Reformation: “The Book thus put in every vulgar hand, / Which each presum’d he best cou’d understand, … / The tender Page with horney Fists was gaul’d.”10 As Dryden’s critique suggests, physical graspability had interpretive consequences. Margreta de Grazia writes, “If words are to serve as transparent representations of things, their own thinglike or sensible properties must be overlooked.”11
For de Grazia, “the material properties of words” are “their duration as sound when spoken and their extension as marks when written.”12 To the thinglike properties of sound and symbol, I add texture. In this chapter, I argue that the texture of words, and the texture, especially, of the media on which “God’s words” were printed, were not effectively overlooked by Renaissance readers, who had the capacity to recognize the things from which their texts were constructed. I move from my focus on the materiality of paper as a transformed plant in Chapter 1 to focus here on the poetics of paper in Renaissance English texts and more broadly on what I would call a poetics of corruptibility. Bibles themselves were byproducts of organic life cycles, of germinated seeds and rotting plant stalks. Recognizing the ecology of the book as a Renaissance reader might have, we might grasp—both literally, as page texture, and cognitively, as aesthetic insight—a richer, more poetically intriguing interplay between recorded words and the decaying substrates on which they appear.
I begin with a discussion of paper quality and printing costs in Renaissance England that focuses on the books that most influenced literacy and reading practices in Renaissance England: vernacular Bibles. Though there are many voices and opinions in the debate over words as things in Reformation-era England, this chapter is guided by one particular conversant, Henry Vaughan (1621–95), who, while reading his “cheap” Bible, is conscious of the intersecting lives of bookish words and natural matter in the past, present, and future.13 Vaughan offers a palimpsestic reading strategy that anticipates our own critical turn toward “polychronic” readings as articulated by Bruno Latour and Michel Serres, and as convincingly applied to Renaissance literary criticism in Jonathan Gil Harris’s Untimely Matter.14 Vaughan’s poem “The Book,” first printed in the second edition of Silex Scintillans: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations in 1655, relies upon a readerly understanding of the social cycles of flax plants, among other things, as he itemizes the flora and fauna used to make his Bible:
The Book.
Eternal God! maker of all
That have liv’d here, since the mans fall;
The Rock of ages! in whose shade
They live unseen, when here they fade. [5]
Thou knew’st this papyr, when it was
Meer seed, and after that but grass;
Before ’twas drest or spun, and when
Made
