style="font-size:15px;"> Whither good corn, or fruitless weeds. [10]
Thou knew’st this Tree, when a green shade
Cover’d it, since a Cover made,
And where it flourish’d, grew and spread,
As if it never should be dead.
FIGURE 9. “The Book,” in Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1655), GEN 14456.49.2.10*, G8v–Hir, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Thou knew’st this harmless beast, when he [15]
Did liee and feed by thy decree
On each green thing; then slept (well fed)
Cloath’d with this skln [sic], which now lies spred
A Covering o’re this aged book,
Which makes me wisely weep and look [20]
On my own dust; meer dust it is,
But not so dry and clean as this.
Thou knew’st and saw’st them all and though
Now scatter’d thus, dost know them so.
O knowing, glorious spirit! when [25]
Thou shalt restore trees, beasts and men,
When thou shalt make all new again,
Destroying onely death and pain,
Give him amongst thy works a place,
Who in them lov’d and sought thy face!15 [30]
Vaughan’s poem, discussed in greater detail at the conclusion of this chapter, converses with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates about cheap media and the production of a vernacular Bible in England, and it addresses modern critical concerns about material culture, the “thingness” of words, and the sociology of texts. What is perhaps surprising for a twenty-first-century reader is Vaughan’s detailed awareness of the natural resources used to make his Bible, particularly his expectation that readers will understand his references to animal and plant origins. What is more surprising, though, is the way that Vaughan reads these natural resources and their potential for corruption, especially in light of the early history of vernacular Bible production in England. “The Book,” arguably “one of [Vaughan’s] most impressive” poems, is pleasing as a poetic conceit, a conversation between a poet and the “maker of all” about the organic nature of Renaissance books.16 As I will show, it is also, on a deeper level, a contribution to an ongoing cultural conversation about the poetic form and function of the natural things on which “the Word” was printed in Reformation England.
Re-Forming the Bible in Renaissance England
By the turn of the seventeenth century in England, as I have noted, vernacular Bibles were becoming cheap. They were made to be affordable, and, as a result, book ownership and literacy rates in England spiked. William H. Sherman claims that the Geneva Bible alone, “which went through more than 140 editions between the 1560s and the 1640s,” was probably “the most widely distributed book in the English Renaissance, and the one that played the most crucial role in changing the patterns of lay book ownership in the age of print.”17 In Renaissance England, according to Sherman, “literacy did not mean just reading; it meant reading the Bible.”18 The translation of God’s Word to mass media posed material challenges, and some were aghast at the relative cheapness of Bibles. William Prynne writes in Histrio-mastix that some playbooks “are growne from Quarto into Folio; which yet beare so good a price and sale, that I cannot but with griefe relate it, they are now new-printed in farre better paper than most Octavo or Quarto Bibles.”19 A printed marginal note adds: “Shackspeers Plaies are printed in the best Crowne paper, far better than most Bibles.” Prynne’s complaint about the paper quality of Bibles in relation to the quality of Shakespeare’s First and Second Folios suggests that the relative cheapness of Bible materials was inherently aesthetic. John Vicars, in a 1645 pamphlet, appeals for a “Reformation” of the “sacred Book of God” and rails against the printing of Bibles filled with errors “wherby the sense is in very many places, feully corrupted and falsly mistaken” (“foully,” misspelled as “feully,” ironically reinforces Vicars’s point).20 Vicars further criticizes the “printing of our Bibles in very course and extreme thin and bad sinking-paper.”21 In Vicars’s point of view, Bible printing is a neglectful business that seeks after “filthy lucre” by using bad materials.22 These materials, however, are not value-neutral, for they tend to affect Bible reading; errata may lead a reader astray, and “sinking-paper,” paper that is not well coated with gelatinous animal sizing (a topic I discuss in detail in Chapter 4), allows water-based handwriting ink to blot into its fibers, frustrating a reader’s attempts to annotate the margins of his or her Bible.23 Edward Leigh similarly condemns the use of cheap paper in Bible printing. His list of those who “unreverently handle the Scriptures” includes the usual suspects, such as atheists, papists, antinomians, and witches.24 Less predictably, printers “who print the Bible in bad Paper” make the list ahead of heathens and Jews.25
According to Green, “The rapid expansion and diversification of bible production in England … was due primarily to a combination of God and Mammon.”26 Green details English “publishers’ success in devising and disseminating cheaper, simpler bibles” to meet market demands.27 This “diversification of formats,” as Green demonstrates, was achieved not only by making Bibles increasingly smaller, but also by manipulating paper quality.28 Green shows evidence of folios being sold in three qualities of paper (superior, fine, and ordinary) and of quartos and octavos sold in two qualities of paper. Of course, cheaper production costs did not always mean that discounts were passed on to customers. In Scintilla, or, a light broken into darke Warehouses, Michael Sparke denounces the “Monopolists” who were manipulating Bible prices.29
Sparke’s six-page pamphlet is filled with references to “quires”—used twenty-three times—and to relative paper quality: “thinne paper,” “good paper,” “Large paper,” “better paper,” “best paper,” “excellent paper.”30 In one instance, Sparke complains that “Church Bibles of a thinner sort” were “cheaper” and “were excellent for poore Parishes” until the monopolists exploited the market.31 Sparke’s diatribe suggests the value of attending to what we might call the aesthetics of cheapness in relation to texts and especially paper. As Green notes, though there is a lack of reliable pricing data for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bibles, one can confidently discuss the relative cheapness of particular works and the rhetorical effects of the varied paper qualities discussed (and denounced) by Prynne, Vicars, and Sparke.32
It is worth noting, too, that from leaf to leaf within printed texts, paper usage was not always consistent. According to David McKitterick, “Although printers usually endeavoured to ensure reasonable continuity of quality and colour throughout a volume, there were exceptions,” including a 1648 text printed on “stocks varying in colour between shades of brown and white,” a 1642 folio Greek New Testament printed on different paper sizes, and a 1629 Bible composed of “no less than seven different stocks, divided between discrete issues.”33
