THE NATURE OF THE PAGE
MATERIAL TEXTS
Series Editors
Roger Chartier
Joseph Farrell
Anthony Grafton
Leah Price
Peter Stallybrass
Michael F. Suarez, S.J.
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
The NATURE of the PAGE
Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England
Joshua Calhoun
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-5189-0
For
Misty Arden, my Chickadee
“Haply I think on thee …”
CONTENTS
Introduction. Toward an Ecology of Texts
Chapter 1. Substances Used to Convey Ideas: Ship Sails, Cellulose, and Spinning Wheels
Chapter 2. The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper
Chapter 3. How to Read a Blot: Historiography and Renaissance Ecologies of Inscriptive Error
Chapter 4. Sizing Matters: Annotating Animals in Renaissance England
Remainders. Reading and Seeing Textual Ecology
PREFACE
Beginnings
Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones.
—Duke Senior in William Shakespeare,
As You Like It, 2.1.16–17
This book tells a story about paper in Renaissance England—about what it was elementally, and about what it was not; about what a page of paper did, what it was made to do, and what it would not do; about what it made representable and unrepresentable, recordable and revisable, preservable and destructible. It is a story about recording so much of what we call history on sloshed-together plant fibers. For most of the history of printing, paper was made primarily from recycled rags, so this is also a story about using tattered ship sails and worn-out clothes to tell new stories about the past, about the plant fibers used to make those textiles that were eventually used to make texts, and about the plant fibers that frustrated papermakers’ best attempts to replace scarce natural resources with abundant natural resources. Paper, in the story this book tells, is a marvelous but flawed protagonist, the product of nature and culture, of nonhuman and human agency. This story about human ideas recorded on plants is also an environmental story about the ecology of paper and about the ecosystems in which poets and plants can become (and un-become) Renaissance literature. And because plants, like humans, are defenseless against “Time’s scythe,” this is also a story about corruption—corruption and replication and the desperate hope that we can out-replicate the thing we love so as to preserve it from decay.1
We have, by and large, taken for granted the ecologies that allow, disallow, and alter the storage and transmission of ideas. We overlook not only the nature of handmade pages, but also the nature of the electronic screens on which we access digital reproductions of those pages and record our own ideas. Portions of this book, especially ideas that came at moments when keyboard and screen or pen and paper were not manageable, were first recorded on an iPhone, a now ubiquitous communication device that, in its earliest versions, was made with “toxins” such as arsenic, beryllium, lead, and mercury.2 In 2015, Apple Inc.’s new take-back initiatives aimed at recycling “finite resources” recovered nearly 200,000 pounds of cobalt, more than 2,000 pounds of gold, and more than 4.5
