the variant paper qualities of Bibles and Bible aids (prayer books, metrical Psalms, concordances, etc.) in juxtaposition. The expense of binding “meant that works rarely stood alone in self-enclosed units but were mixed with other works to save money.”34 It is easy to overlook the page and thus miss the significance of mixed paper stocks. Or, noticing varying qualities of paper from title to title within a Sammelbände or even within individual titles, it is easy to settle for an explanation grounded in the economics of the book trade. But the book trade exists in a world of things, and the mixing of paper qualities is not just the mixing of colors and grades of paper but also the mixing of species. Varied paper qualities and mixed paper stocks draw attention to the ecologies of Renaissance papermaking; at the same time, they draw attention to the aesthetic perceptions of Renaissance readers who commented upon the substances used to convey ideas.
For example, Leigh, who criticizes Bible printers for using bad paper stock, also repeats a material criticism of the printed Bible: “The Papists stile the Scripture … the black Gospell, inky Divinity.”35 When a printed Bible is accused of being a “black Gospell” and an “inky Divinity,” part of the criticism is that the communication of godly ideas is muddled in the process of textual production. For Catholics, the Bible is supplemented by unwritten tradition, the direct, unmediated communication of God with the clergy. When the Bible is attributed sole authority, it becomes, in the view of Catholic critics, an idolatrous divinity made of ink. Or, materially, an idol made of flax, for the “basic constituent” of English printing ink in the period was linseed oil.36 The Word made flax, in the Catholic view, is the Word corrupted beyond recognition. “Inky Divinity” is vibrant matter of the worst kind, a blotty collation of matter that damns the souls of humans.
Debates about the vernacular Bible in England, which centered on the issue of sola scriptura, were thus complicated by the practical means by which the Bible was made available to lay readers. In short, the Protestant Reformation and sola scriptura gave rise to Bibles made cheaply of cheap materials. Bibles were more tangible, more accessible, and more handy. Their margins were often markable, and readers were encouraged to write in them. Reformation Bibles were secular; what had previously been hand-copied by religious scribes was being mass-produced by merchants—with sometimes ghastly results, such as “The Wicked Bible,” a 1631 Authorized Version whose seventh commandment read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”37 Implicit in period debates about the Bible, the text that transformed reading practices in Renaissance England, is a debate about its material status as a set of metaphysical ideas bound up in the physical world.
Words on Flax
Thomas More and William Tyndale, the early voices in debates over the introduction of vernacular Bibles in England during the reign of Henry VIII, fundamentally disagreed about the role of the “unwritten,” that is, of the mediating role of church tradition.38 Tyndale believed in the authority of the Bible alone, sola scriptura, rejecting the authority of the church’s oral tradition. For More, the biblical text was not the only source of revelation, and he rejected the grounds on which Tyndale wished to argue. As Germain P. Marc’hadour and Thomas M. C. Lawler point out, “More’s response [to Tyndale] … is not to quibble over the text of scripture but to interpret the sense of the passage in terms of the tradition of the church.”39 English translation (or mistranslation) was certainly a point of contention between More and Tyndale, but it is one that has received more attention than the more basic disagreement about textual authority.40 Essentially—or, rather, substantially—More and Tyndale argued over media and corruption. Tyndale distrusted the clergy as unreliable mediators between God and humans. Power corrupts. More, on the other hand, distrusted textual media as unreliable, citing as evidence the facts that (1) some scripture has already been lost, (2) we cannot know how much, and (3) parts of what we have are “corrupted.”41 Texts tend toward corruption, and that corruption is due not only to human error, but also to material conditions. Paper is easily ripped, burned, and soaked. Bookworms are no respecters of crucial words, and knots of organic matter in the page can interrupt typography.
Modern scholars in archival libraries can still see plants in paper. That is, we can still easily see what Vaughan saw when he looked at his Bible and saw visible evidence of flax cultivation. The page space around and between words, often referred to as “white space,” is anything but white. Though often assumed to be discolored by age, many of the brownish pages we encounter in archival libraries have actually retained coloring from their production. For instance, the rivers that provided water for paper mills were not always pristine, especially in the spring (when they ran muddy) or when the riverbanks were populated upstream. The “stuff” vat, the technical name for the pot of macerated fibers used to make sheets of paper, was about 99 percent water; so it is no surprise that silty, muddy, or polluted water would render sheets of paper darker.42
Looking a bit more closely, one can immediately see that the general impression of brownness is often enhanced by a network of flecks and fibers embedded in the page. They are ubiquitous in early texts to the point that they have become invisible to us. There are notable exceptions, however. Though most hairs in the pages of books are miniscule, and one has to look closely to see them, I find it hard to ignore long strands of hair that wind through the margins or printed areas of Renaissance books, even when the text on the page is not poeticizing the locks of a beloved. A feather embedded in a page of George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres is even harder to overlook; its placement in the margin points up a self-blazoning by the mourning lover in Dan Bartholomew.43 Are we licensed to read this into the lines? Or to comment on the appropriateness of a feather appearing here, in a volume so preoccupied with textual production and misproduction, with material integration and disintegration? We can agree that unique instances of human marginalia in Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Gascoigne are noteworthy and are representative of, or at least pertinent to, broader patterns of Renaissance book interactions; might we not argue the same for unique instances of avian marginalia?
Hairs are more common than feathers, but vegetable matter of two varieties is most commonly embedded in paper: (1) bits and pieces of vegetable fibers that made their way into clothing (during flax processing) and finally into paper, and (2) flecks of organic matter, presumably from riparian flora upstream, that were too small to filter out of the papermaker’s vat. (As with the silty brownness described above, seasons and weather patterns affect the flecking of paper.) When one searches for readers’ marks in books, flecks of organic matter can seem purposeful at first glance; in books where readers have used small, marginal tick marks as the primary method of highlighting passages, it is sometimes hard to tell (particularly in microfilm or digital reproductions) if a mark is made by pen on the paper or if the mark is organic matter in the paper. Occasionally a “knot” of organic matter embedded in the page will cause errors in the printed text, interrupting the type. Sometimes a large piece of flax appears in paper, a husky piece of the stalk of the flax plant known as a “shive.”44 An opening from a copy of the second edition of Hoby’s translation of The Book of the Courtier is particularly illustrative of the ecologies of textual production and consumption, and shows evidence of hair interrupting the impression of the typeface of a printed marginal note on the verso, a shive extending off the trimmed edge of the page from the margin of the recto, and a brown, iron gall ink manuscript note below the shive.45
The largest, most noticeable shive I have found, in a copy of the first printing of More’s collected English writings (1557), bears the ink of a printed marginal note. Shives and husks of flax are supposed to be eliminated in the process of converting plant to clothing. One might make the argument that while some bibliographers prefer to focus on textual accidentals and substantives in the printed area, actual readers may have been much more knowledgeable about this type of “ecological accidental.” There is no human intention to be uncovered here, but the unexpected visibility of the world of things on which words were printed in Renaissance England yields an ecologically and poetically playful juxtaposition: the husk of flax interrupts a printed marginal reference to John 14, calling attention to physical substance beneath the citation of a passage in
