complex embeddedness among creaturely life on earth,” to what the authors call “the potential for human indistinction.”57 The work of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities is filled with decentering metaphors such as “entanglement,” “embeddedness,” “networks”; however, “indistinct” calls attention to an observer who, making one thing come distinctly into focus, risks making other things indistinct. We might say we have to choose forest or trees, a metaphor that applies, but also one that brings us back around to paper, to the reminder that the ecologies of even this paragraph have been indistinct: Feerick and Nardizzi and the twentieth-century edition of Hooker that they cite are not persons, but trees. Their ideas came to me not in human-, but in tree-form. Typing these lines onto a paper-shaped rectangle on my computer screen, I expect to be similarly translated into words printed on tree pulp. Then the ecologies of these lines, of the many screens and scraps of paper used in rendering them readable in the form of this book or ebook, may be indistinct, but like Leopold’s driftwood board, they will remain guessable.
Chapter 3, “How to Read a Blot: Historiography and Renaissance Ecologies of Inscriptive Error,” opens by pondering a large blot on a single copy of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV in one of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s First Folios. In that chapter, I show how one might read an indistinct stain on a page, not only metaphorically, but also materially, to better understand the mixed-media surfaces on which readers and writers (and printers) recorded and revised history from the time of Richard II (1367–1400), Henry IV (1367–1413), and Henry V (1386–1422) to the time of Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. Chapter 3 further demonstrates how the language of blots seeps into the King James Bible, marking another well-known king, King David, with an indelible reminder of his past mistakes. Ultimately, I argue that metaphors for thinking about error and reformation are linked to common writing technologies, specifically to the fundamentally different affordances of parchment and paper.
Chapter 4, “Sizing Matters: Annotating Animals in Renaissance England,” reveals a surprising textual interaction between animals and readers. The most obscure natural ingredient in early printed books, and one that is almost uniformly overlooked despite scholarly interest in Renaissance reading practices, is “animal sizing,” a viscous mixture made from gelatinized animal parts and used to coat the surface of paper so that ink would not blot into its fibers. Animals were integral elements of the literary ecosystem. Demonstrating how Renaissance reading habits and reading habitats are systemically linked, my work breaks new ground by arguing that scholarly data on book use and book survival in the period are skewed—and that future studies can produce more reliable data by recognizing the role of animals in paper books.
Focusing on John Donne’s “A Valediction: Of the Book” and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Chapter 5, “This Book, as Long Lived as the Elements: Climate Control, Biodeterioration, and the Poetics of Decay,” explores book biodeterioration across time by considering how Renaissance writers imagined book decay then, and how Renaissance scholars imagine book decay now. Taking its cue from the Sonnets themselves, the chapter explores the husbandry of paper memorials—how writers imagined paper as a living and dying monument that could outlast its own unique copy text. I explore these concerns, penned in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the point of view of a reader in an archival library in the twenty-first century, a century that if current environmental models prove true, could be the last full century in which original copies of Donne’s and Shakespeare’s poetry on paper can be preserved intact. The indistinct ecologies under consideration in this final chapter are the fossil fuels and nuclear energy used to create climate-controlled archival microbiomes where we can lose sight of the corruptible nature of books and of the poetics of decay.
Each of the five chapters explores a mode of negotiation with paper media: making paper (Chapter 1), reading paper (Chapter 2), editing on paper (Chapter 3), annotating printed paper (Chapter 4), preserving paper records (Chapter 5). And yet, focused as the chapters are on legibility and use—on readers and writers negotiating with an environment in order to record and transmit and store ideas—the chapter progression also works out the life arc of a paper text; this book’s two parts, “Legible Ecologies” and “Indistinct Ecologies,” describe the two broad phases in the ecological life of a handmade page: construction and destruction. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss details like cellulose and flax to show how a sheet of paper comes into existence in Renaissance England. Chapters 3–5 consider paper after its construction and examine how annotation and revision and nonhuman biodeterioration affect its contents and its uses (and users). But this work also suggests that we might pull the frame back even farther, revealing that the progression described above is not only about the life of a book, but also, and more fundamentally, about the lives of plants and animals and minerals as they move through society in textual form. Early handmade paper is a case study for a much broader methodology; I strive, in these pages, to use paper’s ephemeral form to call attention to the ecosystemic relationship that always exists between human ideas and nonhuman matter.
Always our readings of texts are broadened or narrowed by what we acknowledge as part of the creation process. When we consider how the human species seeks to make sense of the world by using the organisms around them to make records of the past, when we consider how many plants and animals and minerals are housed in archival libraries and how vital these records are and may be to humanities and environmental humanities scholars alike, we could call disinterest in the ecology of texts an embarrassing oversight. We could also call it a prelude to a singularly exciting future direction for collaborative scholarship. Whether or not there is an ethical obligation to, in McKenzie’s words, “show the human presence” in texts, we have long acknowledged that we cannot really make sense of texts in the world without accounting for human presence. And whether or not there is an ethical obligation to show the nonhuman presence in texts, I do not think we can make sense of the textual habits of humans without accounting for textual habitats, how the human species seeks to make sense of the world by using the organisms around them to make records of the past. Natural resources are provisional, seasonal, and geographically specific. To accept them as givens in the stories we tell about texts is to miss out on a vibrant history of the ecological negotiations and technological contrivances used to hold and share and save written records of human ideas.
PART I
LEGIBLE ECOLOGIES
CHAPTER 1
Substances Used to Convey Ideas: Ship Sails, Cellulose, and Spinning Wheels
The art of Paper-making ought to be regarded as one of the most useful which has ever been invented in any age or country; for it is manifest, that every other discovery must have continued useless to society, if it could not have
