The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun

      

      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

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      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

       Preface. Beginnings

       Introduction. Toward an Ecology of Texts

       PART I. LEGIBLE ECOLOGIES

       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

       PART II. INDISTINCT ECOLOGIES

       Chapter 3. How to Read a Blot: Historiography and Renaissance Ecologies of Inscriptive Error

       Chapter 4. Sizing Matters: Annotating Animals in Renaissance England

       Chapter 5. This Book, as Long Lived as the Elements: Climate Control, Biodeterioration, and the Poetics of Decay

       Remainders. Reading and Seeing Textual Ecology

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      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 million pounds of aluminum from old iPhones.³ Though we may not have such precise statistics for natural resource usage in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bookmaking, we know that, like smartphones, Renaissance books were made from and with finite resources. They were also made with visible, recognizable traces of ecological matter: recycled clothes, slaughtered animals, felled trees.

      The Nature of the Page draws attention to the plant, animal, and mineral materials employed by human creatures, who seem to have a unique need to externalize cognition and memory, creatures whose minds are bursting with ideas that they want to transfer to some savable, shareable format. This study traces the plant fibers found in handmade papers through the late 1800s, when recycled rags were replaced by living trees as the stuff that stories, like this very book, are made on. My focus is especially on the ways in which the production and use of handmade paper have influenced and been influenced by global resource availability in an age of burgeoning exploration and colonization and natural resource extraction. Eating, we know, has human advantages and ecological consequences. Agriculture