Joshua Calhoun - The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England

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

Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones.

Duke Senior in William Shakespeare,
As You Like It, 2.1.1617

This book tells a story about paper in Renaissance Englandabout 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 Times scythe, this is also a story about corruptioncorruption and replication and the desperate hope that we can out-replicate the thing we love so as to preserve it from decay.

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 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 has profoundly altered our planet. Writing and reading, too, have human advantages and ecological consequences, and on a scale that we have not yet honestly acknowledged in our stories about book history or fully recognized in our studies of environmental history.

Acknowledging and engaging with the ecology of media in other periods and places, this book focuses on a particular medium, paper, in a particular time and place, Renaissance England. Yet the questions I ask of early handmade paper might also be just as productively asked of millennia-old Eastern palm-leaf books or medieval scrolls or Victorian headstones or junk mail or the newest iPhone. They might be distilled into three questions that guide this work: (1) How has scarcity of nonhuman matter altered human communication? (2) How have humans creatively imagined or reimagined the textual possibilities available to them in a given ecosystem? (3) How has human communication been altered by the corruptibility of the nonhuman matter used to make texts? Scarcity. Possibility. Corruptibility. These three ecopoetic negotiationsas pertinent to twenty-first-century ebooks as to sixteenth-century books on handmade paperguide The Nature of the Pages narrative.

With age and reading and train trips down the Hudson River to access rare books in archival libraries came the realization that the Adirondacks were not a sovereign island of wilderness but were, and in many ways continue to be, New York Citys hinterland. My journeys through the watersheds and river valleys between the Adirondacks and archival libraries have shaped this work and have left me unable to think about technology and progress without also asking about wilderness and landscape.

Now in Madison, Wisconsin, I write these words less than fifty miles from where Aldo Leopold once stood on the edge of the Wisconsin River looking at a piece of driftwood and jotting down observations that would, with enough paper and time, become these lines in A Sand County Almanac:

The spring flood brings us more than high adventure; it brings likewise an unpredictable miscellany of floatable objects pilfered from upriver farms. Each old board has its own individual history, always unknown, but always to some degree guessable from the kind of wood, its dimensions, its nails, screws, or paint, its finish or the lack of it, its wear or decay. One can even guess, from the abrasion of its edges and ends on sandbars, how many floods have carried it in years past.

Here Leopold offers what we might now recognize as a material culture reading of lumber that is invested not only in political and cultural systems, but also, and especially, in ecosystems. Drawing attention to biotic interactions between people and land, Leopold claims that the riparian lumber is not only a collection of personalities, but an anthology of human strivings in upriver farms and forests.the unknown but to some degree guessable, of drawing on imperfect expertise in an attempt to make the ecologies of media more legible, aptly describes the project that