The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
is one of the formal features most legible to historical readers, especially the seventeenth-century readers I discuss here, who may not have understood the nuances of the printing press, but who participated in and understood the nuances of the rags-to-paper economy. Third, as I will show, these same historical readers actively commented on the aesthetic effects of paper quality.
Conversations (and controversies) about cheaply produced Bibles range through the dates and geographies covered in The Norton Anthology, but in this chapter I consider the ways that the Protestant Reformation made the Bible—and, by extension, other books—more vulgar, to use a term deeply associated with Bible translation and transmission. The Reformation’s doctrinal emphasis on personal reading and interpretation dramatically increased book ownership and literacy rates in Renaissance England as the Bible was made to be both physically and intellectually grasped by readers-in-training.9 John Dryden famously decries the material effects of the Reformation: “The Book thus put in every vulgar hand, / Which each presum’d he best cou’d understand, … / The tender Page with horney Fists was gaul’d.”10 As Dryden’s critique suggests, physical graspability had interpretive consequences. Margreta de Grazia writes, “If words are to serve as transparent representations of things, their own thinglike or sensible properties must be overlooked.”11
For de Grazia, “the material properties of words” are “their duration as sound when spoken and their extension as marks when written.”12 To the thinglike properties of sound and symbol, I add texture. In this chapter, I argue that the texture of words, and the texture, especially, of the media on which “God’s words” were printed, were not effectively overlooked by Renaissance readers, who had the capacity to recognize the things from which their texts were constructed. I move from my focus on the materiality of paper as a transformed plant in Chapter 1 to focus here on the poetics of paper in Renaissance English texts and more broadly on what I would call a poetics of corruptibility. Bibles themselves were byproducts of organic life cycles, of germinated seeds and rotting plant stalks. Recognizing the ecology of the book as a Renaissance reader might have, we might grasp—both literally, as page texture, and cognitively, as aesthetic insight—a richer, more poetically intriguing interplay between recorded words and the decaying substrates on which they appear.
I begin with a discussion of paper quality and printing costs in Renaissance England that focuses on the books that most influenced literacy and reading practices in Renaissance England: vernacular Bibles. Though there are many voices and opinions in the debate over words as things in Reformation-era England, this chapter is guided by one particular conversant, Henry Vaughan (1621–95), who, while reading his “cheap” Bible, is conscious of the intersecting lives of bookish words and natural matter in the past, present, and future.13 Vaughan offers a palimpsestic reading strategy that anticipates our own critical turn toward “polychronic” readings as articulated by Bruno Latour and Michel Serres, and as convincingly applied to Renaissance literary criticism in Jonathan Gil Harris’s Untimely Matter.14 Vaughan’s poem “The Book,” first printed in the second edition of Silex Scintillans: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations in 1655, relies upon a readerly understanding of the social cycles of flax plants, among other things, as he itemizes the flora and fauna used to make his Bible:
The Book.
Eternal God! maker of all
That have liv’d here, since the mans fall;
The Rock of ages! in whose shade
They live unseen, when here they fade. [5]
Thou knew’st this papyr, when it was
Meer seed, and after that but grass;
Before ’twas drest or spun, and when
Made linen, who did wear it then:
What were their lifes, their thoughts & deeds
Whither good corn, or fruitless weeds. [10]
Thou knew’st this Tree, when a green shade
Cover’d it, since a Cover made,
And where it flourish’d, grew and spread,
As if it never should be dead.
FIGURE 9. “The Book,” in Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1655), GEN 14456.49.2.10*, G8v–Hir, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Thou knew’st this harmless beast, when he [15]
Did liee and feed by thy decree
On each green thing; then slept (well fed)
Cloath’d with this skln [sic], which now lies spred
A Covering o’re this aged book,
Which makes me wisely weep and look [20]
On my own dust; meer dust it is,
But not so dry and clean as this.
Thou knew’st and saw’st them all and though
Now scatter’d thus, dost know them so.
O knowing, glorious spirit! when [25]
Thou shalt restore trees, beasts and men,
When thou shalt make all new again,
Destroying onely death and pain,
Give him amongst thy works a place,
Who in them lov’d and sought thy face!15 [30]
Vaughan’s poem, discussed in greater detail at the conclusion of this chapter, converses with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates about cheap media and the production of a vernacular Bible in England, and it addresses modern critical concerns about material culture, the “thingness” of words, and the sociology of texts. What is perhaps surprising for a twenty-first-century reader is Vaughan’s detailed awareness of the natural resources used to make his Bible, particularly his expectation that readers will understand his references to animal and plant origins. What is more surprising, though, is the way that Vaughan reads these natural resources and their potential for corruption, especially in light of the early history of vernacular Bible production in England. “The Book,” arguably “one of [Vaughan’s] most impressive” poems, is pleasing as a poetic conceit, a conversation between a poet and the “maker of all” about the organic nature of Renaissance books.16 As I will show, it is also, on a deeper level, a contribution to an ongoing cultural conversation about the poetic form and function of the natural things on which “the Word” was printed in Reformation England.
Re-Forming the Bible in Renaissance England
By the turn of the seventeenth century in England, as I have noted, vernacular Bibles were becoming cheap. They were made to be affordable, and, as a result, book ownership and literacy rates in England spiked. William H. Sherman claims that the Geneva Bible alone, “which went through more than 140 editions between the 1560s and the 1640s,” was probably “the most widely distributed book in the English Renaissance, and the one that played the most crucial role in changing the patterns of lay book ownership in the age of print.”17 In Renaissance England, according to Sherman, “literacy did not mean just reading; it meant reading the Bible.”18 The translation of God’s Word to mass media posed material challenges, and some were aghast at the relative cheapness of Bibles. William Prynne writes in Histrio-mastix that some playbooks “are growne from Quarto into Folio; which yet beare so good a price and sale, that I cannot but with griefe relate it, they are now new-printed in farre better paper than most Octavo or Quarto Bibles.”19 A printed marginal note adds: “Shackspeers Plaies are printed in the best Crowne paper, far better than most Bibles.” Prynne’s complaint