The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
Vicars, in a 1645 pamphlet, appeals for a “Reformation” of the “sacred Book of God” and rails against the printing of Bibles filled with errors “wherby the sense is in very many places, feully corrupted and falsly mistaken” (“foully,” misspelled as “feully,” ironically reinforces Vicars’s point).20 Vicars further criticizes the “printing of our Bibles in very course and extreme thin and bad sinking-paper.”21 In Vicars’s point of view, Bible printing is a neglectful business that seeks after “filthy lucre” by using bad materials.22 These materials, however, are not value-neutral, for they tend to affect Bible reading; errata may lead a reader astray, and “sinking-paper,” paper that is not well coated with gelatinous animal sizing (a topic I discuss in detail in Chapter 4), allows water-based handwriting ink to blot into its fibers, frustrating a reader’s attempts to annotate the margins of his or her Bible.23 Edward Leigh similarly condemns the use of cheap paper in Bible printing. His list of those who “unreverently handle the Scriptures” includes the usual suspects, such as atheists, papists, antinomians, and witches.24 Less predictably, printers “who print the Bible in bad Paper” make the list ahead of heathens and Jews.25
According to Green, “The rapid expansion and diversification of bible production in England … was due primarily to a combination of God and Mammon.”26 Green details English “publishers’ success in devising and disseminating cheaper, simpler bibles” to meet market demands.27 This “diversification of formats,” as Green demonstrates, was achieved not only by making Bibles increasingly smaller, but also by manipulating paper quality.28 Green shows evidence of folios being sold in three qualities of paper (superior, fine, and ordinary) and of quartos and octavos sold in two qualities of paper. Of course, cheaper production costs did not always mean that discounts were passed on to customers. In Scintilla, or, a light broken into darke Warehouses, Michael Sparke denounces the “Monopolists” who were manipulating Bible prices.29
Sparke’s six-page pamphlet is filled with references to “quires”—used twenty-three times—and to relative paper quality: “thinne paper,” “good paper,” “Large paper,” “better paper,” “best paper,” “excellent paper.”30 In one instance, Sparke complains that “Church Bibles of a thinner sort” were “cheaper” and “were excellent for poore Parishes” until the monopolists exploited the market.31 Sparke’s diatribe suggests the value of attending to what we might call the aesthetics of cheapness in relation to texts and especially paper. As Green notes, though there is a lack of reliable pricing data for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bibles, one can confidently discuss the relative cheapness of particular works and the rhetorical effects of the varied paper qualities discussed (and denounced) by Prynne, Vicars, and Sparke.32
It is worth noting, too, that from leaf to leaf within printed texts, paper usage was not always consistent. According to David McKitterick, “Although printers usually endeavoured to ensure reasonable continuity of quality and colour throughout a volume, there were exceptions,” including a 1648 text printed on “stocks varying in colour between shades of brown and white,” a 1642 folio Greek New Testament printed on different paper sizes, and a 1629 Bible composed of “no less than seven different stocks, divided between discrete issues.”33 One must also consider the frequency with which discrete volumes were bound together, putting 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;