The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
texts come into view and become legible. The words on the pages of this book, printed with soy-based ink on recycled tree pulp, engage with and draw attention to the textual forms of ship sails, hemp, flax, ink blots, animal glue, human hair, and fungi.2 It is easy to imagine humans as the point of origination, as if the materials used to make paper, to make ink, to make printing type, and so on simply existed in abundance, waiting to be harvested. In reality, ecological availability and scarcity make certain kinds of human records possible; at the moment those possibilities are realized and integrated into textual forms, textual corruption and disintegration begin. The mode of reading modeled in “The Book” and pursued on a larger scale here inspires a more ecologically deterministic, but also a more poetic past and future for those endlessly intriguing sites of humanistic and environmental negotiation we call “texts.” At the heart of this work, or more appropriately, at the headwaters, is a fascination with the ecopoetic motif of textual negotiation, with moments when scarcity, possibility, or corruptibility interrupts writers and readers.
One finds textual negotiation as an ecopoetic motif woven throughout English Renaissance literature: over and over again, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers express frustration, surprise, impatience, and inventiveness as they confront the affordances of various ecological materials in textual form. At times the animal, plant, and/or mineral materials used to make texts are taken to be affective, as when Thomas Dekker and George Wilkins describe a writer so filled with vitriol that his words should appear on “paper made of the filthy linnen rags that had beene wrapt about the infected and vlcerous bodyes of beggers, that had dyed in a ditch of the pestilence.”3 At times the materials are the subject of poetic conceits, as when Vaughan, in the example above, recognizes the former states of paper (seed, flax plant, and clothing) not only as a fact of textual production, but also as an inspiration for poetry about a material and metaphysical conundrum. At times the materials are hidden behind the very metaphors and poetic tropes that they have inspired, as when so many English poets, drawing on Petrarch, who was drawing on Virgil, refer to their verses as “scattered leaves.” Quite often, earthy materials are blamed for their inability to do justice to a subject, as when the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnets asks, “What’s in the brain that ink may character … ?”4 At other times, the materials are blamed for their seeming resistance: when Philip Sidney as Astrophil struggles to find “fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,” seeking inspiration in “others’ leaves” and biting his “truant” quill pen, he struggles with words but partly blames a feather.5 By the poem’s end, Sidney claims his muse has inspired him to the point that he feels capable of mastery over his materials. He will look in his heart and write. It is a nice fiction, but as Adam Smyth observes when discussing the theme of ineffability in William Strode’s work, “Books are not disembodied conveyers of meaning but papers, ink marks, sheets, and strings.”6 And we could add, adjusting the depth of field, flax seeds and stalks, and rain, and sunlight, and the decayed bodies of things as nutrient-rich soil.
Recognizing that scrolls, and books, and tablet screens are sites of ecological negotiation, that the acts of writing and reading are also meaningful and entangled modes of dwelling, The Nature of the Page draws literary criticism into conversation with two generative fields of scholarly study that are not typically linked: book history and the environmental humanities. Both fields are expansive and difficult to define precisely. For that matter, both fields continue to debate their own “fieldness.” Robert Darnton, addressing concerns about “interdisciplinarity run riot” as early as the 1980s suggested that book history “looks less like a field than a tropical rain forest”; Darnton’s biogeographic metaphor now fits the environmental humanities as well or better than it does book history.7 Hannes Bergthaller and colleagues refer to the environmental humanities as a “metadiscipline or superfield,” and Ursula K. Heise labels it an “interdisciplinary matrix.”8 In their introduction to the first issue of the journal Environmental Humanities, Deborah Bird Rose and colleagues suggest that the environmental humanities gained momentum as “what have traditionally been termed ‘environmental issues’ have been shown to be inescapably entangled with human ways of being in the world.”9 This book makes these inescapable entanglements more visible and more legible by calling attention to “the world of things themselves” in which humans lived, and moved, and made their being known through different kinds of animal, vegetable, and mineral memorials.10 A central claim of this work is that the story of paper is as much an environmental story as it is a bibliographical story. The story of paper is an ecopoetic story, too, for making poetry in the world means not only finding the right words, but finding the right matter to convey those words. Focusing on early handmade paper as a case study, The Nature of the Page draws out three strands, named in the book’s subtitle, that tell us much about the environmental histories of textual negotiation: poetry, papermaking, and the ecology of texts.
If, as with book history, scholars do not always agree when, precisely, the environmental humanities began and which disciplines and disciplinary approaches have most contributed to its growth, few would argue with the claim that “two fields that have embraced the environmental humanities with particular fervour [are] ecocriticism and environmental history.”11 The Nature of the Page is a project with roots in both approaches, as will be evident throughout the book. As an epigraph to this Introduction, I cite “Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities,” a pivotal essay collaboratively authored by a broadly international group of ten literature, history, and geography scholars. In the essay, the authors make an impassioned argument for the value of scholarly heterodoxy, reflexivity, and experimentation, all grounded in an understanding that literary analysis can best be “conducted in a mode attuned to social practices of environing (rather than taking the existence of ‘the environment’ as a given).”12 Grounding media and media-making in a landscape (or multiple landscapes as texts travel through time and space) allows different, more nuanced, and more entangled considerations to filter into ongoing conversations about book history and the environmental humanities. Such an approach calls attention to the influence of habitat on textual habits and allows us to understand the place-based constraints of book technologies.
Paper and Place
In Book 2 of Thomas More’s Utopia, the fictional narrator Raphael Hythloday outlines the history of the book on the island of Utopia, an island whose name emphasizes its placelessness.13 Hythloday claims he arrived on the island of nowhere with “a great many Books” including works of Plato and Aristotle, Plutarch, Lucian, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Herodotus. One of his companions had copies of Hippocrates and Galen. Hythloday also had an incomplete copy of Theophrastus’s work on plants (incomplete thanks to a page-tearing monkey on board the ship). These books intrigued the Utopians because they were printed (not handwritten) on paper, a substance made from macerated plant fibers. According to Hythloday, “While we were showing them the Aldine editions of various books, we talked about paper-making and type-cutting, though without going into details, for none of us had had any practical experience. But with great sharpness of mind they immediately grasped the basic principles. While previously they had written only on vellum, bark and papyrus, they now undertook to make paper and print with type.”14 An early nineteenth-century translation sums it up this way: “Formerly they wrote only on parchment, reeds, or the bark of trees. Now they have established paper-manufactures and printing-presses.”15 After some trial and error with these new technologies, Hythloday says, they “mastered both arts … reprinting each [of the Aldine editions] in thousands of copies.”16 In Hythloday’s narrative, then, resourceful humans on one side of the world see the handiwork of resourceful humans from the other side of the world and, with a bit of practice, they reproduce it. No mention is made of the plants or plant-based fibers that must have supplied so much papermaking, nor would it make much difference in a fictional world. If Hythloday had said that the Utopians ultimately learned to make paper out of Japanese mulberry, it would be useless to question the claim. Mulberry trees may be written into existence on a fictional island. A Utopian ecosystem that is nowhere cannot lack natural resources.
Hythloday’s placeless history of the book in the fictional environment of Utopia is much like the book history narratives we have