The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
an emblem in Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586) with the motto Uses libri, non lectio prudentes facit, “Using a book, not reading it, makes us wise.”51 Book use as defined against some ideal of book reading has been productively explored in other periods in works such as Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain and in Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature.52 And Jeffrey Todd Knight has argued that “conceptions of utility … remain largely bound to modern categories, making room enough for texts but little for textual objects.”53 In response, Knight’s work broadens the conversation about book use, considering, for example, books that were used primarily for furniture, not reading. More recently, Helen Smith has explored “the multitudinous uses of paper in early modern England,” drawing special attention to the many uses of paper “that have nothing to do with writing.”54 And digital projects such as Cooking in the Archives and the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective are revealing, among many other things, just how important a role recycled paper played in Renaissance kitchens.55 Legibility as use also productively contributes to conversations about historical literacy rates, since there may be a number of different kinds of literacies or use skills at play in regard to a work of literature.
Chapter 1, “Substances Used to Convey Ideas: Ship Sails, Cellulose, and Spinning Wheels,” describes the transformation of a plant into a page of paper and considers how ecological scarcity has affected the history of the book from the beginning of papermaking in England until the latter half of the eighteenth century. It is easy to overlook the fact that most of the papermaking process involves working with materials that are not paper. Papermakers pulp and hydrate and draw out and dehydrate fibrous, absorbent plant matter as though they were alchemists transmuting a worthless substance—an old ship sail or a ragged smock, for instance—into an object as valuable as gold in terms of social history. (By contrast, parchment, an animal skin that has been prepared, not made, remains recognizable as an alteration of the thing it was before: a skin.) We know that paper’s essential substance must derive from somewhere, and the first chapter demonstrates the importance of identifying what paper is and where it comes from. Placing paper history and, by extension, book history into a real ecological context rather than imagining it in a utopian nowhere, I argue that the standard narrative of rag shortages and eventual human innovation in the form of wood-pulp paper simplifies book history at the expense of environmental history. Despite centuries of international rag shortage and despite an abundance of local plants with suitable cellulose content for papermaking, hundreds of years pass without notable adjustments to well-documented ecological scarcity: Henry David Thoreau’s paper is made from recycled rags just like Jane Austen’s paper and Queen Elizabeth I’s paper and Geoffrey Chaucer’s paper.
Chapter 2, “The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper,” examines Henry Vaughan’s poem “The Book” as part of a broader conversation about the poetics of paper: the rhetorical effects of the varied colors and qualities of paper used in the production of the vernacular Bibles that transformed reading practices in Renaissance England. The chapter also prompts a broader discussion about the rhetorical effects of flora and fauna in books, especially during the roughly four centuries (1450s to 1850s) when books were printed on paper made from recycled clothing. I find, in Vaughan’s poem, a model of a Renaissance reader poring over an old book (a family Bible), pondering the legibility of its ecological history, offering hard evidence about the volume’s structure. Like so many literary historians, Vaughan cannot resist the urge to narrate more than the evidence indicates. The history becomes an imagined story about the people who wore the linen clothing that became the paper, about the calf and the tree that became the book’s binding, and about their future fate. The poetics of paper, the awareness that paper quality and prosody are intertwined, is rooted in an ecological mode of thinking, one that revels in the interconnectedness of heavenly ideas and earthly things sewn together in the form of a printed Bible.
The last three chapters, grouped in Part II, “Indistinct Ecologies,” explore ecological aspects of books and paper that are easy to overlook, but that have shaped the ways humans used nonhuman materials to record ideas. From a subjective perspective, we might say they are illegible, but objectively speaking, the ecologies themselves are legible—perhaps unknown, but certainly, as I show, guessable. While I demonstrate that to read with a greater ecological awareness is to approach texts more like Renaissance readers, I am equally interested in what was missed, and even in what we can see now that they could not. Here Heidi Brayman’s designation “abecedarian literacy” is useful, for though she uses the term in reference to “the most elementary vernacular reader” in the early modern period, we might think of ourselves as abecedarian readers of textual ecology.56 While Chapters 1 and 2 consider ecology that was visible and notable to Renaissance readers and writers, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine aspects of book ecology that, while influential and important in terms of book production, were less visible to the average sixteenth- and seventeenth-century book user and that are nearly invisible to us now. Intrigued by these moments when things on which words are affixed become or are treated as invisible, illegible, indistinct, I work to fill gaps in our scholarly knowledge, but I also expose gaps and raise questions. Where what can be guessed is limited by available data, I try to shine light rather than shy away because I mean for this work to instigate more active attention to the ecologies from which our texts are made, and to the ways in which these ecologies inflect our engagement with the past and the future.
The title of Part II draws from and converses with The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, particularly Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi’s introduction to the collection in which they rely on the influential sixteenth-century theologian Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity to call human exceptionalism into question: “In Hooker’s account, a fully ripened man emerges as somewhat stunted in growth and capacity when positioned amidst the universe of other created things.” Hooker, they observe, calls attention to “humankind’s complex embeddedness among creaturely life on earth,” to what the authors call “the potential for human indistinction.”57 The work of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities is filled with decentering metaphors such as “entanglement,” “embeddedness,” “networks”; however, “indistinct” calls attention to an observer who, making one thing come distinctly into focus, risks making other things indistinct. We might say we have to choose forest or trees, a metaphor that applies, but also one that brings us back around to paper, to the reminder that the ecologies of even this paragraph have been indistinct: Feerick and Nardizzi and the twentieth-century edition of Hooker that they cite are not persons, but trees. Their ideas came to me not in human-, but in tree-form. Typing these lines onto a paper-shaped rectangle on my computer screen, I expect to be similarly translated into words printed on tree pulp. Then the ecologies of these lines, of the many screens and scraps of paper used in rendering them readable in the form of this book or ebook, may be indistinct, but like Leopold’s driftwood board, they will remain guessable.
Chapter 3, “How to Read a Blot: Historiography and Renaissance Ecologies of Inscriptive Error,” opens by pondering a large blot on a single copy of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV in one of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s First Folios. In that chapter, I show how one might read an indistinct stain on a page, not only metaphorically, but also materially, to better understand the mixed-media surfaces on which readers and writers (and printers) recorded and revised history from the time of Richard II (1367–1400), Henry IV (1367–1413), and Henry V (1386–1422) to the time of Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. Chapter