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CHAPTER 2

The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper

A handmade sheet of paper provides documentation or physical evidence of a dialogue between human beings and nature.

—Timothy Barrett, “Aesthetics and the Future of the Craft”

In a controversial history of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sean Shesgreen claims that one of the three reasons for the anthology’s remarkable success in the 1960s and thereafter was its so-called innovational use of “Bible paper.”¹ According to Shesgreen, “Bible paper had previously been shunned by anthologists: transparent and flimsy, it tears easily and bleeds profusely.”² But the use of “Bible paper” allowed The Norton Anthology to offer 60 percent more content than its main competitor in a text that weighed 25 percent less, and more pages with less bulk allowed the printers to use a smaller size (octavo-size rather than quarto-size).³ The new, flimsy-paper anthology was an unprecedented success, but that success might be qualified by considering the degree to which substandard paper ultimately affected student perceptions of the literature printed on that paper. What message did the new media communicate? Is it possible that the “flimsy” paper emphasized functionality over form, coding its printed contents as means to an end (an acceptable course grade, for example) rather than as avenues of aesthetic exploration? In short, what is the rhetorical effect of cheap paper, especially as a medium for supposedly cherished literature?

Historically and conceptually, the anthology’s bookmaking innovation was hardly innovative. The flimsy paper is called “Bible paper” for a good reason: Bibles have a long history of being printed on cheap paper, as The Norton Anthology’s editors must have known. The trick of cutting paper costs to make a Bible more portable was used even before paper and printing: “Paris Bibles” from the thirteenth century were copied by secular scribes onto “tissue-thin parchment”⁴ to create a portable Bible “intended to meet the needs both of the student in the university classroom and the Mendicant preacher on a mission.”⁵ Printing-press technology itself developed only after papermaking technology reached Europe, bringing with it a cheaper alternative to parchment.⁶

In Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, Ian Green demonstrates that ”canny publishers used nearly every trick in the book to expand markets and maximize profits” on Bible sales, including the use of “cheaper paper.”⁷ As with Shesgreen’s discussion of Bible paper, scholars have focused on the increased portability, distribution, and ownership of cheaper Bibles. What tends to be overlooked are the aesthetic effects of the surfaces on which words appear. This oversight is particularly remarkable for three reasons. First, since current textual criticism has been deeply influenced by D. F. McKenzie’s work on the “sociology of texts” and the view that “forms effect meaning,” we might expect to read more about paper, one of the book’s most basic forms.⁸ Second, paper 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 about the paper quality of Bibles in relation to the quality of Shakespeare’s First and Second Folios suggests that the relative cheapness of Bible materials was inherently aesthetic. John 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; so it is no surprise that silty, muddy, or polluted water would render sheets of paper darker.⁴²

Looking a bit more closely, one can immediately see that the general impression of brownness is often enhanced by a network of flecks and fibers embedded in the page. They are ubiquitous in early texts to the point that they have become invisible to us. There are notable exceptions, however. Though most hairs in the pages of books are miniscule, and one has to look closely to see them, I find it hard to ignore long strands of hair that wind through the margins or printed areas of Renaissance books, even when the text on the page is not poeticizing the locks of a beloved. A feather embedded in a page of George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres is even harder to overlook; its placement in the margin points up a self-blazoning by the mourning lover in Dan Bartholomew.⁴³ Are we licensed to read this into the lines? Or to comment on the appropriateness of a feather appearing here, in a volume so preoccupied with textual production and misproduction, with material integration and disintegration? We can agree that unique instances of human marginalia in Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Gascoigne are noteworthy and are representative of, or at least pertinent to, broader patterns of Renaissance book interactions; might we not argue the same for unique instances of avian marginalia?

Hairs are more common than feathers, but vegetable matter of two varieties is most commonly embedded in paper: (1) bits and pieces of vegetable fibers that made their way into clothing (during flax processing) and finally into paper, and (2) flecks of organic matter, presumably from riparian flora upstream, that were too small to filter out of the papermaker’s vat. (As with the silty brownness described above, seasons and weather patterns affect the flecking of paper.) When one searches for readers’ marks in books, flecks of organic matter can seem purposeful at first glance; in books where readers have used small, marginal tick marks as the primary method of highlighting passages, it is sometimes hard to tell (particularly in microfilm or digital reproductions) if a mark is made by pen on the paper or if the mark is organic matter in the paper. Occasionally a “knot” of organic matter embedded in the page will cause errors in the printed text, interrupting the type. Sometimes a large piece of flax appears in paper, a husky piece of the stalk of the flax plant known as a “shive.”⁴⁴ An opening from a copy of the second edition of Hoby’s translation of The Book of the Courtier is particularly illustrative of the ecologies of textual production and consumption, and shows evidence of hair interrupting the impression of the typeface of a printed marginal note on the verso, a shive extending off the trimmed edge of the page from the margin of the recto, and a brown, iron gall ink manuscript note below the shive.⁴⁵

The largest, most noticeable shive I have found, in a copy of the first printing of More’s collected English writings (1557), bears the ink of a printed marginal note. Shives and husks of flax are supposed to be eliminated in the process of converting plant to clothing. One might make the argument that while some bibliographers prefer to focus on textual accidentals and substantives in the printed area, actual readers may have been much more knowledgeable about this type of “ecological accidental.” There is no human intention to be uncovered here, but the unexpected visibility of the world of things on which words were printed in Renaissance England yields an ecologically and poetically playful juxtaposition: the husk of flax interrupts a printed marginal reference to John 14, calling attention to physical substance beneath the citation of a passage in which Jesus explains the metaphysics of his incarnation. More striking, even, than bits of flax are swatches of cloth embedded in paper, like the approximately 12 x 12 millimeter swatch in a copy of Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince.⁴⁶ Appearing, appropriately, in “The Table of the Contents of the Book,” the texture of the fabric, with threads unravelling into the text block, emphasizes the rag content of the book’s pages. We will never know if a remarkable flax shive or an unpulped rag in the pages of Vaughan’s Bible was the inspiration for his poem “The Book.” What we do know is that Vaughan, like his contemporaries, comprehended the natural origins of paper and understood that flax was literally inhabited—broken in as clothing—before it was used in papermaking.⁴⁷