Читать книгу The Nature of the Page - Joshua Calhoun - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION

Toward an Ecology of Texts

What must matter to the environmental humanities is how texts are entangled with and address the larger processes by which societies conceptualize and manage their environment.

—Hannes Bergthaller et al., “Mapping Common

Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities”

In “The Book,” a short poem published in 1655, Henry Vaughan observes that his Bible’s paper is made from flax plants and that its binding is made from the wood of a tree covered with the skin of a “harmless beast.” What happens to a Bible, Vaughan wonders, on the day of resurrection, when all things are restored to their perfect forms? Does the Bible revert to its vegetal, bestial origins? Vaughan’s poem raises questions about the earthly matter from which media are made, about how nonhuman objects in bookish format persist, interrupt, and alter the words they are made to record. Embedded in the pages of Renaissance texts are legible ecologies that record the environmental negotiations of people and things, of humans, humanists, and nonhumans. I return to “The Book” in Chapter 2, but here I introduce the poem in summary to call attention to its intriguing mode of reading. Vaughan’s reading of a book, like the reading of driftwood discussed in the Preface, draws on what is known in order to imagine the material history of the text in his hands. Like Leopold, Vaughan acknowledges his own role in the narrative as the one who is holding the object and envisioning its “unknown, but to some degree guessable” past. But then Vaughan’s reading takes a sudden, surprising turn: he pivots around the object to look from its past creation to its future destruction. Both book and reader intersect in a moment of flux, and Vaughan knows that the nonhuman things he holds, gathered in the past into the form of a book, must be scattered again in the future.

The Nature of the Page takes up and extends the Janus-faced mode of reading past and future that is modeled in “The Book.” The readings I offer here attempt to account for what the text is, at the moment and place of human intersection, but also to draw out the past and future lives of the nonhuman things we recognize, metonymically, as texts. In an influential essay that laid the groundwork for future scholarship on material texts, Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass call attention to the fact that a Renaissance text is “a provisional state in the circulation of matter.”¹ Literary critics and book historians have, in recent years, drawn attention to the provisionality of texts as they circulate in society, but The Nature of the Page extends the conversation about provisions and provisionality to its literal roots. Drawing attention to ecological provisionality in its many senses—temporary, preliminary, provident, conditional—I adjust the depth of field so that nonhuman histories (and futures) of material 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 tended to tell, as is best demonstrated by Darnton’s influential schematic diagram “The Communications Circuit” (see Figure 1). In the diagram, only outputs—human labor and the texts generated by that labor—are mapped; the nonhuman inputs are assumed. Like a book in Utopia, books in Darnton’s circuit exist as if in a human vacuum rather than in an ecosystem of plants, animals, and minerals whose availability or scarcity dictates what a text can be at any given time and in any given place.¹⁷ Leslie Howsam praises Darnton’s model for its “emphasis on human agency in the making and use of books,” calling attention to a sociological shift in book history, one that brought human labor into focus.¹⁸ This important shift in book history was best and most famously sounded by D. F. McKenzie in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Redefining bibliography as “the study of the sociology of texts,” McKenzie insisted that humans must be a part of the stories that scholars tell about the history of books, and he employed the word “sociology” in order to further expand the field’s purview to include human agency.¹⁹ The brilliance of McKenzie’s approach was that even as it extended the scope of an already-overextended field or “tropical rain forest,” it offered a compelling framework for revisiting old books and for imagining new ways of examining them. McKenzie claimed that a sociological approach to texts could lead to new insights and discoveries because “it can, in short, show the human presence in any recorded text.”²⁰ And yet, as Mark Vareschi has argued, the groundbreaking work of book historians such as McKenzie “inevitably [has] to locate action and intention in known human actors” such that we are left with “a delicate, and often unsatisfactory, balance being struck between the interpretive richness offered by their attention to the material text and the desire to justify such interpretations through recourse to the choices of authors, printers, publishers, apprentices, and others.”²¹

FIGURE 1. “The Communications Circuit,” in Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” (1982). Reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press.

What about nonhuman presence in texts, then? The Nature of the Page advocates an “ecology of texts” as a necessary and timely extension of McKenzie’s sociology of texts.²² Like a sociology of texts, an ecology of texts further extends the field, bringing more agents into play. It suggests, in a manner akin to that of McKenzie, that there is more to see and discover in the pages we have turned. An ecology of texts is an extension that has been latent in book history at least since Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s seminal study, The Coming of the Book.²³ Febvre and Martin, like other scholars of the Annales school in 1960s France, are often credited with drawing attention to “the general pattern of book production and consumption” rather than “fine points of bibliography.”²⁴ But in their discussion of papermaking as a collaboration of the “industrial” and the “natural,” one can also see the seed of a more ecologically attentive approach: “The story, in brief, of the papermaking industry is that its development was always conditional on the supply of its raw materials.”²⁵ Even the language of Darnton’s communications circuit draws on ecological metaphors: “Books belong to circuits of communication that operate in consistent patterns…. By unearthing those circuits, historians can show that books do not merely recount history; they make it” (emphasis mine).²⁶ “Unearthing,” though, requires one more step: the representation of the natural matter that makes the books that make history. One need not have any special investment in environmentalism to appreciate how much of the story we miss if we accept natural resources as givens rather than variables in the history of media.

On the other hand, one need not have any special investment in Renaissance poetry or book history to notice an important connection between the long, pollutive history of paper mills and Rob Nixon’s attention, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, to “paper trail identity” and the ways “writing has become fundamental to petro-modernity’s control of labor.”²⁷ Indeed, in the section “Orality, Geology, and Writing: The Technologies of Encounter” Nixon puts that work in a direct conversation with “The Sociology of a Text: Oral Culture, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand,” the final chapter of McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts—and further highlights the “slow violence” that becomes visible when we attend to human presence in texts.²⁸ Early handmade paper, which has played such an important role in codicological and bibliographical research of the past, is filled with other kinds of legible evidence about histories of weather and weaving, of ports and imports and exports, of environmental exploitation and toxic effluence. As Diane Kelsey McColley claims in a reading of Vaughan’s poetry, “Part of ecological thinking is knowing where our artifacts come from, with what cost to the earth, to habitats, to species, to individuals of those species, and in human labor.”²⁹

Regardless of what we emphasize individually when we write about literature of the past, the great majority of humanities scholars access primary sources not only in editions, but also in archival libraries, where we hold and read and handle the slowly decaying remains of historical ecosystems that we call “Renaissance England” or “postcolonial Africa” or “nineteenth-century Latin American literature.” (Throughout this book, I use the term “archival libraries” when designating specific, material spaces that facilitate on-site access to published and unpublished historical records.)³⁰ Bruce Holsinger suggests that “to be a medievalist is to be hopelessly implicated in and to constantly witness the mass deaths of countless sheep, lambs, calves, and goats for the means of literary transmission.”³¹ In doing so, Holsinger raises important concerns about the implications and the social and environmental ethics of archival research, topics to which I return in this book, especially in the final chapter. My starting point, though, is aesthetics as much as ethics, scholarly due diligence as much as environmental awareness. Seeing and emphasizing the organic nature of the texts we examine can give rhetorical weight to the matter from which texts are made and can begin to account for the crucial negotiations between humans and the world of things in the acts of creating (and preserving) material records of ideas.

We accept, as readers and as writers, that words on matter never perfectly replicate ideas in the mind. We accept and even enjoy these incongruities between mind and matter, but our fascination with the agency of humans, with human language, with human media, tends to blur our ability to see the ecological negotiations that undergird textual creation and circulation. Using biological metaphors like “medial ecologies,” we tend to overlook the actual ecologies that make media possible.³² And yet, as this book demonstrates, the affordances of a particular media form are determined by the affordances of the available plants, animals, and minerals used to create those forms. Natural resources can be imagined as boundless in Utopia; anywhere else, as the inputs from the natural world change, so do the outputs—the books themselves. A poem printed on paper can be read and circulated and preserved differently than a poem written on parchment or engraved on a stone monument or, for that matter, a poem inscribed on a cucumber.³³

Confluence: Academic, Conservatorial, Artisanal

Inscribed cucumbers, as it happens, are a part of paper’s fascinating history of raw materials to rags to reading matter, a history that has been told and retold in prose and in poetry for centuries. The story of paper is captivating in part because paper is both perfectly familiar, a quotidian object used in unremarkable ways each day, and perfectly exceptional, a remarkably important cultural commodity with an intriguing backstory. In The New Organon (1620), Francis Bacon says paper is both “a common enough thing” and “a unique instance of art,” an “absolutely unique” artificial material that, although made from nature “change[s] her completely.”³⁴ Fascination with the simultaneous oddity and mundanity of paper has inspired a vast body of literature on its history and uses, but the works that this book engages can be grouped into three kinds of expertise on early handmade paper, three streams of interest: academic, conservatorial, and artisanal. These streams of interest begin with different kinds of questions, are driven by different currents, and, as one would expect, end by telling stories in which certain kinds of details tend to surface. When they converge in The Nature of the Page, the currents shift and roil at the confluence, different kinds of details find their way to the surface, and a new, ecological story can be told about hundreds of years of human ideas entangled in plant fibers.

Academic studies focused on particular periods and/or techniques, especially those focused on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handmade paper in England, are one set of sources that have contributed much to our knowledge of papermaking and paper use in recent years.³⁵ Despite its modest title, John Bidwell’s essay “French Paper in English Books” still serves as one of the best, most concise introductions to papermaking in and around England from the mid-1500s through the late 1600s, and Helen Smith’s recent essay, subtitled “The Proliferating Surfaces of Early Modern Paper,” offers an overview of paper importation and papermaking in Renaissance England that brilliantly condenses the story into a dozen impressively documented paragraphs.³⁶ Period-focused introductions to the study of book history are similarly insightful as guides to early paper production and use.³⁷ Renewed interest in the materiality of textual forms has inspired a number of more focused studies that build upon standard works in the field, such as D. C. Coleman’s The British Paper Industry, 1495–1860 and Richard L. Hills’s Papermaking in Britain, 1488–1988, while offering exciting new insights into the social circulation of paper.³⁸ Heather Wolfe’s groundbreaking research on paper costs, which calls into question the often-repeated claim that writing paper was an expensive commodity in the Renaissance, stands out as an example of new research that corrects overgeneralizations that have long been accepted as fact.³⁹ Finally, because of its unique focus on pre-Gutenberg paper outside of Europe, Jonathan M. Bloom’s Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World has proven an indispensable resource, one that strips away assumptions and reminds readers who typically handle sixteenth-century English books that the ink-imprinted, flax-based paper in those volumes is just one realized possibility, one version of paper among many.⁴⁰ Taken together as a stream of interest in paper and paper-making, these scholarly studies brim with questions about how paper came to be and how it came to be used, and their answers to these questions contribute invaluable historical context to the story that this book tells.⁴¹

Conservatorial interest in stabilizing and preserving the paper that has survived to the present day contributes another stream of vital information about paper and papermaking. “Because so much of our heritage … is paper-based, the importance of these artifacts is undeniable, and the need to conserve them is critical,” writes Timothy P. Whalen, director of the Getty Conservation Institute, in a foreword to Historical Perspectives in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper.⁴² The volume, edited by Margaret Holben Ellis and comprised of a variety of historical perspectives on paper conservation, brings together centuries of dialogue about paper as a valued but imperfectly preserved object. A more focused but equally essential work in this category, John Krill’s English Artists’ Paper: Renaissance to Regency offers a fine-grained account of “the more than supportive role which paper has played in the graphic arts” told by an expert paper conservator with decades of hands-on experience in world-class museums.⁴³ More recently, Fabriano: City of Medieval and Renaissance Paper-making, by Sylvia Rodgers Albro, a senior paper conservator at the Library of Congress, offers an impressive, capacious history of papermaking materials and methods while focusing the narrative on a single locale.⁴⁴ Both Krill’s and Albro’s volumes are heavily and beautifully illustrated so that readers can see, for instance, photomicrographs of flax and cotton fibers at 50x magnification.⁴⁵ A significant development in the spread of conservatorial expertise between Krill’s book (2002) and Albro’s book (2016) is that in recent years, conservators at many institutions have begun publishing short, heavily illustrated, blog-style explorations filled with detailed, useful information about paper preservation. Recent posts to the British Library’s Collection Care blog have included discussions of insect-damaged pages bound in manuscript fragments as well as “a leaf-casting machine [that] can transform a damaged object in an instant with the help of paper pulp, gravity, and suction.”⁴⁶ The conservation process, then, has grown increasingly visual and accessible as archives and libraries self-publish content on their websites and share images from the conservation lab on social media.

The artisanal work of hand papermakers contributes a third stream of expert information on early handmade paper. Broadly speaking, while book historians focus on recovering what was and while conservators focus on preserving what is, hand papermakers tend to be uniquely interested in imagining what can be. They approach the materials differently, ask different kinds of questions, and emphasize aspects of the process that a book historian might easily overlook. Like conservators, they think about fibers and fiber structure. They also think not only about the fibers that have been used historically for paper, but also about fibers that can be used—and the chemical composition of those fibers. For instance, in a brief introduction to the craft, papermaker Walter Hamady is quick to point out that “the main ingredient for all natural paper is simply CELLULOSE FIBER. Most living plants are made up of this fiber and, properly prepared, can produce some kind of paper.”⁴⁷ Some papermakers, like Timothy Barrett, are actively striving to understand and replicate the techniques of early hand papermakers and publishing what they learn from that quest.⁴⁸ Barrett’s website, Paper Through Time: Nondestructive Analysis of 14th- Through 19th-Century Papers, represents the gathered expertise of a master papermaker who is also deeply invested in conservation, and the introduction offered on that site, “European Papermaking Techniques, 1300–1800,” is an essential contribution to scholarship on the history of papermaking.⁴⁹ The best broad overview in this category is Therese Weber’s The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years, a comprehensive history of papermaking filled with details and insights and connections I have not found in other histories of paper.⁵⁰ Throughout this work I return again and again to the published work of papermakers like Hamady, Barrett, and Weber, to short articles printed in the journal Hand Papermaking, and to personal notes I have taken while interviewing master papermakers, particularly Robert Possehl.

Overview

The Nature of the Page is organized in two parts, “Legible Ecologies” and “Indistinct Ecologies,” both of which emphasize the varied ways that humans recognize or do not recognize the plants, animals, and minerals in their media. Part I, “Legible Ecologies,” takes up a narrative that is familiar to anyone who has engaged with the history of papermaking: handmade paper is made from other substances that circulated in societies, and not only papermakers and bookmakers but also readers and writers thought about the circulation of these materials. However, while previous studies of papermaking have tended to focus on the circulation of human commodities, especially rags, this work traces human commodities back to nonhuman materials such as flax, hemp, and straw. Part II, “Indistinct Ecologies,” takes up interactions with handmade paper that have deep and abiding significance for writers and readers from past to present, but that have gone largely unnoticed and unread in the stories that we tell about books. What I show in these chapters is that when we pay attention to the ecology of texts, that is, when we question the broader range of human and nonhuman interactions that allow books to come into being, we begin to understand not just how humans use natural resources to convey ideas, but also how these nonhuman elements alter the ways human ideas can be expressed and even sometimes conceived.

The chapters in Part I, “Legible Ecologies,” focus primarily on how writers and readers and printers used or negotiated with available ecologies in order to produce usable texts. In Part I, playfulness is an important part of the conversation, particularly the ways in which legibilities overlap and allow more poetic, playful, or surprising readings. In my use of the word, legibility—from the Latin for “readable” (legibilis), which is from the Latin legere, “to read”—can denote the ability to read an entire text and its component parts, not just the words on a page. Legibility, in this sense, allows a user to understand not just what can be done with the ideas conveyed by the materials, but also what can be done with the material conveyance itself (and its component parts). In Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio’s Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700 and in William H. Sherman’s Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, the authors justify the use of the word “use” (as opposed to “reading”) by citing 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 3 further demonstrates how the language of blots seeps into the King James Bible, marking another well-known king, King David, with an indelible reminder of his past mistakes. Ultimately, I argue that metaphors for thinking about error and reformation are linked to common writing technologies, specifically to the fundamentally different affordances of parchment and paper.

Chapter 4, “Sizing Matters: Annotating Animals in Renaissance England,” reveals a surprising textual interaction between animals and readers. The most obscure natural ingredient in early printed books, and one that is almost uniformly overlooked despite scholarly interest in Renaissance reading practices, is “animal sizing,” a viscous mixture made from gelatinized animal parts and used to coat the surface of paper so that ink would not blot into its fibers. Animals were integral elements of the literary ecosystem. Demonstrating how Renaissance reading habits and reading habitats are systemically linked, my work breaks new ground by arguing that scholarly data on book use and book survival in the period are skewed—and that future studies can produce more reliable data by recognizing the role of animals in paper books.

Focusing on John Donne’s “A Valediction: Of the Book” and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Chapter 5, “This Book, as Long Lived as the Elements: Climate Control, Biodeterioration, and the Poetics of Decay,” explores book biodeterioration across time by considering how Renaissance writers imagined book decay then, and how Renaissance scholars imagine book decay now. Taking its cue from the Sonnets themselves, the chapter explores the husbandry of paper memorials—how writers imagined paper as a living and dying monument that could outlast its own unique copy text. I explore these concerns, penned in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the point of view of a reader in an archival library in the twenty-first century, a century that if current environmental models prove true, could be the last full century in which original copies of Donne’s and Shakespeare’s poetry on paper can be preserved intact. The indistinct ecologies under consideration in this final chapter are the fossil fuels and nuclear energy used to create climate-controlled archival microbiomes where we can lose sight of the corruptible nature of books and of the poetics of decay.

Each of the five chapters explores a mode of negotiation with paper media: making paper (Chapter 1), reading paper (Chapter 2), editing on paper (Chapter 3), annotating printed paper (Chapter 4), preserving paper records (Chapter 5). And yet, focused as the chapters are on legibility and use—on readers and writers negotiating with an environment in order to record and transmit and store ideas—the chapter progression also works out the life arc of a paper text; this book’s two parts, “Legible Ecologies” and “Indistinct Ecologies,” describe the two broad phases in the ecological life of a handmade page: construction and destruction. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss details like cellulose and flax to show how a sheet of paper comes into existence in Renaissance England. Chapters 3–5 consider paper after its construction and examine how annotation and revision and nonhuman biodeterioration affect its contents and its uses (and users). But this work also suggests that we might pull the frame back even farther, revealing that the progression described above is not only about the life of a book, but also, and more fundamentally, about the lives of plants and animals and minerals as they move through society in textual form. Early handmade paper is a case study for a much broader methodology; I strive, in these pages, to use paper’s ephemeral form to call attention to the ecosystemic relationship that always exists between human ideas and nonhuman matter.

Always our readings of texts are broadened or narrowed by what we acknowledge as part of the creation process. When we consider how the human species seeks to make sense of the world by using the organisms around them to make records of the past, when we consider how many plants and animals and minerals are housed in archival libraries and how vital these records are and may be to humanities and environmental humanities scholars alike, we could call disinterest in the ecology of texts an embarrassing oversight. We could also call it a prelude to a singularly exciting future direction for collaborative scholarship. Whether or not there is an ethical obligation to, in McKenzie’s words, “show the human presence” in texts, we have long acknowledged that we cannot really make sense of texts in the world without accounting for human presence. And whether or not there is an ethical obligation to show the nonhuman presence in texts, I do not think we can make sense of the textual habits of humans without accounting for textual habitats, how the human species seeks to make sense of the world by using the organisms around them to make records of the past. Natural resources are provisional, seasonal, and geographically specific. To accept them as givens in the stories we tell about texts is to miss out on a vibrant history of the ecological negotiations and technological contrivances used to hold and share and save written records of human ideas.