The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England by Joshua Calhoun (review)

The preface to this provocative book takes its epigraph from As You Like It: Duke Senior, unfolding to his companions the benefits of their banishment, describes how they will find ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones’ (2.1.16–17). It makes a suitable motto for The Nature of the Page, in which Joshua Calhoun finds the literary written through the natural world. This is a monograph that mines the metaphorical resources of paper and its constituent materials—flax seeds, linen, ‘gelatinized animal parts’ (p. 15)—and restlessly investigates how these resources have been exploited by writers over the last four centuries. This ecocritical approach yields conclusions that are frequently stimulating, often surprising and sometimes genuinely enlightening.

The Nature of the Page is organized into five chapters, each addressing a different interaction—or ‘mode of negotiation’ (p. 16)—with paper. The first chapter discusses its manufacture, focused mostly on a study of the late-eighteenth-century Pomeranian paper-maker Matthias Koops. The second shows how paper’s pre-life as linen rags was imagined poetically in early modern England, influenced in particular by Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book’. The third chapter addresses the different ways in which errors were removed from early modern books—scraped from parchment or blotted out of paper—and their differing poetic resonances. The fourth chapter examines how a sized page, unlike its unsized equivalent, could hold annotations, exploring both the opportunities this enabled for metaphor and the consequences it caused for book survival rates. And the fifth stays on this conservationist theme, showing how modern and early modern expectations of bibliographical survival differ and musing on how this affects critical interpretation.

Calhoun repeatedly imagines his method as ‘adjusting the depth of field’ (p. 3), allowing ‘nonhuman histories (and futures) of material texts’ to ‘come into view and become legible’ (p. 2). His book is strongest when it can read these histories without rendering illegible the writing on the page, bringing together both environmental and literary insights. These readings arrive reliably throughout. For instance, Calhoun shows how Koops and Vaughan forced their readers to think about what lay physically beneath their words—Koops by printing his history of paper on straw-and wood-papers of his own invention, Vaughan by imagining the prior lives of the leather, linen, and wood that made up the book in front of him. Koops and Vaughan are the twin animating spirits of The Nature of the Page but the book is filled with other lively images. Calhoun describes delightfully how the gradual movement from parchment to paper led to a parallel shift in metaphors of erasure: when the translators of the King James Bible use ‘blot’ with five times the frequency of any previous translation, he notes, they seem ‘simply to be modernising the metaphors’ (p. 95). And when Falstaff tells the audience of The Merry Wives of Windsor that ‘you may know by my size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking’ (3.5.11–12), Calhoun shows that Shakespeare is making use of a paper-based trope. Ink would sink unreadably unto unsized paper but this pun, as Calhoun ably explains, ‘reverses material expectations: while a lack of size makes paper sink, Falstaff’s ample size makes him sink’ (p. 120). The Nature of the Page is characterized by such moments.

But Calhoun’s adjustment of the depth of field does occasionally cause a loss of focus—for instance, in his inconsistent treatment of the book in Vaughan’s poem ‘The Book’. Calhoun variously describes the subject of this poem as ‘an old book (a family Bible)’ (p. 13), Vaughan’s ‘“cheap” Bible’ (p. 47), ‘a printed Bible’ (p. 68) and ‘an “aged book”—probably an old Bible’ (p. 126). But the word ‘Bible’ does not feature in...