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

As he meditates on an old Bible, the narrator of Henry Vaughan's "The Book" (1655) has strange and beautiful visions: he imagines the lives of the plants, animals, and humans who have contributed to the material making up the book––the boards and the sheepskin, the rags and linen that were recycled into paper for its pages––and then imagines these same creatures resurrected in the afterlife, trees and sheep restored alongside with men. These visions reveal the old book to be not just a textual object but also an ecological meeting place, embedded in natural cycles of creation and corruption. This is a manner of looking and reading, a way of telling "natural" stories about the "cultural" artifact of the book, which Joshua Calhoun has taken up in his new book, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. With early modern handmade paper as his "marvelous but flawed protagonist" (8), Calhoun tells a story about bibliographic innovation, production, use, and decay in which human and nonhuman agency are always entangled, where the materiality of texts does not recede in the process of literary analysis but rather opens up new poetic and interpretative possibilities.

Two main lines of argument emerge from this narrative: first, that the historical readers of Renaissance books––including Shakespeare, Donne, and the translators of the King James Bible––had a fuller understanding of the natural origins of their books and of bookmaking practices, and developed a poetics of paper that was rooted in, and referred back to, the very material on which it was written; and second, that recovering the aesthetics of paper production, quality, and decay draws from and brings into dialogue contemporary debates in the fields of book history and ecocriticism, constituting an "ecology of texts"—what Calhoun calls "a necessary and timely extension" of D. F. Mackenzie's sociology of texts (19).

The book is organized into two parts: "Legible Ecologies" and "Indistinct Ecologies." In the first chapter, Calhoun sketches out a history of paper with a special emphasis on material scarcity, the movement of ideas and resources, and the human and ecological cost of the push for increasingly cheaper means of paper production. Chapter 2 is centered on "The Book," exploring Vaughan's "palimpsestic reading strategy," which allowed him to attend to the traces of plant, animal, and human life in a book––visible on the surface of the page as pieces of unprocessed linen or embedded hair, and in its text as metaphors with "vegetable origins" (80). The fascinating third chapter considers blots in early modern books––and one in particular, in a Folger Library copy of 2 Henry IV––as "accidentals": not just accidents but drawing the eye and supplementing the meaning of the text, changing the color and timbre of the reading as a musical accidental would. The second part of the chapter dwells on the language of blotting and erasure in the King James Bible, exploring how the coexistence of parchment (which could be razed) and paper (which had to be blotted) in this period contributed to the formation of two competing aesthetics of error and correction, two theological models for the forgiveness of sins.

Chapter 4, "Sizing Matters," focuses on animal sizing, a mostly invisible and often overlooked part of early modern bookmaking. As with the previous case studies, the chapter brings the poetic tropes referring to this aspect of the book's ecological makeup together with a material history of sizing practices. From this ecopoetic investigation, Calhoun draws a surprising and compelling conclusion about the effect of sizing on historical book use and rates of book survival—as opposed to the intuitive and widely accepted view that books that were most heavily used and annotated would be most vulnerable to decay and less likely to survive, he suggests that the presence and quality of...