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  • The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England by Joshua Calhoun
  • Douglas Bruster (bio)
Calhoun, Joshua. 2020. The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp xii + 212. ISBN 9780812251890, Hardback $55.00.

The word "Nature" in the title here means two things: both nature as "quality" and nature as our larger physical world. The relation of these two meanings is, in fact, a point of the book: paper pages were, are, and will continue to be natural things. With the full foretitle, Calhoun tips his hat to Adrian Johns's indispensable The Nature of the Book (2009), and it's worth noting from the outset that one of the many admirable aspects of The Nature of the Page is its attention to and respect for existing scholarship. In fact, while this book does many things well, one of the most useful is citing and summarizing a wealth of studies related to book history and its related technologies—particularly, the intertwined, natural histories of parchment, paper, and ink.

An early gesture reveals its overall strategy. Reproducing Robert Darnton's well-known chart of "The Communications Circuit", which sets out a social organization of human actors involved in book production and circulation (authors, publishers, booksellers, et al.), Calhoun pulls the camera back to 10,000 feet, embedding Darnton's fairly synchronic circuit in a much larger context of history and ecosystem. One can summarize the central question as follows: How have human communications been shaped by the natural materials used to fashion the media for those communications? Further, as human culture has moved from plant (papyrus) to animal (parchment) back to a plant/animal hybrid (paper, often "sized" with animal gelatin), how have these various stages, and the overlap of the media ecologies before, during, and after the transitions from one stage to the next, affected the meaning and experience of communication?

Between its introduction and afterword, five chapters contribute to the "story about paper in Renaissance England—about what it was elementally" (ix). These five chapters concern, in turn, the cellulose economy of paper; the role of flax (and hemp) in paper's emergence; "blots" as both thing and idea; the "sizing" of paper in early modern England; and the relation between physical environments and book decay. Some of these chapters [End Page 239] bear the traces of conference presentations, but each is scrupulously researched and, even as case studies, connect well with the larger argument of The Nature of the Page.

Calhoun is very good at getting us to see—both from 10,000 feet and closer up, through call-outs of texts, leaves, and annotations—the ways in which pages have always been implicated in the world of plants and animals. Even for scholars familiar with early texts, such connections can carry real surprise. An everyday analogy here comes in the domain of nutrition: as with those engaging in new diets (say, gluten-free, vegetarian, or vegan), everywhere one looks, culture has found a way to blend things that we had presumed to be separate. Very little is distinctly one thing or another, and most things (including paper pages) are interconnected. Calhoun continually shows how books—connected elementally to their materials of composition—are, at base, natural things.

To my mind the most important material in the book relates to sizing. Sizing was the application, to paper, of a glutinous coating typically derived from animal products (bones, skulls, hides, etc.). The word size in this sense is quite old, apparently dating to the early fifteenth century, when, according to the MED, it referred to a sticky substance used to prepare surfaces for gold or silver overlay (see sīse n.(2) and quotations). Because size in any discussion of books and paper is likely to produce confusion with size as measurement, and because Calhoun is otherwise interested in the history of words, this term might have been defined at more length in this study. But the key thing is his argument concerning the importance of sizing in the period, and its overlooked role in the history of...

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