The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. By Joshua Calhoun

Abstract

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.