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The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Joshua Calhoun
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Abstract

Made of recycled clothes, slaughtered animals, and felled trees, Bibles in Renaissance England were filled with visible traces of ecological matter, remainders that remind one that words on a page are thought fused with—and inflected by—matter. This essay places Henry Vaughan's poem “The Book” in 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. Historical writers and readers, who were directly involved in a flax-to-rags-to-paper economy, recognized and commented on the natural resources from which cheap, widely distributed Bibles and other texts were made. Further, this essay models a reading strategy that attends to the natural history of books, to both the function and the form of the organic matter used to mediate human ideas.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 2 , March 2011 , pp. 327 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

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