Calhoun 2011

Joshua Calhoun. "The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper." PMLA 126.2 (2011): 327-344.

• 327 ...what is the rhetorical effect of cheap paper, especially as a medium for supposedly cherished literature?
• 328: [rhetorical effects of surfaces as well as] paper is one of the formal features most legible to historical readers
• the natural history of the book
• connecting H Vaughan's "The Book" to "polychronic readings" of Latour and Serres (sans citation though?)
• 329 Vaughan's poem...engages in 16th- and 17th-century debates about cheap media and the production of a vernacular Bible in England, and it addressed modern critical concerns about material culture, the thingness of words, and the sociology of texts.
  • McKenzie 1986
• l/u Krill English Artists' Paper: Renaissance to Regency, Oak Knoll, 1987
• 331ff remnants of plant matter, shives, etc in EM paper -> ecological accidentals (333)
• 333 Shives like this one are supposed to be eliminated in the process of converting plant to clothing. Their presence in the text is a reminder to Renaissance readers of the sartorial associations of paper. One might argue that, while some bibliographers prefer to focus on textual accidentals and substantives in the printed area, actual readers may have been more knowledgable about this type of ecological accidental.
• There is no intentional rhetorical interplay between words and matter, but there is the potential for it.
• We do know that Vaughan, like his contemporaries, comprehended the natural origins of paper and understood that flax had to be literally inhabited -- broken in as clothing -- before it could be used in papermaking.
  • l/u Hunter Papermaking for verification
• 334 Present function does not obliterate past form.
  • Stallybrass/Jones on clothes' economic and mnemonic functionality
• 335 Rags -- flax that has been further processed through inhabitation - frequently slides into associations with paper[.]
• gender implications -- women closer to flax/spinning/weaving work -- interesting
• 338 ...Diane Kelsey McColley claims, "Part of ecological thinking is knowing where our artifacts come from, with what cost to the earth, to habitats, to species, to individuals of those species, and in human labor"
• Composed and printed during a century of religious reformation and scientific revolution, the poem raises a crucial question: how should one resolve the tension between ideas and the natural matter that mediates those ideas in the forms of texts?
• 339 "The Book" is exceptional for its ability to draw multiple temporalities and actors (human and nonhuman) into a conversation about the translation of ideas into matter that is centered on concerns about the textual corruption of Bibles.
• 340 Bibliography and literary criticism can also recover nonhuman actors in the networks of textual produciton, and Vaughan's close reading of his own Bible models such critical work.
• 341 I have emphasized location in this essay by focusing on flax, a geographically determined natural resource from which Western books were made from the 1400s through the late 1800s.
• etiology, assigning cause