Renaissance Bibles on Organic Paper

Just the other day, I read Joshua Calhoun’s essay, “The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper” in the PMLA 126:2 (March 2011). It is an essay squarely in the tradition of codicology — the study of bookmaking — and discusses how paper was made from flax, a living plant, in the Renaissance. Other things might be embedded in the paper from the paper-making process: discolored water, flecks of organic matter, plant fibers, human hair, large husky pieces of the stalk of the flax plant, known as shives, bits of cloth, even bookworms — which were not metaphors for avid readers, but actual worms that ate through the paper!

In order to make the Bible widely available in English, Renaissance printers often used affordable paper — cheap paper made from rough flax. The living Word was printed on paper visibly made from the living world. Henry Vaughn, an early modern poet, wrote about this in his poem, “The Book.”

Eternal God! Maker of all
That have lived here since the man’s fall;
The Rock of Ages! in whose shade
They live unseen, when here they fade;

Thou knew’st this paper when it was
Mere seed, and after that but grass;
Before ’twas dressed or spun, and when
Made linen, who did wear it then:
What were their lives, their thoughts, and deeds,
Whether good corn or fruitless weeds.

Thou knew’st this tree when a green shade
Covered it, since a cover made,
And where it flourished, grew, and spread,
As if it never should be dead.

Thou knew’st this harmless beast when he
Did live and feed by Thy decree
On each green thing; then slept (well fed)
Clothed with this skin which now lies spread
A covering o’er this aged book;
Which makes me wisely weep, and look
On my own dust; mere dust it is,
But not so dry and clean as this.
Thou knew’st and saw’st them all, and though
Now scattered thus, dost know them so.

O knowing, glorious Spirit! when
Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men,
When Thou shalt make all new again,
Destroying only death and pain,
Give him amongst Thy works a place
Who in them loved and sought Thy face!

Henry Vaughn (1655)

The first line in this poem strikingly alludes to the beginning of the Nicene Creed, which could be incorporated in the Anglican church services. The first stanza invokes the fall of man, as recorded in Genesis 3, while the second goes on to meditate on God’s providential foresight into the future — his ability to know the very paper on which the story of Genesis would be printed in the Renaissance and its origins in seed, in grass,  before it was ever dressed, spun or made into linen. The last two lines of the  second stanza turn the natural origins of paper toward metaphor: toward an acknowledgment that the lives and deeds and thoughts of people who wore the linen could be either “good corn” or ” fruitless weeds.”

The poet notes the tree that was used to make the wooden cover of his book, and that allusion to the “Tree”  is rich with implications and for connections to the tree of Genesis —  the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — and the tree, the Cross, that Christ was crucified upon to redeem sinners and save them.

In the third stanza, the poet remembers the “harmless beast,” one of God’s innocent creatures, that gave up its skin to make leather to cover the wooden cover of the book. In that very remembering, the poet alludes to the animal sacrifice that God made in the garden of Eden in order to make skins to cover Adam and Eve when they were ashamed of their nakedness. The death of a creature, and the memory of how sin entered Eden, causes the poet to meditate on his own dust and to weep for the reality that death is part of our experience of the world. At the same time, the poet knows that God knows and sees everything.

This leads him in the final stanza to exalt in the realization that God will restore “trees, beasts and men” when he shall “make all new again.” He looks forward to a place in heaven, after God has destroyed death and pain, for all those who love God and seek his face. These thoughts come from an incredible inspiration for the poem is an observant response to the paper on which Henry Vaughn’s book was printed.

In 2011, the 4ooth anniversary of the 1611 printing of the King James Bible, it is worth remembering the extraordinary ways that the Bible came to people in the Renaissance and continues to reach people all over the world to this very day.

King James Bible – 1613

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