Milli mála - 2021, Page 196
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worms, and a host of other incidents destroyed books.46 The large-
scale destruction of books in the wake of the Reformation left sig-
nificant scars on the cultural imagination of early modern England.47
Repurposing of books was another frequent occurrence: the ever-
growing need for paper led those in the waste trade to turn manu-
scripts and unwanted print volumes into anything from endpaper
and pastedowns for new books to wrappers for groceries and privy
paper.48 “Pen, paper, inke, you feeble instruments,” admits the
anonymous poet in his 1595 sonnet collection Emaricdulfe.49 At the
same time, Juliet Fleming remarks, “paper was not necessarily the
most obvious, or suitable, medium for writing in early modern
England (nor, for that matter, was paper as ‘immaterial’ as it has
since become).”50 A surprising amount of writing from the period
is on glass, wood, fabric, or metal. Moreover, early modern paper
made from rags of flax cloth frequently contained flecks of plant
and textile matter, producing an uneven, challenging surface,
where “knots of organic matter … can interrupt typography.”51
This textual ecology dislocated poetry from the predictable site of a
written page, enmeshing it into a wider aggregation of entities and
things.
The scriptive ontology of early modern lyric is further compli-
cated by connections of poetry, especially lyric, with vocal perfor-
mance and music. Jennifer Richards challenges the widespread as-
sociation of print (and writing in general) with silent reading and
insists instead that early modern texts should be read as scripts of
vocal performance. As she argues, “the oral-aural context of reading
in this period produced voice- or performance-aware silent readers
as well as readers who literally animated the page with their
breath.”52 Moreover, in Renaissance England lyric’s “grounding in
sung performance was still intact” and “song was a vital aspect of
46 Smyth, Material Texts, 55–74; Pearson, Book Ownership, 10–13.
47 For example, see Ramsay, “‘Manuscripts.”
48 On uses of wastepaper in binding, see Smyth, Material Texts, 137–74; on book pages as privy
paper, see Yates, Error, 107–108.
49 Emaricdulfe, sonnet XXII.
50 Fleming, Graffiti, 10.
51 Calhoun, Nature of the Page, 52.
52 Richards, Voices and Books, 16.
DANILA SOKOLOV