An innovative study of books and reading that focuses on papermaking in the Renaissance In The Nature of the Page, Joshua Calhoun tells the story of handmade paper in Renaissance England and beyond. For most of the history of printing, paper was made primarily from recycled rags, so this is a story about using old clothes to tell new stories, about plants used to make clothes, and about plants that frustrated papermakers' best attempts to replace scarce natural resources with abundant ones. Because plants, like humans, are susceptible to the ravages of time, it is also a story of corruption and the hope that we can preserve the things we love from decay. Combining environmental and bibliographical research with deft literary analysis, Calhoun reveals how much we have left to discover in familiar texts. He describes the transformation of plant material into a sheet of paper, details how ecological availability or scarcity influenced literary output in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and examines the impact of the various colors and qualities of paper on early modern reading practices. Through a discussion of sizing-the mixture used to coat the surface of paper so that ink would not blot into its fibers-he reveals a surprising textual interaction between animals and readers. He shows how we might read an indistinct stain on the page of an early modern book to better understand the mixed media surfaces on which readers, writers, and printers recorded and revised history. Lastly, Calhoun considers how early modern writers imagined paper decay and how modern scholars grapple with biodeterioration today. Exploring the poetic interplay between human ideas and the plant, animal, and mineral forms through which they are mediated, The Nature of the Page prompts readers to reconsider the role of the natural world in everything from old books to new smartphones.

This collection explores the rich literary and visual origins and afterlives of the popular legend. It examines Robin's portrayal as outlaw hero and the significance of his traditional setting in the 'merry greenwood,' both in England and in the Brandywine Valley that became the Sherwood Forest of illustrators Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. Complemented by thirty black-and-white illustrations and six color plates, the varied essays in this collection should deepen and enrich the study of a figure of seemingly endless variety. Through the analysis of various 'texts'_May games, ballads, broadsides, legal archives, operettas, illustrated children's book, English theater, Chinese outlaw fiction, and Japanese Kabuki drama_contributors illuminate the many ways in which the traditional images, and those of analogous legends, have been produced and reproduced across cultures and times.