and Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.
Wilson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature, and shared the following:
Opening Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature at page 99 puts us near the beginning of chapter 3 of 4. We’re over half way through the book (excluding endnotes), which suddenly makes it seem shorter than it had felt to write. Taking part in a pattern of short, punchy chapter titles, chapter 3 is entitled ‘Form’; it’s about the history of formalism and the role of paper (as an imaginative and material form) in that history. Two of the three paragraphs are broader brush – the kind of ‘history-of-the-discipline’ stuff that might be useful for readers looking to situate themselves within the longue durée of material texts – while the third paragraph dives into a close reading of the early modern theologian William Pemble.Learn more about Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.
That swooping between the bigger picture and granular close reading is representative of the book as a whole, and the critics cited on this page (D.F. McKenzie, Peter Stallybrass, Margreta De Grazia, Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry span multiple generations of scholarship in a way which, I hope, also reflects something about the book. At the same time page 99 is broadly about book history rather than paper and so prises open the focus of the argument. The particular affordances of paper and form only start to emerge from William Pemble’s similies about souls and whiteness which are abruptly truncated by the edge of the page.
Having just taught an MSt class in which we discussed the units of pages, leaves, and sheets in relation to early modern books, I couldn’t help wondering what page 99 would mean in some of these different configurations. The real 99th page in this book, accounting for title pages and preliminary material, is numbered page 91, and comes at the end of possibly my favourite chapter on ‘composition’. This chapter is about the gathering together of stray sheets and paper fragments into books as a model for gathering words into sentences, and I enjoyed thinking about my own writing as I put the argument together. If Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature were a quarto – printed from sheets of paper folded twice to make 8 pages per sheet - then page 99 would fall on the 13th sheet, printed at the same time as pages 98, 102, and 103. Imagining this book as an octavo or a duodecimo would place page 99 in relationship to a plethora other pages. So to really do justice to the potential of early modern paper we couldn’t talk about page 99 without talking about all those other pages as well, and eventually we’d have to abandon the idea of the single page and go back to the unit of the book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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