Practices Of Ephemera In Early Modern England

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ostensibly disposable print? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when objects and texts were rapidly proliferating—the term began to acquire its modern association with transitoriness. But contributors to this volume show how ephemera was also integrally related to wider social and cultural ecosystems. Chapters explore those ecosystems and think about the papers and artefacts that shaped homes, streets, and cities or towns and their attendant preservation, loss, or transformation. The studies here therefore look beyond static records to think about moments of process and transmutation and accordingly get closer to early modern experiences, identities, and practices.

Uses the collections of ephemera popular in the late seventeenth century as a way to understand the reading habits, publishing strategies and thought processes of late Stuart print culture. Cheap' genres of print such as ballads, almanacs and playing cards were part of everyday life in seventeenth-century society - ubiquitous and disposable. Toward the end of the century, however, individuals began to preserve, arrange and display articles of cheap print within carefully curated collections. What motivated this sudden urge to preserve the ephemeral? This book answers that question by analysing the social, political and intellectual factors behind the formation of cheap print collections, how these collections were used by their owners, and what this activity can tell us about 'print culture' in the early modern period. The book's central collector is John Bagford (1650-1715), a shoemaker who became a dealer of prints and other 'curiosities' to important collectors of the time such as Samuel Pepys, Hans Sloane and Robert Harley. Bagford's own rich and largely unstudied collection is afascinating study in its own right and his position at the centre of commercial and intellectual networks opens up a whole world of collecting. This world encompasses later Stuart partisan political culture, when modern parties and the 'public sphere' first emerged; the 'New Science' and 'virtuoso culture' with its milieu of natural philosophers, antiquaries and artisans; the aural and visual landscape of marketplaces, streets and alehouses; and developing practices of record-keeping, life-writing and historical writing during the long eighteenth century.

Approaching from bibliographical, literary, cultural, and intercultural perspectives, this book establishes the importance of Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden, a largely unexplored manuscript commonplace book to early modern English literature and culture in general. Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden is a seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book known primarily for its Shakespearean connections, which extracts works by dozens of early modern English authors, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Milton. This book sheds light on the broader significance of Hesperides that refashions our full knowledge of early modern authorship and plagiarism, composition, reading practice, and canon formation. Following two introductory chapters are three topical chapters, which respectively discuss plagiarism and early modern English writing, early modern English reading practice, and early modern English canon formation. The final chapter further expands the field to ancient China, comparing commonplace books with Chinese leishu, exploring Matteo Ricci’s cross-cultural commonplace writing, and re-reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in light of Ricci’s On Friendship. The solid book will serve as a must read for scholars and students of early modern English literature, manuscript study, commonplace books, history of the book, and intercultural study.

The ubiquity of waste paper in early modern England has long been misunderstood. Though insults and modesty tropes that refer to waste paper are widespread, these have often been dismissed as nothing more than rhetorical flourishes. Paired with the common misconception that paper would have been too valuable to 'waste' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these tropes have been read as scatological flights of fancy. Waste Paper in Early Modern England argues that such commonplaces are in fact indicative of everyday, material experience - of an author's, reader's, housewife's, or city-dweller's immersion in an environment brimming with repurposed scraps and sheets. It demonstrates that waste paper makes visible a radically different understanding of waste matter in the early modern period than in our own. More than a rhetorical aside, repurposed pages were both materially and figuratively useful. Drawing on a range of literary, pictorial, and bibliographical sources, Waste Paper in Early Modern England reveals how layers of meaning accreted around paper fragments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how, because of the widespread sensitivity to the life cycle of paper and books, wasted pages prompted meaningful imaginative work. The book's five chapters recount how, in this period, the biography of waste paper provided a thing to think with concerning matter and temporality - a potent and flexible emblem for the troublesome passage of books and all other sorts of bodies through time.

For the first time, Early Modern Streets unites the diverse strands of scholarship on urban streets between circa 1450 and 1800 and tackles key questions on how early modern urban society was shaped and how this changed over time. Much of the lives of urban dwellers in early modern Europe were played out in city streets and squares. By exploring urban spaces in relation to themes such as politics, economies, religion, and crime, this edited collection shows that streets were not only places where people came together to work, shop, and eat, but also to fight, celebrate, show their devotion, and express their grievances. The volume brings together scholars from different backgrounds and applies new approaches and methodologies to the historical study of urban experience. In doing so, Early Modern Streets provides a comprehensive overview of one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship in early modern history. Accompanied by over 50 illustrations, Early Modern Streets is the perfect resource for all students and scholars interested in urban life in early modern Europe.

This volume addresses two key questions: 1) How can ephemera be understood as a critical category of literary and historical inquiry? and 2) How can ephemera serve pedagogical purposes in the classroom? Each of the essays in Encountering Ephemera 1550-1800: Scholarship, Performance, Classroom addresses these questions by exploring a diverse range of materials as well as periods. The essays collectively work to define ephemera as a complex and multi-faceted critical category in terms of its literary, cultural, and historical significance. Each contributor works to complicate the traditional binary opposition between the ephemeral/transitory and the canonical/enduring, in part by recognizing how attending to the material processes of textual production, transmission, and dissemination highlights the potential instability and mutability of texts (and textual relationships), whether discussing broadside ballads or coterie poetry. By shifting the focus to the processes by which texts are constructed and construed, the prospect of recognizing any text (regardless of its canonical status) as a static and fixed entity becomes difficult and, in turn, the ephemeral qualities that define and constitute the text’s materiality come more sharply into focus. Along these lines, the “ephemeral spaces” across and between discourses – what might be called the “ephemera of cultural poetics” – play a key role in shaping literary texts. Thus, early modern and eighteenth century ephemera constitute both the material (texts not intended to last or designed for limited cultural life) and the process (fleeting and transitory aspects of cultural production). Whether discussing the circulation of cheap print, the performative traces of music and gesture in Shakespeare’s plays, or the diffuse cultural influences that both surround and pervade literary texts, attending to ephemeral matters underscores the dynamic unfixity of early modern and eighteenth century cultural practices.

A collection of new and previously-published essays on the culture of the English Renaissance state.

An investigation into aphrodisiacs challenges pre-conceived ideas about sexuality during this period.