Waste Paper in Early Modern England

Abstract

Abstract The ubiquity of waste paper in early modern England has long been misunderstood. Although references to waste paper in insults and modesty tropes are widespread, they are easily dismissed as nothing more than rhetorical flourishes. Working under the common misconception that paper would have been too valuable to ‘waste’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these tropes are often read as scatological flights of fancy. Waste Paper in Early Modern England demonstrates that these 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—and 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.