Waste paper in early modern England
type: CreativeWork
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: Waste paper--Recycling
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: Waste paper
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/320126539
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/320131055
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/330134642
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.
creator: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/310154671
language: eng
subject of: Statement
  additional type: http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/300195187
  text: Introduction: waste matter -- 1 The material history of waste paper -- 2 Pepper and mackerel: the waste paper trope -- 3 Butterflies and binders' shops: reading monastic waste -- 4 Pickled paper: Thomas Nashe's poetics of waste -- 5 Out of date almanacs and Middleton's 'mouldy stuff' -- Coda: living with waste.
work example: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/301333327

PropertyValue
property ID: NL-AmRIJ
value: 333327