Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 centurieswhen objects and texts were rapidly proliferatingthe 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.
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Biographies
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- introduction/ spawning
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concepts/ emerging
- Megan Heffernan, Expired Time: Archiving Waste Manuscripts
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- Anna Reynolds, What do Texts and Insects have in Common?; or, Ephemerality before Ephemera
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- Bruce Boehrer, Time’s Flies: Ephemerality in the Early Modern Insect World
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- Robert Bearman, What is an ‘ephemeral archive’? Stratford-upon-Avon, 1550-1650: a case study
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- Alison Wiggins, Paper and Elite Ephemerality
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matter/ metamorphosing
- Elaine Leong, Recipes and Paper Knowledge
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- Katherine Hunt, More lasting than bronze: statues, writing, and the materials of ephemera in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall
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- Hannah Lilley, Uncovering Ephemeral Practice: Itineraries of Black Ink and the Experiments of Thomas Davis
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- Helen Smith, Things That Last: Ephemerality and Endurance in Early Modern England
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environments/ buzzing
- Michael Lewis, Toy Coach from London
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- Jemima Matthews, Maritime Ephemera in Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary
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- Callan Davies, Playing Apples and the Playhouse Archive
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- William Tullet, Extensive Ephemera: Perfumer’s Trade Cards in Eighteenth-Century England
