Enfilade

The volume focuses on materials produced before 1700, though the final essay addresses 18th-century trade cards. From Routledge:

Callan Davies, Hannah Lilley, and Catherine Richardson, eds., Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2023), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-0367528362 (hardback), $160 / ISBN: 978-1003058588 (ebook), $40.

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.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Biographies

1  Introduction: Spawning

Concepts/ Emerging
2  Megan Heffernan — Expired Time: Archiving Waste Manuscripts
3  Anna Reynolds — What Do Texts and Insects Have in Common?; or, Ephemerality before Ephemera
3  Bruce Boehrer — Time’s Flies: Ephemerality in the Early Modern Insect World
4  Robert Bearman — What Is an ‘Ephemeral Archive’? Stratford-upon-Avon, 1550–1650: A Case Study
5  Alison Wiggins — Paper and Elite Ephemerality

Matter / Metamorphosing
6  Elaine Leong — Recipes and Paper Knowledge
7  Katherine Hunt — More Lasting than Bronze: Statues, Writing, and the Materials of Ephemera in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall
8  Hannah Lilley — Uncovering Ephemeral Practice: Itineraries of Black Ink and the Experiments of Thomas Davis
9  Helen Smith — Things That Last: Ephemerality and Endurance in Early Modern England

Environments / Buzzing
10  Michael Lewis — Toy Coach from London
11  Jemima Matthews — Maritime Ephemera in Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary
12  Callan Davies — Playing Apples and the Playhouse Archive
13  William Tullet — Extensive Ephemera: Perfumer’s Trade Cards in Eighteenth-Century England