Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England

Catherine Richardson is Professor of Early Modern Studies and Director of the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Kent. She studies early modern material culture, and has written books on Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), Shakespeare and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2011) and, with Tara Hamling, A Day at Home in Early Modern England, The Materiality of Domestic Life, 1500-1700 (Yale 2017). She has edited Arden of Faversham for Arden Early Modern Drama, and is PI on the AHRC project ‘The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort’: https://research.kent.ac.uk/middling-culture/ Hannah Lilley is an independent scholar, previously of the University of Birmingham. She is interested in the material culture of early modern scribal practice. Callan Davies works across early modern literary, cultural, and theatre history. He’s part of the Box Office Bears project (researching animal sports in early modern England), as well as the Middling Culture (www.middlingculture.com) team examining early modern status, creativity, writing, and material culture, and the Before Shakespeare team (www.beforeshakespeare.com). His book, What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620, is an accessible account of the playhouse across early modern England (Routledge 2022). He is the Editor of the Curtain playhouse records for Records of Early English Drama’s Records of Early English Drama REED London Online and author of Strangeness in Jacobean Drama (Routledge, 2020) as well as articles across literature and history journals.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Biographies






introduction/ spawning
concepts/ emerging




Megan Heffernan, Expired Time: Archiving Waste Manuscripts



Anna Reynolds, What do Texts and Insects have in Common?; or, Ephemerality before Ephemera



Bruce Boehrer, Time’s Flies: Ephemerality in the Early Modern Insect World



Robert Bearman, What is an ‘ephemeral archive’? Stratford-upon-Avon, 1550-1650: a case study



Alison Wiggins, Paper and Elite Ephemerality
matter/ metamorphosing




Elaine Leong, Recipes and Paper Knowledge



Katherine Hunt, More lasting than bronze: statues, writing, and the materials of ephemera in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall



Hannah Lilley, Uncovering Ephemeral Practice: Itineraries of Black Ink and the Experiments of Thomas Davis



Helen Smith, Things That Last: Ephemerality and Endurance in Early Modern England
environments/ buzzing




Michael Lewis, Toy Coach from London



Jemima Matthews, Maritime Ephemera in Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary



Callan Davies, Playing Apples and the Playhouse Archive



William Tullet, Extensive Ephemera: Perfumer’s Trade Cards in Eighteenth-Century England