Privy Tokens: Wastepaper in Early Modern England, 1536-1680

This thesis considers the importance of wastepaper in early modern England. More than a rhetorical trope, I argue that repurposed pages were both materially and figuratively useful. Drawing on a range of textual and archival sources, I show how layers of meaning developed around paper fragments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that, because of a widespread sensitivity to the life cycle of paper, visible in its surfaces and folds, wasted pages prompted imaginative work. With particular attention to how waste objects serve as palimpsests of multiple events and histories, I consider how wastepaper intersected with ideas of temporality, and how it came to be a potent emblem, or 'thing to think with', in the period.