Wastework

The book offers innovative and interdisciplinary studies about the reuse and value of waste and discards in early modern material culture.
Paper scraps, metal filings, wool shearings... dismantled sets, spoiled rags, animal blood...
How did these ostensibly worthless by-products of art and industry avoid the flames of the kitchen hearth or the sweep of the apprentice’s broom to spark ingenuity, generate new forms, and propel further acts of creation? Wastework moves beyond the well-researched category of spoliation, foregrounding waste as a material expression of the practices of ordering and classification by which people adjudicated between collection and disposal, wanted and unwanted, salvation and loss. Authors follow the afterlives of spent books and soiled textiles, peek behind the curtain of machine theater, and venture into the smith’s foundry and the chemist’s laboratory.
Bringing together research from historians of art, architecture, science, and the environment, this volume examines acts of disposal and reuse and the consequences these carry for the study of early modern material culture. Drawing from the fields of discard studies and Eco materialism, contributors test the usefulness of contemporary formulations—secondary product cycles, material fatigue, metabolic flows, sustainability, recycling—while also proposing new categories with which to re-imagine the discarded past.

Francesca Borgo is Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and Principal Investigator of the five-year Lise Meitner Group Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome. Ruth Ezra is Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she specializes in the material and visual culture of early modern northern Europe. She is most curious about techniques and materials, workshop practices, and feedback loops between process and form.