‘Such dispersive scattredness’: early modern encounters with binding waste

This article explores the valences of monastic wastepaper and binding waste in post-Reformation England. It argues that wastepaper and parchment is palimpsestic, capable of telling stories (to those who care to look) through its traces and tears. I focus on two texts that respond to and provide evidence of this non-textual legibility: John Bale’s The Laboryouse Journey & serche of John Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees (1549) and John Aubrey’s ‘Digression’ in his Natural History of Wiltshire (1656-1691). Writing a century apart both authors extract narratives from the old, dismembered books they encounter. Whereas Bale shapes an aggressively Protestant account of English religious history from the scattered sheets of dispersed monastic manuscripts, Aubrey reads a tale of violent loss and jarring historical change. More generally, however, monastic waste material forms part of an all-encompassing narrative in the early modern world: the trajectory from animal skin or flax, to manuscript, to waste readily demonstrates the universal trajectory of organic matter. Finally, reading the creases and folds of salvaged sheets enables a reconsideration of their phenomenological categorization as waste: waste is neither empty nor worthless. Instead, it evinces an abundant proliferation and potentiality, teeming with meaning, utility and ink.