Conclusion

Summary

In analysing the intellectual motivations, social identities, and political passions of ephemera collectors this book has argued that foregrounding these issues provides new ways to study and understand early modern print culture. Such an approach does not sit easily with conventional studies of cheap print and popular culture that dismiss these collectors as ‘eccentric’. This is partly because the removal of objects out of their utilitarian contexts based upon certain criteria (such as their ‘curiosity’ value) can be understood as differing from the accidental, haphazard accumulations that people amass during the course of everyday life. Furthermore, the culture of curiosity collecting discussed throughout was elite- and male-dominated. Membership to the Royal Society was mainly comprised of aristocrats, landed gentry, lawyers, physicians and so on; and the spaces filled by the curious, such as coffeehouses or studies, excluded female participants. While elite female collecting has been brought to light, even a well-connected figure such as Sarah Sophia Banks was, upon purchasing a bundle of ballads, mistaken for a street-singer by a Smithfield printer (‘are you not one of our chanters? I beg your pardon’). One underlying aim of this book, however, has been to highlight the diversity of early modern collectors and collecting practices. Tradesmen such as Bagford, discussed in chapter 1, were active shapers of virtuoso culture whose intellectual curiosity and retailing practices added new value onto seemingly unremarkable objects such as ballads, playing cards and even title pages removed from (mostly) unwanted books. ‘I do not wonder at so many old books being without their title-pages’, remarked a later antiquary, albeit dismissive of Bagford’s research, ‘since I find it has become a trade with those who call themselves Virtuosi thus to mutilate them.’ The ephemera collections that Bagford compiled to document and express his ‘middling-sort’ network and identity discussed in chapter 5 were, moreover, related to forms of life-writing, record-keeping and chronicling practised by non-elites. Chapter 3 likewise discussed how the ‘associational assemblages’ of popular audiences can be understood, both conceptually and in practice, as a form of collecting.

What was incorporated into institutional libraries and preserved for pos¬terity was of course skewed towards the elite, but clearly all kinds of people collected things.