This collection brings together an international group of scholars to address an expansive range of small things, paying close attention, for the first time, to the rich interaction between scale and the body. Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how entangled small things, such as mugs, buttons, and buckles, were with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small objects, such as tiny books, ceramic trinkets, toothpick cases, and patch boxes, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users, and also at the same time signaling the limits of the body’s adeptness or the hand’s dexterity. The volume also explores the mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry into circumscribed spaces political, philosophical, and cultural concepts; and how small items, tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants for example, were shaped by empire and contributed to Enlightenment systems of knowledge production. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, small things negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global colonial goods.

The small size of old coins and medals attracted the attention of collectors as well as antiquaries throughout the long eighteenth century. Whereas the metallic substance of numismatic objects often provoked narratives of moral decline and decay, the objects’ smallness proved to be a means of reinvigorating the influence they may have exerted on the Enlightenment’s historical imagination. This chapter pays particular attention to the emphasis John Evelyn placed on the smallness of old coins and medals in his influential treatise, Numismata (1697). For Evelyn, the smallness of numismatic objects ensured their historical preservation and enhanced their collectability as well as their usefulness as metaphors of mind, aides-mémoires, and didactic devices. Accordingly, coins’ and medals’ smallness also corresponded to the power they had to circulate and accumulate. The kinds of scale produced by the vast quantities of small numismatic objects that had amassed throughout history stands as a refrain throughout Evelyn’s Numismata, which transforms numismatic objects’ smallness and innumerability into long and far-reaching logics of association.