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This essay charts the way that ideas of nature, life and disease generated new approaches to Europe's documentary culture between roughly 1650 and 1950. Training its focus on the medium of paper, specifically the essay, reveals conceptual intersections between caretakers of libraries and archives and naturalists or physicians whose focus was the entomology or bacteriology. The recognition of the fundamentally organic nature of books (animal, vegetable, mineral, in a Linnaean sense) invited fresh vocabularies and practices of care and preservation. The essay first explores how book lovers—often encouraged by learned societies or state agencies in the eighteenth century—campaigned against insects whose habitat lay between the covers of precious tomes. It then traces how nineteenth-century microscopy and bacteriology informed notions of sickness or 'pathology' in books. It ends by describing the efforts to remediate these impairments in the twentieth century: to deploy chemistry and medicine as therapies for bringing imperilled papers back to health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France, the last decade of the eighteenth century saw an explosion in papers of diverse kinds, put to new political uses. However, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, paper was also instrumentalised to articulate histories of revolutionary participation, as well as changing ideas about revolutionary identification. Some of these were coded as virtuous: paper objects found a place at the heart of sentimental accounts of personal sacrifice, such as that of prison warder Joseph Cange. Conversely, paper was central to claims for culpability or reparation—most strikingly, assorted papers were mobilised as defence against recrimination for involvement in regicide, as discussed here in relation to printmaker and politician Antoine-Louis-François Sergent-Marceau. This essay considers how the apparent abundance that characterised the period's paper ecology, along with new attitudes toward paper's proliferation, preservation and disposal, bore the imprint of political justification, evasion and historical revisionism—all framed by the need to 'pass' as post-revolutionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on an eighteenth-century book, A Catalogue of the Different Specimens of Cloth Collected in the Three Voyages of Captain Cook to the Southern Hemisphere , which opens up alternative histories of paper in the early modern world. The work consists of a letterpress pamphlet describing the production of bark cloth (tapa), bound with samples of tapa, which were acquired from one of Captain Cook's naval officers. In placing paper and bark cloth into relationship with one another, the work offers another vantage point from which to theorise not only the material history of paper but also the ways in which paper was dependent on an ability to 'invisibly occupy'. Paper's material invisibility is both part of its strength while also demonstrating the intellectual blind spots that can occur in attending solely to material histories of paper worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arts of cutting and joining paper (katʿı and vas·s·¯ale) were much prized at the early-modern Ottoman court in Istanbul. This essay takes a single folio of katʿı prepared by the Ottoman paper joinery master (vas·s·¯al) Kalender Efendi (d. 1616) as a starting point from which to explore the essential role of paper in the administration and unification of the Ottoman Empire, shaping the state's relationships with its subjects, and making possible the environment in which Kalender was educated and rose to prominence. Through his skillful manipulation of paper, Kalender created intricate artworks that served as resting place for the eye and mind, astonishing viewers with his skills, and encouraging them to engage in insightful looking. Paper thus served as the locus of intellectual, artistic, and economic encounters, and gave shape to relationships both in the moment and over time [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the material and visual cultural dynamics through which the modern state emerged during the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic world. It centres upon the emergent rhetoric of the 'written constitution' in Revolutionary North America and the new United States, arguing that this mode of constitution-making represented not the invention that many claimed it to be, but instead a revision of the relationship between document, statecraft and the body in early modern British empire that built upon seventeenth-century English critics of monarchical power. The continuities between the material substrates of empire and nation came to be masked by a rhetoric of disavowal that posited the US constitutional form as both an innovation and a template for the material entanglements of the modern state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When turning to the techniques of etching on metal to make intaglio prints on paper, goldsmiths addressed potential clients and other fellows in their trade. In doing so, they put forth statements about what constituted property for members of each of these social stations. Multiple claims competed to classify to whom the raw materials belonged, the skills to transmute them or the forms that such handiwork took and whether the ownership of such entities could be transferred, redirected or even undone. The Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer stages these questions in an etching that shows a tailor who is holding a flag stitched together from remaindered pieces of cloth. Connecting for the first time this image to its literary source, Hans Sachs's 'The Tailor and the Flag', published in 1563, this essay demonstrates how the episode attests against the hoarding of materials, and for the ethos of giving clients and apprentices their due. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue examines paper as it became the definitive material for both artistic practice and jurisprudence. European paper made from pulped rags and linens to create the mythic white empty grounds for design was foundational to early modern European ideas about both sovereignty and the creative act. The materiality of paper—as a surface created from refuse—also introduced a form of ecological thinking into both artistic practice and political theory that recognised the value and revolutionary potential of the material world to create from the detritus of failed projects and revolutions. Surveying artistic production across the European continent and into the Ottoman empire, this series of essays examines paper as both a material force that redefined the limits of the creative act while also being inseparable from the consolidation of new political regimes emerging from the rise of early modern colonialism. Paper was both the tool of dispossession and also the grounds on which the potential of artistic practice was reimagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]