Workshop recap: Waste and leftovers in early modern Europe

This joint seminar was held on November 2025, at the University of Warwick. We thank our invited scholars for their thought-provoking presentations!

Workshop recap: Waste and leftovers in early modern Europe

Scraps, excess, discard... what happens when there's just too much? In our recent workshop "Waste and leftovers in early modern Europe", we explored these questions.

Sponsored by the Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre and STVDIO (Centre for the Study of the Renaissance seminar series), this workshop brought together a fantastic trio of researchers to explore these issues across space and time. Our invited researchers were Alessia Meneghin (University of Valencia -MSCA), Eleanor Barnett (Cardiff University), and Franziska Neumann (Technical University of Braunschweig). To round up the talk, we had Prof. Beat Kümin as chair, and Eloisa Ocando-Thomas as discussant, both from the University of Warwick.

In her paper "An Economy of Leftovers in Fifteenth-Century Arezzo"Link opens in a new window, Alessia Meneghin analysed the circulation, uses and market of leftover textiles in 15th century Arezzo, near Florence. As part of her ongoing Marie Curie project on reuse and material recovery in late medieval Tuscany, this paper examines the legislative constraints and economic opportunities arising from the urban trade in leftover textiles, and the often complex interplay between practice and regulation.

Eleanor Barnett explored leftover food in her paper "Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation in Early Modern England". By using cookbook, sermons and printed literature, this paper highlighted the general aim of early modern English people to preserve food. Moreover, Eleanor links early modern sentiments about waste to general ideas about religious morality.

Finally, we welcomed Franziska Neumann's "Rubbish?! Waste and Recycling in Eighteenth-Century London". This is part of her current project on urban waste in 18th-century London. This research is particularly useful to historicize contemporary issues of urban management. Instead of assuming waste and rubbish as a contemporary problem, Franziska highlighted that urban waste was indeed a common feature in early modern cities. This outlook nuances common idealization of pre-industrial societies and grounds current urban issues in a longer history of cities.

While dealing with quite different themes, several common threads came out. On the one hand, all three papers focused on people's material existence. They also went beyond the classic outlook of production and consumption, to the often-ignored "end life" of material things. This process allowed them to show that early modern people had a more complex relationship to their waste than what has been assumed. Alessia's work shows, for example, the lively leftover textile market in 15th century Italy, highlighting the connections between artisan production, retail and informal brokerage. On the other hand, Eleanor and Franziska explored how waste and material overflow, whether from food or from urban life, were ever present in early modern thought, with people using systems to get rid of excess things, whether rubbish or leftover food.

Above all, from London to Arezzo, the papers showed that the management of this "excess" was not an afterthought. Instead, the workshop highlighted that the structures set in place to reuse and redefine material leftovers were well-established among early modern people.

Overall, the histories shown through these papers highlight that people's relationship with overflow, excess and waste, either factual or possible, have always been complex. Issues about what to do with things we do not want, or the "afterlives" of things and materials, are clearly not post-industrial problems. These histories highlighted that contemporary issues about sustainability, recycling and waste management are heightened by our incredibly dense modern population but are not exclusive to the 20th century. By looking at different places and timeframes, our speakers complicate our ideas about early modern people and give historical context to very contemporary issues.

It was an absolute pleasure hosting these remarkable scholars, and we are excited to see how these projects develop!