What can we learn about waste in the Early Modern period when time and temporality are taken as the starting point of analysis? Engaging with the notion of waste as "matter out of time" (William Viney), the talk discusses how things became waste in Early Modern, pre-industrial societies, paying particular attention to the interplay of materiality and temporality. What role did material properties, such as durability or fragility, play in determining when and how things were discarded? How did changing production conditions and expanding manufacturing possibilities alter the perceived lifespan of objects? And how did temporal rhythms, such as fashion cycles, contribute to rendering things obsolete?

Time is thus employed as a lens through which to view waste in Early Modern societies from a different perspective. It raises questions of periodisation and our perspective on premodern, pre-industrial societies. Rethinking the relationship between waste, matter, and time challenges established assumptions about the past and helps us to recognise the ubiquitous nature of waste.

Franziska Neumann is a Junior Professor of Early Modern History at the TU Braunschweig. Her research focuses on the cultural and material history of the Early Modern period, with particular interests in the history of resources, materiality, and different regimes of value. She is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where she is working on a project on waste in London in the long eighteenth century. Among her publications is a series of articles that explore waste both as a discardable leftover and as a valuable resource.