The Paper Feast in Late Stuart London: Feast Tickets, Advertisements, Songs, Sermons, and Entertainments

abstract:Late Stuart London hosted a variety of semipublic feasts; the most common were for those born in a particular county or town, but others fêted alumni or those sharing a patronymic. Although the antecedents of these feasts extend to the early seventeenth century, the number of such feasts expanded from the 1650s onward. And the printed ephemera associated with these feasts—newspaper advertisements, sermons, printed tickets or forms, poems, songs, and even a playbook—were new. This essay explores the performative roles of this feast ephemera, from publicizing feasts, to commemorating the event, to providing charity circulars, to creating a wider community than that formed solely by commensality.