'Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make Do or Do Without'. Reuse, Repair and Recycle in Late Medieval Italy (13th-15th centuries)

My project aims to produce the first social and economic history of cast-offs management and conversion and reuse in late medieval Italy through the analysis of three case-studies, Fabriano, Florence and Bergamo and their hinterland.

By examining the circulation of cast-offs in medieval crafts, identifying practices of reuse, repair, recycling and upcycling, as well as by discovering networks of waste management, this project seeks to suggest that certain crafts eventually become embedded practices in the urban economy of late medieval Italy.

My aim is to demonstrate that in medieval urban society, where raw materials were expensive and profit margins tight, the re-employment of scraps and by-products was an essential part of craft strategy.

The goal is to verify that general economic growth and rise of consumption at the end of the Middle Ages stimulated the use of waste and recycling, and therefore, alternative forms of production to those traditionally employing raw materials.

Academic research in the fields of archaeology, material culture, and, more recently consumption has rarely used historical data and material findings together, and generally have considered each element of reuse, repair, and recycling in isolation.

My project on Italy in the Middle Ages instead examines all three elements of reuse, repair, and recycling by looking at previously unexplored and unpublished documentary evidence combined with data coming from archaeological surveys and GIS web resources.

This will assist in the reconstruction of the technological, economic and social processes that turned cast-offs into complex and tradeable commodities.

The cycle of waste, the key role of artisans and producers, their guilds, and on the foreground, institutional policies in cast-offs management will be all pieced together.