Discoveries from Dust: Sutton House’s Seventeenth-Century Schoolgirl Ephemera

Abstract More than thirty years ago, a team of amateur archaeologists swept up dust from underneath the floorboards of Hackney’s oldest home, Sutton House. Hundreds of pieces of ephemera were discovered, including coloured and cut prints and folded paper from the seventeenth century, products of an early modern schoolgirl art that has almost no material survival. This article explores these fragments’ connection to seventeenth-century girls’ schooling in the Hackney area and the well documented but rarely extant schoolgirl art of adorning domestic spaces with prints of the natural world and built environment.