Trifle

Abstract

This chapter begins with lists compiled in Lincolnshire in the 1550s. These lists show that objects including pyxes--containers for the Eucharist--were given to children as playthings. The chapter links this practice to the widespread discourse that sought to demean traditional religion as a mere trifling with inane and worthless things, but it argues that the practice of iconoclastic child’s play differs from this polemic in that the object actually lingers as a potential locus for newly emerging meanings. This possibility is linked to the wider complexities surrounding the status of trifles and inanities in the history of Christian thought and its consistent inversions of value, as well as to the self-reflexive interrogation of the status of trifles in the writings of Thomas More.