Through a close reading and reconstruction of technical recipes for ephemeral artworks in a manuscript compiled in Toulouse ca. 1580 (BnF MS Fr. 640), we question whether ephemeral art should be treated as a distinct category of art. The illusion and artifice underpinning ephemeral spectacles shared the aims and, frequently, the materials and techniques of art more generally. Our analysis of the manuscript also calls attention to other aspects of art making that reframe consideration of the ephemeral, such as intermediary processes, durability, the theatrical and transformative potential of materials, and the imitation and preservation of lifelikeness.

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in their widely-read account of Material powers (2010, 21), with The matter of mimesis we seek 'to extend thinking beyond the familiar division between what is and is not "material"' . Ongoing debates in anthropology and the sociology of knowledge over 'assemblages' , 'actants' and 'quasi-objects' (hybrids of the social and the natural) are currently reshaping scholarly models of materiality in ways that challenge claims about material determinism. The implications of these discussions for other disciplines are still unfolding. Our volume has approached materiality from the vantage point of the replicated object, a fruitful and provocative instance that allows us to construct the complex relations between social and political agency, meaning, making and use for a variety of different cultures and circumstances. At the same time, we as scholars feel a need to be reflexively attentive to our own position, given the major transformations in techniques, media and technologies of replication such as 3D printing, cloning, and digital humanities that are in the process of reshaping not only our labour as scholars, but even its object; not only our source materials, but even our understanding of what counts as a source; not only our daily lives, but even our sense of self. Such was historically the case with new media. Benjamin's The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1936), for example, famously grapples with the way that theories of artistic creativity based on appeals to subjectivity, genius and autonomy were challenged by the mechanical reproduction of works of art. Benjamin saw the value of a work of art as both reduced by reproduction and rendered subject to political interventions which altered its original meaning. Today, we face similar challenges, albeit posed by very different media, which present viewers with increasing difficulties in differentiating between reality and its many representations, as the essays of both Conte and Kromholz in this volume vividly illustrate. It is not infidelity in the act of representation that concerns us (as it did early moderns); rather, it is the ever-growing accuracy that new technologies afford that is problematic, for it seems to obliterate even the possibility of authenticity, originality and especially uniqueness. In

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