Despite its rhetoric of rupture and rejection of tradition, Enlightenment thinkers sculpted the identity of the movement and projected it into the future via reflection on the past. This volume seeks to explore how the Enlightenment was structured by transmission of older ideas, what processes defined this transmission and how the Enlightenment has been received from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day, as well as examine the ramifications of the continued sourcing of ideas generated during the period for different, and sometimes conflicting, social, political, and creative projects. The concept of recycling has been addressed in studies of the history of science and sustainability, as well as digital humanities, and this book develops these thoughts to view repurposing as an interdisciplinary mode of enquiry, arguing that artists, scientists, and authors deliberately engaged with the past using similar strategies and harnessed it to create new elements of their disciplines. In so doing, this book demonstrates that the past was fundamental to the creation of the Enlightenment and repurposing was the tool by which Enlightenment thinkers crafted an understanding of history, creating a narrative in which their era appeared to be both a break with the past and the culmination of universal history.