Library Guides: From Page to Pedestal: Literature in the Age of Collecting: Expand Your Knowledge

Arnold, Ken. Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums. London: Routledge, 2016. The last few years has, within museums, witnessed nothing short of a revolution. Worried that the very institution was itself in danger of becoming a dusty, forgotten, culturally irrelevant exhibit, vigorous efforts have been made to reshape the museum mission. Fearing that history was coming to be ignored by modern society, many institutions have instead marketed a de-intellectualised heritage, overly relying on computer technology to captivate a contemporary audience. The theme of this work is that we can do much to reassess the rationale that inspires contemporary collections through a study of seventeenth century museums. England's first museums were quite literally wonderful; founded that is on the disciplined application of the faculty of wonder. The type of wonder employed was not that post-Romantic idea of disbelief, but rather an active form of curiosity developed during the Renaissance, particularly by the individuals who set about gathering objects and founding museums to further their enquiries. The argument put forward in this book is that this museological practice of using objects actually to create, as well as disseminate knowledge makes just as much sense today as it did in the seventeenth century and, further, that the best way of reinvigorating contemporary museums, is to return to that form of wonder. By taking such a comparative approach, this book works both as a scholarly historical text, and as an historically informed analysis of the key issues facing today's museums. As such, it will prove essential reading both for historians of collecting and museums, and for anyone interested in the philosophies of modern museum management.
Blom, Philipp. To Have and to Hold:  An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2003. "Investigating the history of collecting from the Renaissance to our day. Blom shows a multiplicity of worlds: the scientific cabinets of the fifteenth century and an Italian scholar employed as dragon slayer; the 'Ark' of the Tradescants and a friend's betrayal; Emperor Rudolf II's Prague collection as 'practised alchemy': the macabre art of Dr. Frederik Ruysch, first among embalmers; and the overflowing menagerie of Sir Hans Sloane's curiosities, later to become the foundation of the British Museum. He also discusses the strange fate of Angelo Soliman, a black man at the Habsburg court who was stuffed and exhibited with wild animals; explores the rise of scientific collecting and classification and, parallel to it, the explosion of collecting as the private passion of hundreds of thousands; and introduces Robert Opie, whose collection of half a million items of household packaging now fills his home in London and two overloaded warehouses in Gloucestershire besides." "Out of this glittering diversity of material Blom distils the themes underlying this seemingly elusive pursuit: conquest and possession, and the awareness of our own mortality."--Jacket
Nelson, Brent. "Translating the Cabinet of Curiosities in Early Modern England." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 46, no. 2 (2019): 336-352. https://doi.org/10.1353/crc.2019.0025. The article offers information on the translation and concept of transformission in the early modern cabinet of curiosities in early modern England. Topics discussed include collections of rare and curious objects in the early modern period; transmission of objects brought about the remediation of cultural practices; and influence of Francis Bacon's empiricism on early modern thinking.
Ross, Alan S. “Recycling Embryos: Old Animal Specimens in New Museums, 1660–1840.” Journal of Social History 52, no. 4 (Summer 2019): 1087–1109. doi:10.1093/jsh/shz008. Historians unanimously describe the shift from private cabinets of curiosities to public museums in the first half of the nineteenth century as a major transformation in the contents, purpose, and practices of exhibition. On closer inspection, however, this shift was far more clearly defined in the great metropolitan museums than in the hundreds of smaller museums that relied on the second-hand market to furnish their collections. This article examines the changes that cabinets of natural curiosities underwent as they were absorbed and reorganized in public museums during the early nineteenth century. It focuses on the Linck collection in Saxony, one of the oldest and best-documented collections of early modern naturalia still in existence, and particularly on the animal embryos that were taken out of alcohol and taxidermized in the fashion of fully grown animals. Contrary to the outspoken educational purpose of these new museums, the transition from private cabinets to public exhibits did not lead to the creation of anatomically accurate displays. Instead, it often perpetuated the fashions of the "curiously set up" displays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Siegel, Jonah. The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. The Emergence of the Modern Museum, a unique compendium of original sources, presents a detailed and dynamic account of the development of the institution and its practices during that critical period of inception. From poignant recollections of visits to stately homes to charged debates about the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles or the establishment of an Indian Museum; from early catalogue entries describing the curiosities discovered by Captain Cook to later ones organizing human skulls according to Darwinian principles--this volume offers a representative sample of the diverse, contentious, and often moving ideas that have shaped the public museum from its earliest history.
Zytaruk, Maria. “Cabinets of Curiosities and the Organization of Knowledge.” University of Toronto Quarterly 80, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 1–23. doi:10.3138/utq.80.1.001 his article reviews some of the recent literature on early modern cabinets of curiosities and other repositories of knowledge. The 'material turn' taken by the history of science in the last two decades has produced claims for the primacy of objects and collectors in narratives about early modern natural inquiry. As these studies shed important light on the contents and shape of early collections, we must also consider how the model of the museum, in the hands of such figures as Cassiano dal Pozzo and John Evelyn, was adapted to new visual and literary purposes in the seventeenth century. If cabinets were implicated in new taxonomic projects to order the natural world, they also acted as preserves of older, more imaginative readings of nature. The encyclopedia of gardening that Evelyn assembled, the 'Elysium Britannicum,' permits us to trace how the cabinet model functioned as a strategy for dealing with the proliferation of information, objects, and books in the period.

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