Cabinets of Curiosities and the Organization of Knowledge

Abstract

This 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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