Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth century

摘要

Early modern England occupies a singularly important place in the history of museums. TheAshmolean Museum, founded at Oxford in 1683, is the oldest public museum in the world stillopen today; the British Museum, which opened its doors in 1759, is a precocious and influentialexample of the idea of the museum as a repository of a nation's treasures. As Ken Arnold detailsin his study of early modern English collecting practices, both were products of new attitudestowards things which emerged after the disquieting events of the English Civil War. Prior to the1660s England made relatively few contributions to the great pursuit of collecting that flourishedin the continental cities and courts of sixteenth-century Europe. To the extent that it participated,it did so largely in imitation of the European princes and patricians who created the first cabinetsof curiosities. In the next century, however, leading English scholars and virtuosi came toenvision museums as 'thoroughly empirical institutions ?- used to establish publicly accessibleknowledge' (p. 30). They created something different and more uniquely their own. Thisendeavor is the subject of Ken Arnold's book