Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

As readers of this journal need no reminding, research into the growth and development of museums and the history of collecting has grown apace in recent years. But the explosion of interest in all aspects of the museum world has produced a literature that tends towards the particular rather than the general. Although a number of scholars have reflected on museum culture in its widest sense, offering theoretical and critical readings of the collecting impulse, a large part of the new research has been preoccupied with case studies, exhuming the histories of individual collections, institutions and individuals to revise or question received understandings and, in some cases, to bring neglected examples to scholarly attention for the first time. Likewise, although the last decade has seen the publication of handbooks in museum studies, providing edited texts of historically significant documents for the history of collecting, the selection of materials in these...