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“Treasures Inestimable”: Collecting and Displaying the North

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Geographies of the Romantic North

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Abstract

Artifacts collected by northern travelers were at once souvenirs of their travels, evidences of their experiences, representations of the new information awaiting collection and analysis, curios, material expressions of the gentlemanly curiosity that inspired travel and scholarly enquiry, and material expressions of metropolitan perceptions of northern cultures. These objects acted as both curious novelties and as sources of information. In the seventeenth century, curiosities were “both natural and artificial rarities” collected by the educated, from merchants to aristocrats, for display in kunstkammer collections.1 Eighteenth-century museums continued to display the widest range of objects and artifacts possible, but with the added function of ethnographic examination and analysis. Museums such as that of the Royal Society “embodied the quest for the accumulation of material on which a secure natural history could be erected.”2 Cultural artifacts collected by European exploratory travelers around the world represented opportunities to study those peoples and cultures within the framework of developments in ethnographic and natural historical thought.3 Eighteenth-century exploratory voyages brought into contact peoples who had never before encountered each other.

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© 2013 Angela Byrne

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Byrne, A. (2013). “Treasures Inestimable”: Collecting and Displaying the North. In: Geographies of the Romantic North. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311320_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311320_5

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45693-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31132-0

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