Reflections on Workshop III, ‘Collecting and collections: digital lives and afterlives,’ by William Burgess and Alice Wickenden

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Workshop III featured at the Royal Society’s Blog

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Chelsea Brown’s Photography from Workshop II

 

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Jana Schuster’s Reflection on Workshop II

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In the pursuit of antiquarians: attending the second Collective Wisdom conference (1-2 April 2019) Jana C. Schuster (University of Cambridge) A great conference is defined by a few factors: the smooth running of the programme, stimulating and engaging lectures, the … Continue reading

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Spin-off event Study Day on Johann Daniel Major

Warburg Haus

Warburg Haus

There was much interest after our first Workshop in Halle on the figure of the early museologist, Kiel University professor of medicine, Johann Daniel Major (1634-1693). A number of attendees decided that shared interests warranted another day of discussion, which was jointly planned for March 27, 2019 in Hamburg at the original Warburg Library, kindly hosted by Markus Friedrich (Hamburg). A lively day of discussion shows how much more remains to be explored around this pivotal and understudied figure. The program follows!

 

Johann Daniel Major – Study Day

27th March 2019, Warburg Haus, Heilwigstraße 116, 20249 Hamburg

Convenors: Markus Friedrich, Dominik Hünniger, Vera Keller, Martin Mulsow and Bernhard Schirg

Audience at the Warburg Haus

Mattias Ekman presenting, photo courtesy of Lisbet Tarp

We are delighted that the Warburg Haus provides the venue for a first meeting of international scholars dedicated to the German collector, antiquarian and natural historian Johann Daniel Major (1634-1693). Major takes a central position in art history, where he is known as a scholar as well as practitioner of the early modern museum. Originally employed as professor of medicine at the newly founded University of Kiel, Major later established the Museum Cimbricum to display the early and natural history of his region. As collector as well as author, Major’s wide interests encompassed naturalia as well as antiquities, on which he published extensively in addition to his prolific writings on medical subjects. The study day intends to open up the vast horizon of Major as a central scholar of his time. In informal sessions, we explore the relationships he maintained with scholars, potentates and academies both at home and abroad (e.g. the Academia Naturae Curiosorum or the Accademia dei Lincei). We will also explore how Major practiced teaching, collecting and dedicating. The speakers at the study day will present on a variety of aspects connected to this fascinating figure in seventeenth-century museology and natural history. We warmly welcome participants interested in exploring these topics with us.

Vera Keller

Vera Keller, photo courtesy of Lisbet Tarp

9:20-9:40: Coffee

9:40-9:45: Markus Friedrich: Welcome and Introduction

9:45-10:45: Vera Keller, The Experimental Century: Curating the early German Enlightenment

10:45-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12:00: Bernhard Schirg, The world was his oyster. Major’s studies of shells and the autumn of the emblematic age

12:00-2:00 Break for Lunch

2:00-3:00: Martin Mulsow, Johann Daniel Major and the Idea of a Global Numismatics

3:00-4:00: Mattias Ekman, To See the World in Classes: The Orders of Things in Johann Daniel Major’s Description of His Spatzier-Reise to the Nordic Countries

4:00-4:30: Concluding Discussion

Bernhard Schirg presenting, photo courtesy of Lisbet Tarp

 

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Anna Svensson on Workshop I

Early modern English and German collecting networks and practice: Medicine and natural philosophy

On the 8-9 June, 2018, I had the privilege of attending “Early modern English and German collecting networks and practice: Medicine and natural philosophy,” the first of three workshops in the Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy project headed up by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller. The workshop was hosted by the Leopoldina Centre for Science Studies in Halle, appropriately coinciding with the Handel Festival. As a historian more familiar with early modern England than early modern Germany, this was a valuable opportunity to learn more about German sources and scholarship in conversation with English counterparts.

 

The workshop was an invitation to probe the role of academies (specifically the Leopoldina and the Royal Society of London) in the shift from wonder cabinet to the Enlightenment museum, exploring how collecting networks and practices changed between roughly the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. While some papers addressed these academies directly, the workshop as a whole went further to consider them as part of a greater diversity of contexts and networks in which collecting practices were pursued for their epistemological value.

 

“Collective wisdom” neatly sums up the play between early modern collections (materiality, circulation, preservation and order) and the collectives behind them (academies, societies, different kinds of networks such as correspondence and trade) that emerged during the workshop. In these collection networks and practices, what travelled and what did not? What was transmitted over time and space, and what remained relevant only to the specific social context that brought them together? This “collective wisdom” could be read as knowledge gained from studying collections (classification, experimentation, observation), knowledge as a collective pursuit (networks, societies, educational institutions, guilds) and the collections generated through object-based study and exchange (archives, correspondence, journals). Most of the sources discussed were of necessity this last kind, the paper trail, reflecting early modern anxieties about the preservation of collections in the early days of collection institutions.

 

The two guided tours during the workshop provided a very tangible reminder of the role of institutionalisation for the survival of collections. The archives of the Leopoldina gave a glimpse of a rich resource of early publications and the academy’s active collecting role, but was also a reminder of the absence of the Leopoldina’s lost collections. In contrast, the visit to the Francke Foundations was a multisensory encounter with an extraordinarily well-preserved Kunst- und Naturalienkammer, still housed at the top of the original building, whose stairs we sweated our way up in the heat of the summer afternoon. We were awed, intrigued, curious and delighted at the long room with its models down the centre and purpose-made cabinets along the walls (kunst at one end and naturalia at the other) and very reluctant to leave. Yet while the rare state of preservation gave a sense of direct access, it introduced other questions of interpretation, given the distance between the institution as an early modern utopian vision of protestant piety and a twenty-first century museum. The Leopoldina and the Francke Foundations represent two very different uses of collections for the generation and transmission of knowledge: the first tended more towards scholarly and medical networks, an impression enforced through the survival of published and manuscript collections, while the second was part of a larger social project in which the displayed objects and models provided a view of the world in microcosm in a pedagogy that was intended to inspire the viewer to the mission field. Many of the objects were themselves sourced through early mission networks, particularly to southern India.

 

Animal Cabinet in Francke Kunstkammer

 

Many of the discussions prompted by these two collections were raised in the workshop papers, including the role of models and play, the arrangement of collections and catalogues, institutionalisation and the preservation of collections, collecting networks and infrastructures, and the implications of urban/rural collecting. Examples of the use of models as pedagogical tools were particularly interesting as they reflect such different approaches to collections as objects of knowledge production and transfer. Kelly Whitmer’s plenary paper “Engaging with Realia in the ‘School of Play’: Useful Knowledge and the Turn to Pedagogical Realism in Early Modern Central Europe” emphasised the role of playfulness, in this case in the pedagogical value of children learning through playing with objects and toys, but also how much adults had to learn from observing them. Anna Maerker presented a very different example of the pedagogical use of objects, the collection of anatomical waxes in the Josephinum, Vienna. Maerker accounted for the discrepancy between the success of the original collection displayed in the natural history museum in Florence, and their widely controversial pedagogical display for the training of surgeons, effectively replacing the role of dissection. In this case, institutionalisation and patronage did not ensure the success of the collection, and the familiarity with wax models as objects of spectacle or amusement contributed to the public ridicule.

 

Questions of access, publication and secrecy were central in Georgiana Hedesan’ analysis of two catalogues (the Worm and Tradescant museums). Worm’s published catalogue and museum were public displays of his alchemical knowledge, skill and extensive collections, yet crucially did not disclose alchemical secrets. Classification, ordering collections and the role of publication were brought up in several of the papers, as in Vera Keller’s study of “hyphenated objects” and Thomas Ruhland’s reconstruction of the organisation of the Franke Foundation’s Kunst- und Naturalienkammer according to Linnaean classification, based on a detailed study of the catalogue against the objects and their labels. In contrast to the relative stasis of this collection, living collections such as gardens were important sites of experimentation and ordering precisely because of their inherent mutability (a trait plants and people share), as I discussed with the example of the Oxford Physick Garden.

 

 

Julia Schmidt-Funke’s plenary “Studying Nature in the City circa 1700: Danzig and Frankfurt” demonstrated how importance of urban collecting and collectives using the example of two multidenominational cities without a university. This “urban history of science” emerged within the city’s social fabric and infrastructures: the merchant trade, the postal service and the importance of collecting and experimentation organised at the domestic level. A fascinating glimpse into rural private collecting, Anna Marie Roos’ paper on James Petiver’s recently rediscovered travel diary emphasised the importance of “scientific peregrination,” which in Petiver’s case was a means to establishing his network and credentials in the absence of a university education. Such networks, upheld through correspondence and travel, are also reflected in the album amicorum or friendship albums discussed by Maria Avxentevskaya. This prompted a discussion about why this particular collecting culture was found in the German but rarely in the English context – one of the few examples during the workshop of clear differences along these lines. Bringing together scholars working on German and English sources allowed a range of factors to be brought into conversation – including religion, class, the urban/rural, the domestic/institutional, display and use – without collapsing into binary comparisons.

 

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Rountable Reflections from Workshop I from Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller

Update, July, 2018: News from Workshop I

We had a great first workshop in Halle, with two keynotes, a slate of wonderful papers, an energetic final roundtable, behind-the-scenes curator’s tours of the Frankesche Stiftungen’s Kunstkammer and the archive of the Leopoldina, a historic concert within the Hall Orphanage, and many opportunities for socializing and brainstorming.

Franckesche Stiftungen

We discussed several different elements of the cultures of collection in scholarly societies in Workshop I of “Collective Wisdom” with an overall focus upon the interrelationships between medicine, natural philosophy and collecting practice. From a discussion of the interplay between intellectual networks, urban and country house spaces in creating collections of naturalia, to comparison of physical catalogues and analysis of scientific journals to ascertain the nature and purpose of objects collected, to the role of curiosity and play, we have analysed several influences in the development of collective wisdom in the academy. These are some of the insights and connections between papers we discussed in our concluding roundtable.

Anna Maerker speaks about wax models, criticized as toys by physicians, in surgical pedagogy

One theme that arose was the role of realia and artificialia in medical education, and the use or misuse of objects in collections for pedagogic purposes.  Anna Maerker’s paper showed to what extent wax anatomical and obstetric models produced between 1784 and 1788 became a flashpoint in professional rivalries between physicians and surgeons in the Josephinum. The debates were bound up with gender norms, Enlightenment sensibility and the notion of character development, as well as utility to the state. To what extent were anatomical models of real use or detraction from medicinal arts, mere spectacles or useful tools?

So too, Kelly Whitmer’s paper, particularly in its analysis of Comenius, shows the fuzzy boundaries between play, utility, and objects of godly and human creation in educational reform. We find the emphasis on play in many of the papers particularly illuminating, since one might have assumed that playfulness was sacrificed in the passage from purposefully disordered Kunstkammer to organized Museum. To the contrary, we discussed how playfulness and pleasure remained central but were retooled and reframed.

Kelly Whitmer, one of our keynotes, speaks about play in pedagogy

Pleasure arose out of the things themselves, but it was a pleasure that had to be grounded in practical realities, enjoyment from application.  In a particularly striking example, children’s dramatic performances taught classification of plants and materia medica. Recreational mathematics required collection of instruments.   Pedagogical realism engaged with collections of realia. 

Play also extended to the very naming of objects.

Vera Keller speaks on Johann Daniel Major, an early Leopoldina member who claimed to establish a new science of Kunstkammer organization

Vera Keller’s analysis of hyphenated titles in the museology of Johann Daniel Major shows how collections could playfully cross boundaries, particularly for those in-between natural history specimens, such as coral—“stone plants.”

New experimental approaches and new objects did not fit into extant categories, and baroque titles reflected these novel attempts at classification.  As Ruhland’s paper shows, early adaptation of Linnaean taxonomy in the Francke Foundation’s Kunstkammer analyses to what extent these new classificatory schemes come to fruition. Svensson’s paper also demonstrates the role of taxonomy and competing schemes in ordering the physic garden in an early modern English context.

Not only intellectual categorisation was important, but the very organising of objects in physical space, whether in the museum or in a larger venue like the city.

Julia Schmidt-Funke, one of our keynote speakers, speaks about societies formed within the urban settings of Frankfurt and Danzig

Julia Schmidt-Funke’s paper in its analysis of the intellectual geographies also firmly related the creation of natural history collections with urban spaces as centres of trade, as destinations for immigrant merchants and apothecaries, as part of the day-to-day commercial activity of the city.  Roos’ paper analysing the travel diary of seventeenth-century English naturalist and apothecary James Petiver delineated the scientific peregrination from country house to urban gardens, not only as places of collecting field specimens and materia medica, but as places of observation, and intellectual discourse.  The confabulatory life of the natural philosopher cum physician and concomitant creation of natural history collections were firmly bounded to space and place, whether physical locality or the Republic of Letters.  We also see a glimpse of this confabulatory life in Maria Avxentevskaya’swork about the album amicorum, Stammbücher, or friendship albums, constructed by early modern Dutch and German-speaking students. They collected knowledge and contacts on their academia peregrinatio, self-fashioning as cosmopolitan and well-educated men with international contacts and wide-ranging natural philosophical knowledge.

Analysis of printed works is also important to understand the rationale of collections and collecting, as Kraemer’s analysis of the Miscellanea Curiosa, the journal of the Academia Naturae Curiosorumwell demonstrated. Much like a contemporary cabinet of curiosities, albeit on the two-dimensional space of the printed page, the journal juxtaposed a potentially open-ended number of strange things that were deemed of particular value for the study of nature.

Chair Anja-Silvia Goeing introduces Joanna Hedesan’s talk on chymical curiosities within the collections of the Tradescants and Ole Worm

Hedesan’s paper compared the chemical specimens and materia medica in the Tradescant and Ole Worm collection catalogues and tracked them through time as they were collected or created with an eye to understanding their role not only as objects of observation, but in Worm’s case, their use in the chymical laboratory appended to his museum.

Dominik Hünniger speaks on the changing attention to insects in journal publication over time

Hünniger’s paper, which analysed entomological articles by doctors and natural philosophers in the Philosophical Transactionsand the Acta of the Leopoldina would also allow us to track particular specimens chronologically, in this case accounts of insects in published journals, to understand how and why they may have appeared in museum collections.  Analysis such as this allows scholars to  comprehend the rationale behind their changing taxonomic classification based upon observations made about their appearance and behaviour.

We would also like to thank the Leopoldina Centre for Science Studies and the Franckesche Stiftungen for being such generous hosts for our first workshop.

 

 

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