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Epilogze:An Ornament to theNation When Peter Mundy enteredJohn Tradescant's "Ark" in 1634to gaze, spellbound , at Tradescant's collection of taxidermy, minerals, coins, art work, and plants, he unknowingly crossed the threshold of modernity. Possessive individualism, the concept of the self-as-owner which would later come to dominate Western culture, emerged in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries amidst a rapidly expandingworld of physical objects. Shaped by the social, economic, and political conditions peculiar to the early modern period, collections of material things began to proliferate among the English, affording new opportunities for the construction and display of possessive identity. To understand early modern English modes of selfhood and social identity, I have demonstrated, we must consider how individuals and groups used collections of physical objects as sites of self-fashioning. This study has argued that collectingwas often used as a technology of social innovation in seventeenth-century England. Initially pursued as an elite cultural form, the collectionwas soon adopted-and adapted-by ambitious , middling sort men. Although the Tradescants began their careers as the hirelings of Stuart aristocrats, they capitalized on their employers' social connections and the nascent exploitation of the New World to construct new identities-and a livelihood-for themselves as collector/entrepreneurs . The Tradescants' urge to textualize their collection proved their downfall, however, when the creation and publication of the Musaeum Tradescantianum allowed another collector to claim possession of the contents of the Ark. In thus transforming his role from that of cataloguer to owner of the Tradescant collection, Elias Ashmole, the son of a saddler, gained a new foundation upon which to claim enhanced social authority. Knowing from this firsthand experiencejust how vulnerable an individual's collection was to posthumous predation, Ashmole created a museum to keep "his" collection intact, seeking to guarantee the perpetuation of his identity by entrusting it to the architectural and institutional stability of a custom-made building at Oxford University. Although he was born with greater social cachet than Ashmole, the E P I L O G U E I95 politically disappointed Sir Francis Bacon also turned to collecting as a means by which to improve his status. Bacon envisioned himself obtaining power and influence as a scientific mandarin who would oversee the collecting activities of a new bureaucracy. After his death, Bacon's blueprint for natural history research was amended to legitimate the self-consciously genteel collecting practices of virtuosos and the Royal Society. Other fields of knowledge were also shaped by the new emphasis on artifacts and collecting. Chorographers and antiquarians like William Camden, Richard Carew, William Burton, and SirWilliam Dugdale functioned as collectors to create texts which portrayed the English landscape as a space filled with objects. While these authors gathered and displayed objects which symbolized landownership in genealogical terms, after the Civil War other writers such as Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Plot came increasingly to depict the countryside as an amalgam of owned objects, implicitly questioning the social authority of bloodlines in a polity which had endured regicide. The interpenetration of concepts of text and artifact so characteristic of early modern collecting also gave rise to innovative literary forms. Exploiting the blurred boundary between writings and physical things, Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick combined an artifactual concept of the text with the technology of the printed book to create new modes of proprietary authorship for themselves. In his folio Workes,Jonson collected his literary texts to present them as one unified entity-and underestimated the cultural power this apparently complete collection would exert over the reception of his literary output after 1616.Bygathering his poems together in the volume entitled Hesperides, Robert Herrick constructed a vision of the self as a collection of textualized moments of consciousness, creating a printed ark to preserve his multifaceted identity. In many ways, the collecting practices which flourished during the seventeenth century reached their culmination in the immense collection of rarities amassed by Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Despite his title (he was created a baronet in 1716)and his coat of arms (which he applied to register in 1726),Sloane, like so many of the collectors examined in this study,was a self-made man. Hans ~loane was born the youngest son of a ~cottish family which had settled in Ireland, where his father worked as an agent of the estates owned by James Hamilton, first Viscount C1andeboye.l~hroughout his adult life, Sloane displayed a great talent for acquiringlarge sums of money. Moving to...

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