Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (review)

This is an ambitious book by a literary historicist that touches upon aspects of artistic connoisseurship, natural philosophy, antiquarianism, and print culture between roughly 1600 and 1750. It describes the objectives of collecting as broadening during this period to range from factual information to paintings, antiquities, natural curiosities, and the publication of an author's works. Swann further argues that the "vogue for collecting ... was one aspect of the brave new world of consumer goods that emerged during the Renaissance" (5). It reflected "a recognizably modern form of consciousness" in which "possessions became an objectification of self" (6). By examining how people collected and cataloged things, texts, and information, she seeks to illuminate the growth of possessive individualism.

The book provides a wealth of intriguing information and detailed insights about individual collections and collectors, from the Earl of Arundel at the start of the seventeenth century to Hans Sloane, whose vast assemblage of 80,000 artifacts became the core of the British Museum after a special parliamentary appropriation in 1753. It convincingly sustains its argument that a widely diffused "culture of collecting"—involving an obsession with assembling, arranging, and cataloging everything from paintings to descriptions of funeral monuments—deeply shaped seventeenth-century culture. The collector was concerned not just with the acquisition of things but also with the creation of systems of codification, which, in turn, gave rise to new forms of knowledge and claims to cultural authority. Collecting thereby became a form of self-fashioning and a means to acquire prestige and influence. Sometimes it involved attempts by kings and aristocrats to validate their superiority by assembling objects, such as paintings and ancient artifacts, which represented "a kind of knowledge that transformed them into high culture" (17). But Swann also examines how men of middling status like John Tradescant "appropriated and refashioned aristocratic forms of collecting" (27), by assisting aristocratic patrons and amassing collections of their own. Sometimes collecting involved competitive and even predatory practices. Elias Ashmole managed not only to gain possession of Tradescant's immense collection after its owner's death but to appropriate the credit for it by persuading the University of Oxford to erect a building to house it, named the Ashmolean Museum.

Further chapters examine how the activities of collecting and cataloging influenced Baconian natural history, chorographical descriptions of local antiquities, and the publishing of literary texts. Humanists encouraged their students to "harvest" and collect eloquent passages from other writers for incorporation within their own work, a practice that sanctioned plagiarism and undercut individuals' attempts to retain credit for their own work. Swann sees Ben Jonson's Collected Works (London, 1616) as a deliberate effort to combat this problem, while at the same time embodying a retrospective literary biography intended to cement the author's reputation.

Despite its considerable strengths, the book's central argument often seems exaggerated and reductive in its relentless relation of the "culture of collecting" to the rise of possessive individualism and forms of political consciousness implicitly at odds with "Stuart absolutism." Many historians will probably remain unconvinced by several of Swann's more sweeping claims. It will be unfortunate, however, if this reaction leads them to overlook the solid core of research and detailed interpretation that makes this book a valuable contribution to early modern cultural history.