This fascinating book offers a history of museum collecting in western Europe over the course of its formative centuries, tracing its origins from the culture of collecting that emerged during the Renaissance and concluding with the great changes of the nineteenth century which would prove so influential to the museum movement of later years.Taking into account both individual collectors and public institutions, Arthur MacGregor covers topics such as the methods by which materials from both the manmade and natural world were selected and displayed, problems of preservation and presentation, the specialization of individual areas such as fine arts, antiquities or natural history, as well as the developments of the nineteenth century that brought such collections within the reach of a much wider public. With the aid of 200 images, this book offers for the first time a wide-ranging survey of this entire process as well as the changing preoccupations of collectors.

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

Arts & Photography

MacGregor, Arthur

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Anglo-Scandinavian Finds from Lloyds Bank, Pavement, and Other Sites

Humanities Pr

Artefacts made from skeletal materials since the Roman period were, before this book, neglected as a serious area of study. This is a comprehensive account which reviews over fifty categories of artefact. The book starts with a consideration of the formation, morphology and mechanical properties of the materials and illuminates characteristics concerning working with them. Following chapters discuss the organisation of the industry and trade in such items, including the changing status of the industry over time. Archaeological evidence is combined with that from historical and ethnological sources, with many illustrations providing key visual reference. Originally published in 1985.

Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn: The Technology of Skeletal Materials Since the Roman Period (Routledge Library Editions: Archaeology)

Reference

Routledge

Artefacts made from skeletal materials since the Roman period were, before this book, neglected as a serious area of study. This is a comprehensive account which reviews over fifty categories of artefact. The book starts with a consideration of the formation, morphology and mechanical properties of the materials and illuminates characteristics concerning working with them. Following chapters discuss the organisation of the industry and trade in such items, including the changing status of the industry over time. Archaeological evidence is combined with that from historical and ethnological sources, with many illustrations providing key visual reference. Originally published in 1985.

Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn (Routledge Library Editions: Archaeology)

In colonial India, a range of administrators, soldiers, surveyors, and others invested large parts of their lives in attempting to inventory and comprehend the vast country, its teeming populations, and their myriad customs and religions. Company Curiosities offers the first overview of the remarkable role of the East India Company and its servants in collecting, cataloging, and transmitting from India to Europe a treasure-house of natural specimens and man-made objects—from craft materials to paintings and sculptures, weapons, costumes, jewels, and ornaments. For a time, the East India Company’s own India Museum in London led the way in presenting their findings and establishing for a larger public the characteristic features of a subcontinent that would become the heart of Britain’s worldwide empire. Later, when the Great Exhibition and its successors redefined the style and the scale of presentation of the world’s commercial and industrial processes, the Company’s talented curators (now under their new masters, the India Office) continued to play a key role in articulating these materials. Meanwhile, Company employees returning from years of service diffused a taste for all things Indian. Superbly illustrated, Company Curiosities reveals how these diverse players invented the look and feel of India for those who had never ventured abroad.

Company Curiosities: Nature, Culture and the East India Company, 1600–1874

History

Asia

Reaktion Books

The India Museum Revisited

A full examination of the India Museum's founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain's arch-colonialist enterprises. Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections--with respect to materials, their manufacture, and original functions on the Indian sub-continent--as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum. From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded, and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of eighty years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum's involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond. &nbsp;

UCL Press

St Helena: An Island Biography

Boydell Press

The Origins of Museums is an extensive account of the first great collections in late sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. The collections, then called 'cabinets of curiosities', were the beginnings of museums as we now know them. The discovery of the New World saw a huge influx of exotic and rare exhibits arrive in from distant lands. These discoveries revolutionised the European view of the wider world. Scholars from all over the globe describe in thirty- three essays the achievements of numerous significant collectors, the range of material gathered and the impact these collections had on Late Renaissance society. With a comprehensive bibliography, the papers provide expert insight into this fascinating period of collecting history, a generally neglected subject.

The Origins of Museums

IMPEY, Oliver

House of Stratus Ltd

In chronological terms this booklet takes at its starting point the accession of Henry VII in 1485 and it concludes with the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. This key chapter in the story of England is charted with special reference to the Museum's outstanding collections of decorative arts and antiquities -- the material expression of these historical developments. The text is supplemented with fifty-seven illustrations (fifty-four of them in colour) in a format that is as accessible as it is informative.

Tudor England

Hook, Moira

Europe

Ashmolean Museum Publications

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