Enlightening the British : knowledge, discovery and the museum in the eighteenth century

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Enlightening the British : knowledge, discovery and the museum in the eighteenth century

edited by R.G.W. Anderson ... [et al.]

British Museum Press, 2003

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注記

"Texts delivered at the British Museum's 250th Anniversary conference ... which took place at the museum on 4-6 April 2002"--T.p. verso

Includes bibliographical references and index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

The British Museum was born into a world of intellectual turbulence and intensive enquiry - the Age of Enlightenment. Established in 1753 by Act of Parliament as the first national museum of its kind in the world, it naturally reflected contemporary cultural enterprise throughout Europe and further afield. Exploration around the globe had already produced a vast range of new discoveries: collections had sprung up in which scholars attempted to comprehend and to categorize these materials, leading to the production of a stream of scientific treatises, catalogues and encyclopaedias. With the aim of setting the founding of the British Museum in context, this volume presents twenty-two essays by leading scholars. The Museum itself arose out of the activities of Sir Hans Sloane, whose private museum already encapsulated several earlier collections reaching back into the late seventeenth century. Sloane rose to become President of the Royal Society, a body that had already created its own collection of natural specimens, scientific instruments, etc. In its first half-century the British Museum was dominated by the influence of Sir Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Captain Cook on his voyages along with Daniel Solander, a former pupil of Linnaeus and an early recruit to the curatorial staff of the Museum. Banks and Solander respectively enhanced the collections with enormous numbers of specimens from the South Seas and introduced the principles of Linnaean taxonomy. At home in Great Britain the past was being explored and debated by the literati of the age, while the tenets of classical design exerted a profound influence on architecture, painting, sculpture and the decorative arts. The British Museum began to develop its collections of antiquarian material from the ancient world, a process that received a significant boost with the defeat of Napoleon in Egypt and the consequent diversion to Bloomsbury of many important objects originally bound for the Musee du Louvre. There is much in this volume that will throw new light on this, one of the greatest museums of the world, and show its intimate interconnection with contemporary scholarship, artistic endeavour and polite learning.

目次

  • List of illustrations
  • Notes on the contributors
  • Introduction (Robert Anderson)
  • Anticipating the Enlightenment: museums and galleries in Britain before the British Museum (Giles Waterfield)
  • Sir Hans Sloane and the European proto-museum (Debora J. Meijers)
  • From private collection to public museum: the Sloane collection at Chelsea and the British Museum in Montagu House (Marjorie L. Caygill)
  • Encyclopaedic collectors: Ephrain Chambers and Sir Hans Sloane (Richard Yeo)
  • Wantonness and use: ambitions for research libraries in early eighteenth-century England (David McKitterick)
  • Paper monuments and learned societies: Hooke's Royal Society repository (Lisa Jardine)
  • The status of instruments in eighteenth-century cabinets (Robert Anderson)
  • 'Utile et Dulce': applying knowledge at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (Celina Fox)
  • Wedgwood and his artists (David Bindman)
  • Skulls, mummies and unicorns' horns: medicinal chemistry in early English museums (Ken Arnold)
  • Natural history in eighteenth-century museums in Britain (Hugh S. Torrens)
  • Linnaeus, Solander and the birth of a Global Plant Taxonomy (Bengt Jonsell)
  • Joseph Banks, the British Museum and collections in the Age of Empire (Neil Chambers)
  • 'Ethnography' in the Enlightenment (John Mack)
  • European responses to the sacred art of India (Partha Mitter)
  • Dr Richard Mead (1673-1754) and his circle (Ian Jenkins)
  • The rise and decline of English neoclassicism (Joseph M. Levine)
  • Bodies of Enlightenment: sculpture and the eighteenth-century museum (Malcolm Baker)
  • Napoleon and Egyptology: Britain's debt to French enterprise (T.G.H. James)
  • Martin Folkes and the study of the English coinage in the eighteenth century (Hugh Pagan)
  • The antiquity en plein air: eighteenth-century progress from topographical survey to the threshold of field archaeology (Arthur MacGregor)
  • Record and reverie: representing British antiquity in the eighteenth century (Sam Smiles)
  • Afterword (Keith Thomas)
  • Index.

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