The Digital Ark: Early Modern Collections of Curiosities in England and Scotland, 1580-1700

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'Anything that Is Strang': Normality, Deviance, and the Tradescants' Collecting Legacy

Secondary Title (i.e. Proceedings Title): Periodical Title:Perspectives on Science Publication Type:article Authors:Pannese, Alessia Editors: Publisher: Place of Publication: Publication Date:Fall 2015 Alternate Date (i.e. Conference Date): Volume:23 Issue:3 Start Page:334 End Page:360 Abstract:The Tradescants--father and son--naturalists, gardeners, and collectors, are credited with major contributions to seventeenth-century Britain's natural and cultural landscapes. Keen collectors, they amassed artefacts and other objects in what soon became Britain's most illustrious "cabinet of curiosities"--known as Tradescant's "Ark." Here, drawing from historical and scientific evidence, I discuss ways in which the Tradescants' collection reflects, reinforces, and challenges the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understanding of human relation to knowledge, and offers an alternative interpretation of the conceptual categories that it represents. Specifically, I propose a shift of emphasis from the contrast between the natural and the artificial--the two categories into which the collection is explicitly divided--to the one between the normal and the deviant. I suggest that, by embodying the coexistence and juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign, the near and the far, the common and the rare, Tradescant's Ark provided a safe physical and intellectual context for encountering normality and deviance, possibly marking the way seventeenth-century British (and Westerners at large) imagined, learned about, and engaged with the other, and with the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Descriptors/Keywords: Theory of knowledge -- History -- 17th century
Great Britain -- History -- Stuarts, 1603-1714
Intellectual life -- History
Naturalists
Gardeners -- History
Collectors & collecting -- 17th century ISBN: URL:
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