Free Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler Page B

likely)—and at long last grogged the resonances of the archive’s own name as well. (Hokes!?) Thinking better of my initial impulse, I hung up without completing the call.
    M EANWHILE , it was to other, much earlier, incarnations of David Wilson’s museum that I began to turn my own increasingly obsessive attentions. John Walsh’s allusions to
Wunderkammern
lodged in my brain like a spore and increasingly, in the midst of various other sorts of research forays, I found myself drifting over to those sections of the library that documented the early history of what would subsequently become museums. Walsh himself helped exacerbate these tendencies by sending me a marvelously daffy volume from the Oxford University Press entitled
The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe
, a compendium of almost insanely recondite scholarly papers delivered at a 1983 conference called to celebrate the tercentenary of the opening to the public of Oxford’s own Ashmolean Museum by the then Duke of York (subsequentlyKing James II). It was in its pages, for instance, that I first came upon Francis Bacon’s prescription for the essential apparatus of the compleat “learned gentleman” (from his
Gesta Grayorum
of 1594), and particularly his suggestion that in attempting to achieve within “a small compass a model of the universal made private,” any such would-be magus would almost certainly want to compile “a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included.”
    That formulation—I especially liked the “singularity, chance and the shuffle of things” part—neatly anticipated the sorts of lists one comes upon everywhere in this vein of research. The
Origins
book, for example, cites the case of Bacon’s contemporary, Sir Walter Cope (d. 1614), a politician and member of the Elizabethan College of Antiquaries, whose Kensington castle featured, according to the 1599 diary of a Swiss visitor named Thomas Platter, “an appartment stuffed with queer foreign objects in every corner,” including, among other things: holy relics from a Spanish ship Cope had helped to capture; earthen pitchers and porcelain from China; a Madonna made of feathers, a chain made of monkey teeth, stone shears, a back-scratcher, and a canoe with paddles, all from “India”; a Javanese costume, Arabian coats; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros, the horn of a bull seal, a round horn that had grown on an Englishwoman’s forehead, a unicorn’s tail; the baubles and bells of HenryVIII’s fool, the Turkish emperor’s golden seal … (Another diarist, a few years later, noted the addition of such recent acquisitions as “a passport given by the King of Peru to the English, neatly written upon wood,” and a little Indian bird,phosphorescent by night.) 7
    By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this sort of hoard (the chamber of wonders, in which the word
wonder
referred both to the objects displayed and the subjective state those objects inevitably induced in their respective viewers) was rampant all over Europe, and the question arises: Why? Or rather, why
then?
To say that such wonder was an essential aspect of early Renaissance experience merely begs the question: What was it about the early Renaissance that provoked such an avalanche of wonder? And of course the answer, as Platter’s awestruck inventory of Cope’s treasure trove itself suggests, lies in the avalanche of marvelous new
stuff
that had suddenly begun pouring over the transom into a previously parochial, hidebound, closed-in European subcontinent. In particular, the stuff of the New