Enfilade

From the conference website:

Collections in Use
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s College London, 6 July 2015

Over the past few decades, material turns taking place across a number of disciplines have established the importance of placing objects within their broad geographical, conceptual, social and cultural contexts in order to understand the multiplicity of meanings with which they were invested within past societies. Objects are understood to have their own ‘social lives’, illustrated in the various ways in which they were exchanged, acquired, accumulated and displayed.

The history of collecting, in particular, has been a central node in discussions regarding the meanings of objects in the past, because it encompasses a range of activities within and across societies around the world. As such, scholars working on early modern material culture are amassing a great deal of knowledge regarding the precise motivations for collecting objects, how specific objects entered into collections, and which people facilitated this.

Much less is known, however, about what happened within collections, both to the objects and the people who interacted with them. In order to fully understanding the role of objects, collections and collectors within early modern society, therefore, we need to generate more discussion around this issue using the broadest possible sense of the word ‘collection’, including but not limited to: cabinets, museums, sculpture galleries, literary miscellanies, menageries, herbaria, gardens, and houses.

Collections in Use is a one-day workshop designed to bring together early modern scholars across several disciplines to showcase their work across a variety of collections: anatomical, medical, domestic, princely, antiquarian, natural historical, literary, and artistic. To book tickets and for more information, please go to the Eventbrite page.

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P R O G R A M M E

9:30  Registration and coffee

9:50  Welcome by Alice Marples and Victoria Pickering

10:00  Managing Collections: Collecting, Cataloguing, Curating
Chair: Felicity Roberts (King’s College London/British Museum)
• Bert van de Roemer (Universiteit van Amsterdam) – The Act of Assembling Objects
• Mia Jackson (Queen Mary University of London) – The Collections of the Illustres: Collections in Use in the Louvre
•Fabio Morabito (King’s College London) – In Search of His Own Signature: Luigi Cherubini’s Collection of Autographs by Other Composers

11:15  Coffee break

11:45  Experimental Collections: In, With, For
Chair: Alice Marples (King’s College London/British Library)
• Sally Osborn (University of Roehampton) – ‘To be placed with experements’: Developing Knowledge through the Collection and Use of Medical Recipes
• Helen McCormack (Glasgow School of Art) – Superb Cabinets or Splendid Anachronisms? ‘Experimental’ Collecting in Early Scientific Interiors
• Reese Arnott-Davies (Birkbeck University) – ‘Some Dark Emblem’: Visibility, Obscurity and Exhibiting Egypt at Montagu House

1:00  Lunch

2:00  Disseminating Collections: Publication and Practice
Chair: Victoria Pickering (Queen Mary University of London/Natural History Museum)
• Barbara Furlotti – Through Drawings and by Word of Mouth: Circulating Information on Antiquarian Collections in the Early Modern Period
• Isabelle Charmantier (The Linnean Society) – The Linnaean Workshop: Practices of Disseminating Botanical Knowledge
• Dominik Huenniger (University of Göttingen) – ‘Academies of Natural History’: Continental Utilisation of Collections in Eighteenth-Century Britain

3:15  Coffee break

3:45  Researching Collections: Current Methods
Chair: Martha Fleming (Reconstructing Sloane Project)
• Jed Foland (Bodleian Library) – Museums as Laboratories: Reenacting Scientific Discovery Using the Microscope
• Clare Hickman (King’s College London) – Reconsidering the Role of Botanic Gardens
• Alexandra Cook (University of Hong Kong) – Looking at the Herbarium as a Robust Scientific Object

5:00  Roundtable
Chair: Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London)
• Anne Goldgar (King’s College London)
• Alexander Marr (University of Cambridge)
• Mark Carnall (Grant Museum of Zoology)
• Lisa Skogh (Victoria and Albert Museum)

6:00  Wine reception