2001/01/01 by Arthur MacGregor · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Ancient Egypt and Archaeology #Maritime and Coastal Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1093/jhc/13.2.125
openalex publication_date 2001/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
For a period of almost two centuries the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford functioned as an integrated scientific institution, combining a conventional museum display with a chemical laboratory and a school of natural history. The history of the collection of naturalia is examined here in terms of three principal phases: during the earliest of these the character of the displays as revealed by contemporary catalogues was largely conditioned by the collection's genesis in a seventeenth-century cabinet of curiosities; In the second phase, centred early in the second half of the eighteenth century, the impact of Linnaeus began to make itself felt; in the third phase, occupying the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the entire collection was redisplayed as an exposition of natural theology. Finally, by 1860 the natural specimens were transferred from the Ashmolean, leaving a much reduced collection of manmade objects from which the Museum in its current form was later relaunched.