Cabinet of curiosities

A historical collection of unusual natural and human-made objects, often displayed together. Such collections combined specimens, artworks, antiquities, and marvels before modern museums took shape.

Wunderkammer: A German term for a cabinet of curiosities, literally meaning a room of wonders. The term captures the collections’ blend of wonder, learning, and display.
Natural history: The study of organisms and natural phenomena through observation, collection, and description. Natural history supplied many specimens and interpretive questions for cabinets.
Collection (art and antiquities): An assembled group of objects kept together for study, preservation, or display. A cabinet turned individual acquisitions into a curated body of objects.
Ashmolean Museum: A museum in Oxford founded in 1683 from Elias Ashmole’s collection and other gifts. Its opening marked an early transition from private collecting to public museum access.
Renaissance: A period of European cultural and intellectual change beginning in the fourteenth century. Renaissance courts and scholarship fostered collecting rare objects from nature and distant places.
Taxidermy: The art and science of preparing animal skins to preserve lifelike forms for display. Preserved animals made distant or rare creatures present within a collection.
Classification: The arrangement of entities into groups according to shared properties or relationships. Collectors used categories to impose order on objects with different origins.
British Museum: A public museum in London founded in 1753 to house collections of human history, art, and natural history. Its founding collection included objects assembled through earlier antiquarian and natural-history traditions.
Ole Worm: A Danish physician and naturalist whose collection became a celebrated early modern museum. His Copenhagen collection exemplified the scholarly ambitions of a cabinet.
Herbarium: A collection of preserved plant specimens arranged for study and reference. Herbaria show how collected nature could be preserved and ordered systematically.

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