Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy ed. by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy ed. by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller
• Aurélien Ruellet (bio)

Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy
Edited by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Pp. 323.

In January 1742, a mummified ibis was presented at a meeting of the Egyptian Society in London, then carefully dissected a few days later. During another session, a mummy was opened by one of the members, Charles Pococke, who made hypotheses regarding the chemical components of the pigments used for coffins as well as the embalmment techniques. This is one of the numerous narratives that are scattered throughout the volume Collective Wisdom, edited by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller, the result of three conferences that brought together scholars from different countries and thematic horizons.

At the core of most of the eleven contributions, finely put in a wider historiographical perspective by the introduction, lays the question of the circulation of objects and the building of collections within the learned societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ingeniously referred to as “collective wisdom,” the focus of the book is on “the knowledge gained from studying collections . . . and the collections generated through objectbased study and exchange (archives, correspondence, journals)” (p. 16). The chapters are not about the birth of museums, but rather about the way collections, sometimes heterogeneous, composed of antiquities as much as of natural specimens, were circulated among equally heterogeneous social grounds, involving physicians, surgeons, quacks, merchants, and apothecaries, and how those objects were the support of an intellectual interest that was not confined to curiosity. The geographic focus is on central and northern Europe, with chapters devoted to the Leopoldina, which held its meetings in Halle; the Spalding Gentlemen Society in Lincolnshire (SGS); the multifarious activities of the collector and professor Ole Worm in Copenhagen; the uses of objects and collections in pedagogic activities inspired by Comenius; or learned circles in the commercial cities of Frankfurt/Main and Dantzig.

The historian of technology will find many points of interest: besides the discussions of technical objects (like the “roman lamp”—actually a medieval Jewish lamp used for Sabbath—that Hans Sloane offered to the Society of Antiquaries) or technical processes (see for example the chapter by C. Grell on the metrological works of Burratini in Egypt), the contributions shed light on a series of technologies of knowledge management in those learned societies. The reader can appreciate, thanks to many illustrations in color, extracts from the minute book of the SGS: its entries, pointing at the presence of an object during a session, also gave information about its origin and provider, cross-references to other entries, and sometimes also featured realistic drawings. This “virtual witnessing” device was paired with a museographic [End Page 1021] reflection to enable the members to conveniently access the objects and to ease their consultation or their display during the meetings of the society.

The culture of curiosity was not opposed to an experimental approach: the Miscellanea Curiosa (the journal of the Leopoldina) tried to reach an equilibrium between the presentation of specimens, more than often curious or monstrous, and the scholion, comments that were informed by erudition and skepticism, the two being clearly distinguished by the textual layout. The learned society, whose core membership was composed of physicians, thus traced epistemic as well as social boundaries that kept at a distance information purveyors such as apothecaries, midwives, or charlatans, while critically integrating their contributions. The historian of early modern science will be interested in the uncovering of the links that connected this collective wisdom and the better-known places of scientific achievement, in the guise of correspondence or the exchange of books and objects between, for instance, the Royal Society and some of those learned societies.

The conclusive chapter by Louisiane Ferlier aptly puts in historical perspective the issues of curating, classifying, publishing, and making the texts of this collective wisdom accessible to the audience. All those operations are now digital; the danger of a bug has replaced that of the vermin that devoured the texts; the technical choices relate more to the selection of a viewing software than to the location...