| dc.description.abstract | John Woodward’s collection of geological specimens, bequeathed to Cambridge University in 1728, was one of the first public institutional collections of its kind. The collector himself led a checkered career and was frequently accused of self-importance and arro-gance by contemporaries. Studies of Woodward’s legacy project have hence tended to characterize his bequest as an exercise in self-aggrandizement at the expense of its use-fulness to subsequent generations of geologists. However, I propose that by resituating Woodward’s elaborate will and testament in the context of his distinctive collecting and taxonomic practices, the Woodwardian Museum can be reframed as his attempt to per-petuate an embodied methodology for understanding the natural world. By recontextu-alizing Woodward’s legacy project, I offer a reassessment of a prolonged discourse that has conflated his childlessness with a desire to replicate himself, suggesting that his collection tries to foster a meaningful intellectual progeny rather than to merely construct an elaborate funerary monument. | en_US |
