Monuments of Dust: Public Legacies in English Museums, 1683–1753.
Abstract
A cultural history of English museums between the founding of the Ashmolean (1683) and that of the British Museum (1753), a period when collections first started to describe themselves explicitly as 'public'. My primary materials are catalogues, regulations, benefactors' registers, statutory documents, collectors' wills and other textual representations of collections - these form a paratextual scaffolding which defines emerging institutions and mediates the collective identities of their objects.
My project is interested in how monumental and public identities are superimposed on the objects in collections, how these function as qualities of the meanings of objects, in relation to their physical qualities. It explores five collections and their different relationships to publicness: the Cotton Library, the Ashmolean Museum, the Royal Society’s repository, the Woodwardian Museum, and Hans Sloane’s collection. Comparing these I ask why the public museum emerges in England as a category at this time, how uniform is its conceptualisation, and what claims we can make about the relationships between cultures of legacy making and knowledge making. My research centres on questions about rhetorical permanence and material impermanence, the durability of object, individual and social identities, and about ownership, legacy and patrimony
Authors
Burgess, William GeorgeCollections
- Theses [4138]