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Author: Ken Arnold
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351953591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
The last few years has, within museums, witnessed nothing short of a revolution. Worried that the very institution was itself in danger of becoming a dusty, forgotten, culturally irrelevant exhibit, vigorous efforts have been made to reshape the museum mission. Fearing that history was coming to be ignored by modern society, many institutions have instead marketed a de-intellectualised heritage, overly relying on computer technology to captivate a contemporary audience. The theme of this work is that we can do much to reassess the rationale that inspires contemporary collections through a study of seventeenth century museums. England's first museums were quite literally wonderful; founded that is on the disciplined application of the faculty of wonder. The type of wonder employed was not that post-Romantic idea of disbelief, but rather an active form of curiosity developed during the Renaissance, particularly by the individuals who set about gathering objects and founding museums to further their enquiries. The argument put forward in this book is that this museological practice of using objects actually to create, as well as disseminate knowledge makes just as much sense today as it did in the seventeenth century and, further, that the best way of reinvigorating contemporary museums, is to return to that form of wonder. By taking such a comparative approach, this book works both as a scholarly historical text, and as an historically informed analysis of the key issues facing today's museums. As such, it will prove essential reading both for historians of collecting and museums, and for anyone interested in the philosophies of modern museum management.
Author: Ken Arnold
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351953591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Get Book Here
Book Description
The last few years has, within museums, witnessed nothing short of a revolution. Worried that the very institution was itself in danger of becoming a dusty, forgotten, culturally irrelevant exhibit, vigorous efforts have been made to reshape the museum mission. Fearing that history was coming to be ignored by modern society, many institutions have instead marketed a de-intellectualised heritage, overly relying on computer technology to captivate a contemporary audience. The theme of this work is that we can do much to reassess the rationale that inspires contemporary collections through a study of seventeenth century museums. England's first museums were quite literally wonderful; founded that is on the disciplined application of the faculty of wonder. The type of wonder employed was not that post-Romantic idea of disbelief, but rather an active form of curiosity developed during the Renaissance, particularly by the individuals who set about gathering objects and founding museums to further their enquiries. The argument put forward in this book is that this museological practice of using objects actually to create, as well as disseminate knowledge makes just as much sense today as it did in the seventeenth century and, further, that the best way of reinvigorating contemporary museums, is to return to that form of wonder. By taking such a comparative approach, this book works both as a scholarly historical text, and as an historically informed analysis of the key issues facing today's museums. As such, it will prove essential reading both for historians of collecting and museums, and for anyone interested in the philosophies of modern museum management.
Author: Ruth Scurr
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681370433
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
Born on the brink of the modern world, John Aubrey was witness to the great intellectual and political upheavals of the seventeenth century. He knew everyone of note in England—writers, philosophers, mathematicians, doctors, astrologers, lawyers, statesmen—and wrote about them all, leaving behind a great gift to posterity: a compilation of biographical information titled Brief Lives, which in a strikingly modest and radical way invented the art of biography. Aubrey was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1626. The reign of Queen Elizabeth and, earlier, the dissolution of the monasteries were not too far distant in memory during his boyhood. He lived through England’s Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the brief rule of Oliver Cromwell and his son, and the restoration of Charles II. Experiencing these constitutional crises and regime changes, Aubrey was impassioned by the preservation of traces of Ancient Britain, of English monuments, manor houses, monasteries, abbeys, and churches. He was a natural philosopher, an antiquary, a book collector, and a chronicler of the world around him and of the lives of his friends, both men and women. His method of writing was characteristic of his manner: modest, self-deprecating, witty, and concerned above all with the collection of facts that would otherwise be lost to time. John Aubrey, My Own Life is an extraordinary book about the first modern biographer, which reimagines what biography can be. This intimate diary of Aubrey’s days is composed of his own words, collected, collated, and enlarged upon by Ruth Scurr in an act of meticulous scholarship and daring imagination. Scurr’s biography honors and echoes Aubrey’s own innovations in the art of biography. Rather than subject his life to a conventional narrative, Scurr has collected the evidence—the remnants of a life from manuscripts, letters, and books—and arranged it chronologically, modernizing words and spellings, and adding explanations when necessary, with sources provided in the extensive endnotes. Here are Aubrey’s intricate drawings of Stonehenge and the ancient Avebury stones; Aubrey on Charles I’s execution (“On this day, the King was executed. It was bitter cold, so he wore two heavy shirts, lest he should shiver and seem afraid”); and Aubrey on antiquity (“Matters of antiquity are like the light after sunset—clear at first—but by and by crepusculum—the twilight—comes—then total darkness”). From the darkness, Scurr has wrested a vibrant, intimate account of the life of an ingenious man.
Author: Kelsey Jackson Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191087122
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
John Aubrey (1626-1697), antiquary, natural philosopher, and virtuoso, is best-remembered today for his Brief Lives, biographies of his contemporaries filled with luminous detail which have been mined for anecdotes by generations of scholars. However, Aubrey was much more than merely the hand behind an invaluable source of biographical material; he was also the author of thousands of pages of manuscript notebooks covering everything from the origins of Stonehenge to the evolution of folklore. Kelsey Jackson Williams explores these manuscripts in full for the first time and in doing so illuminates the intricacies of Aubrey's investigations into Britain's past. The Antiquary is both a major new study of an important early modern writer and a significant intervention in the developing historiography of antiquarianism. It discusses the key aspects of Aubrey's work in a series of linked chapters on archaeology, architecture, biography, folklore, and philology, concluding with a revisionist interpretation of Aubrey's antiquarian writings. While covering a wide variety of scholarly territory, it remains rooted in the common thread of Aubrey's own intellectual development and the continual interaction between his texts as he studied, discovered, revised, and rewrote them across four decades. Its conclusions not only substantially reshape our understanding of Aubrey and his works, but also provide new understandings of the methodologies, ambitions, and achievements of antiquarianism across early modern Europe.
Author: Michael Hunter
Publisher: Science History Publications/USA
ISBN:
Category : Antiquarians
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Author: Aubrey Burl
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445620146
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 613
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Book Description
The career of eminent archaeologist John Aubrey and his revolutionary work on stone circles.
Author: Elizabeth Yale
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812247817
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Sociable Knowledge reconstructs the collaborations of seventeenth-century naturalists who, dispersed across city and country, worked through writing, conversation, and print to convert fragmented knowledge of the hyper-local and curious into an understanding and representation of Britain as a unified historical and geographical space.
Author: Jon Bruce Kite
Publisher: Lewiston, N.Y., USA : Edwin Mellen Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Author: Graham Parry
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191567159
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
The Trophies of Time presents the first comprehensive survey of the English antiquarians of the seventeenth century. In Britain throughout the period there was a persistent curiosity about the origins of the nation and its institutions, inspired initially by the publication in 1586 of Camden's Britannia. A remarkable campaign of scholarship developed, which attempted to imagine the vanished societies that had once flourished there. What could be known of prehistoric Britain from its monuments and language? Could the lay-out of Roman Britain be recovered? Was it possible somehow to retrieve the language, religion, and laws of Saxon England? The answers to these questions often had a bearing on contemporary issues of church and state and also enabled citizens to gain a new insight into the character and identity of their nation. Many of the most learned men of the age addressed themselves to antiquarian enquiry and this book presents lively and fascinating portraits of Camden, Cotton, Selden, Spelman, Ussher, Dugdale, Aubrey, and many other lesser-known scholars.
Author: Graham Parry
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317871103
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
The seventeenth century was a period of immense turmoil. This book explores the methods by which a distinctive iconography was created for each Stuart king, describes the cultural life of the Civil War period and the Cromwellian Protectorate, and analyses the impact of the antiquarian movement which constructed a new sense of national identity. Through this detailed and fascinating discussion of seventeenth-century society, Graham Parry provides a clear insight into the many forces operating on the literature of the period.
Author: Alan Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199684073
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages' explores the richness and variety of life writing in the Middle Ages, ranging from Anglo-Latin lives of missionaries, prelates, and princes to high medieval lives of scholars and visionaries to late medieval lives of authors and laypeople.
