Abstract:

Among the most important resources for Early Modern theorists of the imagination was the museum--the imagination as a space stocked with objects or images of objects. Deployed by such early empiricist thinkers as John Locke, Robert Hooke, and John Evelyn, this metaphor of the collection provided the foundational trope for the Enlightenment mind--a striking fact given the often chaotic nature of the collections to which they referred. Unlike the creative faculty theorized by Romantic authors, such an imagination, prevalent in the Restoration and early eighteenth century, was conservative and mimetic, the site of the storage and reproduction of objects or images of objects. It was, in a word, curatorial. But the conservative model of the imagination--the imagination as passive storage space--was puzzled by the sometimes haphazard and generally disordered collections to which the metaphor itself referred. The early modern Enlightenment mind, that is, was less a clean, well-lighted space than a cluttered heap of impressions, an eccentric space which found, as its most natural model, the equally eccentric Early Modern museum.

This dissertation extends recent work on the origins of museums to the imaginative arts which those museums came to imply. A surprising number of authors of Restoration and Eighteenth-century England were collectors, just as many collectors were also authors; I therefore consider the parallels which emerge between the poetics of collecting and the poetics of the imaginative arts. Important figures for this project, all of whom were writers and curators, include virtuoso and numismatist John Evelyn, the diarist and bibliophile Samuel Pepys, obstetrician William Hunter, Royal Society curator Robert Hooke, poet and physician Mark Akenside, poet and gardener Alexander Pope, geologist John Woodward, medalist and essayist Joseph Addison, painter Joshua Reynolds, librettist John Gay, thief and thief-taker Jonathan Wild, and belletrist and antiquarian Horace Walpole. Given the importance of collections to theorists of the mind, it is my contention that a close look at material collections will teach us something about the curatorial strain of the imaginative arts, just as a close look at the imaginative arts will reciprocally yield important clues about the structure of the early modern museum.