ABSTRACT
Especially from the early seventeenth century onwards, within a group of largely secular institutions in Europe – some relatively formal, official and regulated (academies, learned societies, publishing houses), others looser and more informal (networks of savants, naturalists, collectors, travellers and antiquarians) – there developed various worldly discourses of curiosity1 that were attacked by churches and, to a certain extent, universities. The two relatively newest and most distinctive semantic features of these worldly discourses were, first, their tendency to make curiosity, on the whole, something more good than bad and, secondly, their enthusiasm for curiosities – that is, they were responsible for the rapid proliferation of object-oriented usages of this family of terms (‘a curious shell’), alongside the continuing subject-oriented ones (‘a curious collector’). The tendency within this culture of curiosities2 to call objects ‘curious’ often entailed shaping matter or discourse into a collection of fragments. In other words, when several material or discursive objects were described as ‘curious’ or as ‘curiosities’, it was stated or implied that they were fragments belonging to a literal or metaphorical collection. This tendency did not characterise all early modern discourse on curiosity, but rather the culture of curiosities in particular. It was sometimes couched in terms other than the language of curiosity; but it was very often grounded in the object-oriented semantic thread of the ‘curiosity’ family of terms. In cases where it was, I am labelling it the curiosity-collecting tendency (or thread, strand or metaphor). In cases where it was not, I am simply labelling it the collecting tendency.
