ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1599, Thomas Platter of Basle visited the London apartments of Walter Cope to view Cope's collection of curiosities gathered from around the world. Cope's room is a Kunst or Wunderkammer, a wonder-cabinet: a form of collection peculiar to the late Renaissance, characterized primarily by its encyclopedic appetite for the marvellous or the strange and by an exceptionally brief historical career. The museum represents an order and a categorical will to knowledge whose absence is precisely what is on display in a room such as Cope's. Cope's display of strange things will serve as our introduction not to Renaissance collections, but to Renaissance collection: to the process rather than the product of what we might call the collective activity of the period. Laurent Joubert's Erreures populaires is the earliest of such anthologies: forays by the learned into the new-found land of popular culture, in which "vulgar" thought and customs were recorded and collected as Error.
