The jocund cabinet and the melancholy museum in seventeenth- century English literature

Rabelais’s parodic library in part inspires a minor but distinctive seventeenth-century English genre based on this impropriety: the curiosityspoof either as a stinging caricature of the virtuoso and the curioso, or as the fanciful catalogue of absurd collections.3 Although the great majority of

This essay, written originally in 2003 for the present volume, was eventually incorporated in slightly different form in Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005).