ABSTRACT
Cabinets of curiosity, which first appeared in the fifteenth century and were replaced in the nineteenth century by public collections and museums, were precursors to natural history museums. The idea was to classify objects, beginning with those related to God and natures work, and ending with human-made things. The aim was to celebrate human ingenuity, even if it was considered another expression of the Creator. The sixteenth century saw an obsession for objects belonging to the category of exotica. Foreign objects were an endless source of interest, and fed a craze for all things original, curious, or strange. Fantastic zoologies appear in a number of travel narratives from the time, from Alexander the Great to Marco Polo to the nineteenth-century European explorers. The arrival of the Hottentot Venus in Europe in the early nineteenth century marked the beginning of a new way of thinking about the other in the West.
