Picture a scene. Your eyes are met with such abundant impressions that they flit swiftly from one to the next. Just as something catches your gaze, another calls from the periphery. So you move on. As you do again. And again after that. Suddenly, as if time were a vapor, you’ve spent an hour shuffling your attention between curious things.

This scene could well describe the modern experience of scrolling Instagram or TikTok. But it also captures the sensory rush of stepping into a cabinet of curiosities centuries ago. Much as we find ourselves drowning in content today, these so-called Wunderkammern, literally “wonder chambers,” put the information overload wrought by European colonization and foreign trade on indulgent display.

Curiosity cabinets “demanded an agile and darting eye,” writes historian Daniela Bleichmar in her essay contribution to Collecting Across Cultures, “one that constantly shifted focus from wide to narrow and speed from slow to fast.” From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, these cabinets—which might be literal pieces of furniture, a single room, or several conjoined chambers—crammed their shelves with objects from across the globe. A single glance might have captured a stuffed walrus, two-headed beasts, ivory wrought into virtuosic shapes, books on medicinal plants, pottery, and sculptures in miniature—all while the curator tried (and failed) to burn asbestos in a fiery demo in the corner. It was enough to leave a person gobsmacked, and perhaps a hair overstimulated. The writer Peter Mundy, after visiting a seventeenth-century collection known as the Tradescant Ark, suspected a person might in one day spent under its roof “behold…more Curiosities then hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travell.”

The echoes between the curiosity cabinets of yore and our own media-steeped world offer opportunities for teaching digital and visual literacy, critical analysis, and historical thinking in the college classroom. As a historian of science who has taught about the history of collecting, I encourage my students to try to imagine themselves in the shoes of museumgoers and naturalists past. Images of historical artifacts from these cabinets as well as depictions of the collections themselves—all available to students through Artstor on JSTOR and similar resources—provide a tangible gateway to experience remote worldviews and mores. Such images can especially help STEM students see the value in humanistic questions, not least because curiosity cabinets were some of the original interdisciplinary spaces.

* * *

Students in “Reading Artifacts: The Material Culture of Science,” a course I taught at Dartmouth College for a number of years, use images and primary sources to think about both ruptures and continuities between our moment and the past. During an early unit on curiosity cabinets, students begin by posting a reading response to our discussion board before class. For this assignment, they must use an online database like Artstor on JSTOR to locate a pre-1800 artifact or image that reminded them of the readings and cite at least one reading in their response. One student might gravitate toward a gilt microscope that looks bafflingly different from the one they use in their research lab. Through it, they might comment on the role of touch in these interactive early museums, or the erstwhile association between science and luxury. Another might find a contested artifact like Powhatan’s Mantle—still on display at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, whose origins lay in the Tradescant Ark. That shell-adorned deer hide might yield a discussion on the relationship between such collections and settler colonialism. Yet another student could locate a depiction of an actual curiosity cabinet and use it to map out the categories of objects that populated such displays and why. Yet more might wrestle with objects they simply don’t understand.

Once students post their responses online, I make their images into a collage on a single slide and project it behind me during our discussion. With this makeshift curio cabinet and visual prompt at the ready, we delve into discussing the nature of these collections: what categories of objects they housed (and why), what people did when visiting (and why), and how the artifacts were sourced (and why). To our modern sensibilities, cabinets of curiosities may seem like random miscellanies lacking any real order. A biology or physics major might even pipe in during the discussion to call them “unscientific.”

On the contrary, these spaces did have their own internally consistent logics. They showcased human and divine artistry side by side to reveal the dance between the two—for what was science in this era if not an empirical study of God’s omnipotence, wisdom, and perfection as manifest in creation? They also broadcast the power and connections of the collector himself—be he a prince, polymath, or apothecary. (Or herself—noblewomen assembled cabinets too.) And, in their darkest moments, they trumpeted the spoils of colonization. The very act of looking at some objects—sacred artifacts, caricatures of the enslaved, or human remains robbed from graves—could be a violent, literal objectification born of European bravado. Studying curiosity cabinets encourages students to grapple with difficult histories and science’s sometimes-insidious past.

Beyond these lessons in historical content, the experience of using a database like Artstor to locate images can help with practical skill building for the course. We discuss how students found their images: what keywords they used to tailor their search, what filters they applied, what filters were even available, and what that might say about our organization and compartmentalization of knowledge today versus that in the Renaissance or early modern Europe. Some students may even liken the experience of browsing Artstor to a modern-day curiosity cabinet, as it floods the senses with content from across time and space, in manifold formats and subjects. That gives us the opportunity to ask as a class: have the categories of the Wunderkammern ever gone away?

As an antidote to the divided attention that shapes student life, close observation of images can force students to slow down in an age of rapid information consumption. As a follow-up activity, the class digs into printed illustrations of wonder chambers in small groups. Each group receives a separate image to analyze. First, they spend five to ten minutes simply looking at the scene before them—identifying objects, pondering the collection’s organization, and noticing more the longer they look. Once that time is up, they take another ten minutes to discuss which three objects from the scene they would nominate to feature in an exhibition for their peers about the history of early museums.

One crowd favorite is the cabinet of Danish physician-collector Ole Worm. It lives on through the famed frontispiece to his 1655 Museum Wormianum, published the year following the medical professor’s death. Worm amassed his cabinet from his travels and connections around the globe. At first blush, the jumbled scene seems a far cry from a modern museum. A chair made from a whale’s vertebra graces the floor. The entire left panel is organized by material—bony things—rather than species relationships. Edible fruits, riding spurs, clothing, musical instruments, and several pairs of severed feet adorn the walls. A unicorn horn bisects the image, drawing a visual parallel with the showcase of arrows above it. A funny little mannequin stares from the corner.

Yet further inspection invites students to notice many throughlines from then to now. Worm surmised that so-called “unicorn horns” like those in his possession might in fact be narwhal tusks—as shown by the same tusk affixed to an actual narwhal skull propped up by the window on the left. Early naturalists were using the tools and evidence before them to puzzle out their worlds in a constant process of revision. They tapped into a universal human impulse to examine the anomalous and tell one’s peers Hey, look at all this cool stuff.

As for that little man in the corner: this was no ordinary sculpture, but rather an automaton—an early mechanized robot, which takes on new salience amidst the zeitgeist of artificial intelligence. Like students awash in a sea of AI-generated content, early modern information consumers had to parse out fact from fiction, truth from dupe. For example, collectors delighted in displaying wondrous fabrications and mythological beings in their curiosity cabinets, from ersatz dragons to many-headed hydra. Some scholars have argued Ole Worm’s image may have indeed been a faithful representation of his collection in physical space. But many similar depictions were no doubt stylized marketing tools—phantasmagoria of how a collector would like to present their cabinets to readers rather than literal copies of their arrangement. Thinking about the construction and bias of such images teaches students to be critical consumers of information.

Over time, Ole Worm’s scene has taken on a meaning never intended by its creator, yet one that shows an unbroken thread to the present: it’s full of now rare, and in some cases extinct, animals. In class, the small group assigned this image might decide to craft an exhibition about curiosity cabinets, biodiversity loss, and the climate crisis. The options are tragically abundant. A polar bear cub suspended from the ceiling, an armored sturgeon hanging top left, a sawfish rostrum propped on the right, and the imposing sea turtle shells next to it all represent animals that are now categorized as threatened, vulnerable to, or formally endangered with extinction, some critically so. One species in the scene was alive and well in Worm’s time but has since been snuffed from existence by overhunting: the great auk, a flightless seabird reminiscent of a penguin, here nestled between the sawfish beak and a horseshoe crab. In fact, Ole Worm had several live (and, after their time expired, dead) great auks in his possession. He was even known to walk one around on a leash. The bird figured in Worm’s Latin compendium of his collection, laid out in the pages following his frontispiece, is the only known illustration of a great auk that is confirmed to have been drawn from life.

Worm’s visualization of his collection, then, is an unwitting elegy of species pushed to the brink of existence by human pressures. Students from environmental studies and the biological sciences are well-equipped to identify these throughlines. Curiosity cabinets filled their shelves through an extractive global process that put far-flung objects into circulation.

Today, curiosity cabinets seem to be having a bit of a popular renaissance, from the vogue for “bad taxidermy,” to spaces like the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, to the work of artists like Mark Dion, Ilya Milstein, and Rosamond Purcell. Purcell, in particular, created a full-scale replica of Ole Worm’s cabinet—and she’s not the first to do so—for a traveling exhibition that now has a permanent home on display in Denmark’s national natural history museum. Some cabinets of yore still exist in some form today, as with Ulisse Aldrovandi’s collection, which draws throngs of visitors to Bologna each year.

Integrating curiosity cabinets into the college classroom taps into that resurged enthusiasm for these cornucopias of knowledge. Such spaces cultivate wonder and delight by overloading the senses with the reality that there was “too much to know,” in historian Ann Blair’s phrasing—a plight to which students can relate. But these collections remain embroiled in thorny political issues related to power, possession, and repatriation. Close study of curiosity cabinets in the college classroom gives students the tools to interrogate them, too. Students learn about the controversies surrounding artifacts like the Mexica featherwork known as Moctezuma’s headdress. The latter, now stored in Vienna’s Weltmuseum, entered a circuit of curiosity cabinets in the late sixteenth century and has recently faced multiple calls for repatriation to Mexico.

To round out our discussion, I leave the students with the artwork and words of Erin Genia, an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate whose 2018 piece After Powhatan’s Robe responds to the display of Powhatan’s Mantle in the Ashmolean Museum.

“Indigenous people and our communities don’t often have access to our own treasures, which are often kept behind doors and walls in museum collections,” she explains. “And it really saddens me because the tribes and the peoples that created works like Powhatan’s Mantle have been so decimated by colonization. And today, we’re still struggling with this same mentality that was used to deprive peoples of their lands, their lives, and their cultural property. And it’s rooted in Western cultural supremacy, which still exists today in the successor to these cabinets of curiosities, which are museums.”

The past of these artifacts might be set in stone, but their future remains an open question.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.