![]() ![]() Thought of as premodern precursors to the museum, these collections encompassing a wide range of objects gathered from scientific expeditions, and imperial and mercantile travels: fossils, taxidermized animals, parts of rare or exotic fauna, ethnographic artefacts, minerals, regalia and precious metals, religious relics, herbaria, and human anatomical specimens, often diseased or anomalous body parts, including aborted embryos preserved in formaldehyde– embody the Enlightenment zeitgeist based in a particular conception of rational knowledge and epistemic praxis. The Museum Wormanium is an early textual representation of the wunderkammern (literally, Cabinets of Wonder) or the Cabinets of Curiosities that rose to prominence as sites of empirical knowledge in 15th and 16th century Europe. In 1655 a four-part illustrated compendium cataloguing in meticulous detail objects from a private natural history collection established in Copenhagen by the recently deceased scientist Ole Worm (Olaus Wormius) was published. ![]()
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