Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management

we may call their cognitive capacities to engage visitors, enlist attention, and mediate between what silent objects can "say" and what the vernacular expects to hear. Subject to a special considerations, what is true of all museums follows for many science museums as well. These, too, combine the ambivalences of le mot, I'idee and la chose in studied combination. In this paper, I want to sketch briefly some of the current regions of discontent, and to suggest how some lines along which major museums are now proceeding may prove of interest to scholars in our field. 1. The Past as Prologue Museums of art, of decorative objects and man-made artifacts, have a history reaching back to antiquity. Their origins are classical, ecclesiastical, and plenipotentiary. Never far from its etymological origins with the seven muses, and the keeping and display of texts, the museum in Europe acquired a separate existence in the cabinets de curiosité of the late 16th century. From the "information explosion" that began with the voyages of discovery, "finds" were assimilated in reserved spaces, sometimes associated with institutional and epistemological cousins, the zoos and botanic gardens. For the next two hundred years, and particularly in Europe, the museum became an exercise in the privileging of objects - from the ancient world and the new - through their collection, registration and classification.

6 Objects came to enjoy symbolic readings once reserved exclusively for the written word. And in their collection and display, museums acquired textual signification as the principal depositories of "stored knowledge" of a permanent kind. By the end of the 18th century, in lending legitimacy to curiosity, museums in Western Europe effectively "licensed" the act of collecting, elevated the status of the collector, and - in ways historians are just beginning to perceive - legitimised the status of the natural philosopher.

7 From the 16th century until the French Revolution, cabinets that dotted Europe were usually restricted to the edification of a few and the ennoblement of the classical mind. But natural philosophy, with its methods of observation and experiment, found the museum a necessary extension of the laboratory. Their very existence, associated in the mind of Bacon, foreshadowed in Salomon's House, and incorporated in the early Royal Society, gave space for the objects of natural virtue, which in themselves formed the material base of the Great Instauration. They inspired, rewarded and privileged the act of "looking"

8 - only much later, to invite the senses of touch, smell, and hearing as well. For two hundred years, museums of natural objects and scientific instruments reflected position, status, wealth, political