Curiosities in the Far North

Abstract

Abstract According to conventional accounts of Norwegian museum history, Norway’s history of collecting began in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, this article, which is the first comprehensive investigation into Norway’s involvement with seventeenth-century collecting cultures, shows that the country’s museum and collecting history began more than a hundred years earlier. It addresses the question of infrastructure: namely, how Norway and Norwegians came into contact with Danish and other continental collectors and collections. While some networks engaged explicitly in the exchange of rarities, others were primarily administrative, diplomatic or mercantile in character, allowing curiosities – and also curiosity – to travel. The article seeks to portray a museal culture of seeing, finding, transmuting, collecting, communicating, distributing and publishing specimens and artefacts. It demonstrates how well integrated Norwegians and Norway were in the culture of Kunstkammern and cabinets of curiosities, and it concludes that Norway has been profoundly overlooked in the history of early modern collecting.