BOB2023MIOT

This volume is the first book-length study to thematise the representation of power in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Bringing together scholars from different backgrounds, the volume aims to stimulate a cross-disciplinary dialogue about representations in art, literature, ritual, and other media. Within the Dutch Republic, different state actors - the city, the provincial states, the States General, the stadtholders, and individual power-holders - vied for the supremacy of power. A vital aspect of this persistent struggle was its representative dimension. In making representative claims about their place in the balance of power, these institutions all faced the challenge of developing a republican language that was both distinctive enough and universally understood. In the cultural repertoires available to political figures, artists, and intellectuals, republican models contended with monarchical ones. In visual and literary depictions, public ritual, and diplomatic encounters alike, the temptation to stand up to the grandeur of powerful European monarchies by borrowing from their representative traditions was not always easy to resist.

This volume analyses how and why members of scholarly societies such as the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Leopoldina collected specimens of the natural world, art, and archaeology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These scholarly societies, founded before knowledge became subspecialised, had many common members. We focus upon how their exploration of natural philosophy, antiquarianism, and medicine were reflected in collecting practice, the organisation of specimens and how knowledge was classified and disseminated. The overall shift from curiosity cabinets with objects playfully crossing the domains of art and nature, to their well-ordered Enlightenment museums is well known. Collective Wisdom analyses the process through which this transformation occurred, and the role of members of these academies in developing new techniques of classifying and organising objects and new uses of these objects for experimental and pedagogical purposes.