Journal of the History of Collections doi:10.1093/jhc/fhaa059 © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. The cabinet and the world Non-European objects in early modern European collections Daniela Bleichmar Early modern European collectors proclaimed that their cabinets contained ‘the world’. What do collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal about the ways in which those who assembled, owned and visited them understood objects from other regions and cultures? Inventories, catalogues and descriptions of European collections from the period reveal that the reception of non-European objects was characterized, above all, by practices of geographical and cultural indeterminacy, most notably: (1) empty attribution, (2) misattribution, (3) unstable attribution, and (4) lack of attribution. When considered as early versions of museums of ‘world cultures’, cabinets functioned not as sites for the production of knowledge but as sites of worldmaking, which absorbed, recontextualized and repurposed objects with specific geographical and cultural origins and meanings to create undifferentiated, fungible foreignness. Worldmaking and knowledge production in the cabinet Early modern European Wunderkammern had global aspirations. Cabinets were conceived, arranged and encountered as miniature universes, microcosms con- taining objects that, in their abundance, rarity, variety, diversity and wondrousness, allowed the collector and the visitor to experience the entire world, at reduced scale. Such worldly ambitions are evident in the in- ventories and catalogues of the collections themselves and the accounts written by collectors or visitors, which profess a keen interest in non-European items and highlight objects’ foreign origins. Cabinets prom- ised the opportunity to encounter the world without leaving Europe. 1 But, how exactly were collections used to acquire knowledge of the world? The idea of the cabinet as a ‘world collection’ was more than a metaphor. Rather, it refected a novel awareness of the vastness and diversity of the globe, as well as the intense attention paid to the many objects arriving in Europe through imperial, colonial, dip- lomatic, missionary and commercial networks. 2 Both the notion that collections could and should include items from around the world, and the capacity to pro- cure them emerged from and depended on European global expansion. Collectors aspired to possess the en- tire world in miniature, while European monarchs, ar- mies, settlers, merchants and trading companies sought to carry out this vision at a global level. Collecting, depicting and imagining other places and other peoples around the globe served to defne both the other and the self. As Benjamin Schmidt has shown, the process of inventing the exotic global also invented its counterpart, the non-exotic European. 3 Cabinets were thus more than repositories for world-gathering: they were crucial sites for ‘worldmaking’. The term refers to the active, self-aware creation of new models, theories, interpret- ations or depictions of the world – a project that, as Ayesha Ramachandran has shown, consumed scholars and artists, theorists and practitioners throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, becoming ‘the cen- tral intellectual task of the late Renaissance’. 4 Given that early modern Europeans conceived of cabinets as containing ‘the world’, what do collections from the period tell us about how exactly those who assembled, owned and visited them imagined and understood the world at large? What meanings did items from around the globe take on in early modern European collections? What vision of the world did cabinets create exactly? This essay investigates these questions by examining the concrete ways in which early modern collectors and visitors to collections addressed the cultural and geographical origins and meanings of non-European objects. I am particularly interested in the complex relationship between world- making and the production of knowledge. Scholars have shown that early collections were not created Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jhc/fhaa059/6124423 by University Of Southern California user on 30 January 2021