Exploring Cultures of Collecting in the Early Modern World

Reconnecting Sloane is an inter-disciplinary and multi-institutional project that involves a number of different researchers, curators, universities and museums, all focused on exploring the vast existing collection of the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). This article surveys recent scholarship within the different methodological and conceptual approaches being used by members of this collaborative team in order to understand early modern cultures of natural history collecting, highlighting the areas in which they overlap in intriguing and inspiring ways. Encompassing a wide spectrum of approaches, this article first looks to the geography of Sloane’s botanical collections and the material studies of natural objects in order to examine the global nature of early modern collecting practices. It then moves to more local perspectives to understand sociable practices of science and issues of trust and authenticity. Finally, this article looks to scholarship surrounding the organisation of natural objects and its role in knowledge formation, before concluding with a discussion of how we might best approach current museum collections. Sloane’s surviving correspondence along with his natural history collections, their manuscript catalogues and the networks that allowed them to form in London (and eventually become the founding collection of the British Museum) provide a unique and thought-provoking resource for thinking in new and sometimes experimental ways about the cultures of natural history collecting in the early modern period.