Johann Daniel Major (1634–1693) and the experimental museum

In the late seventeenth century, Johann Daniel Major, professor of medicine at Kiel University, claimed to have founded a new discipline, the ‘tactica conclavium’ – that is, the study of arranging a collection. At times, scholars have characterized Major’s museology as a form of disordered polyhistorism. This essay emphasizes that the goal of the ‘tactica conclavium’ was experimental use. It situates Major’s interventions as an early example of a ‘political–gallant’ model of learning that would become an increasingly dominant ideal by the turn of the eighteenth century and would shape academic research infrastructures. Recasting collected objects as materials for experiments meant re-envisioning everything about the collection, from its contents to the cabinetry and architecture, the cataloguing and the aesthetics of display

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Ideal (ethics) · Political science · Politics · Visual arts · Architecture · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Law · Museology · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity