Translating the Cabinet of Curiosities in Early Modern England

Abstract

"Reading the book of creatures, or book of nature, in the age of early modern empiricism involved new methods that brought a new and enriched understanding of translation. Even as it was enjoying a golden age of literary translation, seventeenth-century England experienced a perceptible shift in attention from texts to things, introducing a new domain of translation at the centre of which was the cabinet of curiosities, a site of translation in every major sense of the word.... Collectors acquired objects from points around the globe and transmitted them via a pan-European network of exchange. Many of these objects were of interest precisely because they bore the marks of some sort of material transformation, such as, for example, a nautilus shell turned into an ornate vessel. The cabinet of curiosities itself was an attempt to render into a complex visual language a representation of a rapidly expanding and changing world of experience, deeply entwined with efforts to reform or devise new linguistic systems to mediate adequately this new world of objects."