| Abstract | The cabinet of curiosities of Claude Du Molinet (1620-1687), housed at the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève in Paris, provides a salient example of a cabinet of curiosities, because of its past of being assembled, dissembled, and reassembled. This thesis provides a historical synthesis of Du Molinet’s cabinet by providing descriptions of it during these phases. A critical analysis of the cabinet is also provided, focusing on two arguments. It is maintained that Du Molinet’s cabinet is defined by this precarious existence of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling, because collectors did not understand many of the cabinet’s ethnographic objects. It is argued moreover that these objects remained in a no-man’s land of the cabinet. They were neither there (the exotic lands) nor here (Europe). They had no identity, except for sauvageries. This makeup of the cabinet makes for a most curious cabinet that might help us to contemplate differently the definition of museums today. |
