This book embodies a complex project: it offers a survey of certain museum cultures in seventeenth-century England and uses this to illuminate and review aspects of twenty-first-century practice. Along the way there is much fascinating material, ranging from the cultures of coin collecting, the operation of learned societies, and the trade in “exotic” curiosities from overseas to the place of museum work in the study and practice of medicine and pharmacy. All of this gives profound insight into the role of museum practices within the pursuit of experimental science and knowledge production more generally at a time when exploration—both geographical and intellectual—and accumulation of data and objects were primary cultural preoccupations. Ken Arnold's account is at its most enthusiastic when considering the human and social dimensions of museum work. For example, the museum pioneer Robert Plot published “natural histories” of English counties involving the complex description of things (often unusual or even “monstrous” ones) in microscopic and macroscopic detail: his description of a coin found in Oxfordshire fills several pages, covering identification and iconography, historical narratives about the individuals represented, the stamp and metal employed, and gold and silver mining in Britain. Plot was the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum as well as Director of Experiments of the Oxford Philosophical Society, which met at the museum; Arnold is careful to trace the relationship between his published output and museum work, casting the former as the literary embodiment of the knowledge that museum inquiry into objects could produce.

Plot's work corresponds to the first of three museum strategies that Arnold identifies as “narrative” (the telling of stories), “functional” (the study of the use of objects), and “taxonomy” (the imposition of order upon objects), and this tripartite focus forms the main structuring device of the book. Within the functional tradition, for example, Arnold sees the origins of museum ethnography, for the study of how “exotic” objects had been used, represented an attempt to understand their cultures of origin. Taxonomy, meanwhile, is seen to have grown out of seventeenth-century philosophical concerns with education, language, and memory. Most notable here are the many attempts to develop a reliable linguistic apparatus for the codification of nature's objects, which had processes of classification at their core—isolating, distinguishing, and naming sets of things and concepts. Characteristic of such projects was the belief in the possibility of an absolute and true language and thus an absolute and true ordering of reality, but in fact many taxonomical systems were founded on the notion that the key to classification—the reason for differences in the “design” of things—was the will of God (the “Supreme Curator,” Arnold quips [214]), and for many, including key figures such as Hans Sloane, museum work served at least in part to glorify God, confute atheism, and encourage piety. Indeed, the harnessing of taxonomical endeavor to theological argument can seem as bizarre as today's Creationist Museum in Kentucky. Consider, for example, John Woodward's 1695 account of how the formation of strata of rocks and fossils resulted from God's anger at Adam's fall, whereupon God switched off gravity (as it were), only to switch it on again to reconstitute the earth. The historical chapters of this book are full of such fascinating oddities, and Arnold contextualizes them thoroughly in relation to contemporary developments in philosophy, science, and antiquarianism. One shortcoming of the book, albeit an understandable one, is the absence of sustained focus on art as a category of material culture that could be collected, classified, and experienced in settings that we now see as prototype museums; thus, art was arguably implicated in knowledge-construction processes similar to those that Arnold examines in relation to other categories of material culture. A more rounded view of seventeenth-century museum culture—also comprehending the gallery—might give us better insights into all sorts of topics yet to be fully engaged with, such as ocular culture, the development of connoisseurship, and so on.

Each of the three parts of this book is concluded by a chapter in which Arnold reviews aspects of museum practice today in the light of his study of the seventeenth century. Here, for example, his attention to the telling of stories becomes an analysis of contemporary interpretation techniques in museums and prescriptive notes on what, in his view, the “average viewer” requires from label text. The discussions of seventeenth-century medical collections follow through into medicine and health on display today, for instance, in Gunther von Hagens’ notorious “Body Worlds” exhibitions. Likewise, the analysis of seventeenth-century taxonomical projects forms the backdrop for a later section on “declassifying” museums, in which contemporary acts that question and contest the authority of museum taxonomies are discussed alongside initiatives that seek to dissolve entrenched knowledge boundaries such as that between “science” and “art.” A lot is gained from Arnold's decision to shuttle between seventeenth-century and twenty-first-century museum worlds, and I am sympathetic to any project that makes museum history relevant to contemporary practice. But a lot is lost too, for the three hundred years of museum history that lie between Arnold's two centuries of choice feel somewhat glossed over. Where his attention does come to rest on institutions in this temporal interstice—such as the Victoria and Albert Museum—he is not nearly as well informed or as acute in his insights.

These are (probably unashamedly) the least scholarly of all of the chapters in the book, for while they engage with much contemporary museological scholarship and theory, their intent is to persuade us of the ways in which museums can, in Arnold's view, reinvigorate their practice and the experiences they offer to visitors. Arnold is a museum professional of some standing himself, and it feels as though this is the authorial persona that dominates in these chapters about contemporary practice—but what is lost in scholarly rigor we gain in passion, the insight that considerable professional museum experience brings, and a vision capable at the very least of inspiring critical practice in, and critical attitudes to, museums.