The sixteenth-century reckoning with extra-European peoples and cultures occurred at precisely the same moment that humanists were increasingly preoccupied with the daily life, material culture, and lived religion of classical antiquity. Leading figures in sixteenth-century antiquarianism took an abiding interest in ethnographic accounts of contemporary peoples and even produced such accounts. This article examines how sixteenth-century readers and scholars placed bodies of literature on ancient and modern customs in dialogue with one another. While scholars have long appreciated that ethnographic and (...) travel writing were deeply mediated by the study of antiquity, that mediation cut both ways. This article addresses the question of how ethnographic descriptions of modern peoples shaped sixteenth-century understandings of the customs and lived religion of antiquity. The writings of merchants and humanists testify to the ways in which the practices of ethnographic writing helped to shape travellers’ and readers’ appreciation of the cultural alterity of classical antiquity. (shrink)

The stage-like “exhibitionary space,” which members of the public visit, has received more scholarly scrutiny than the pedagogical and curatorial activities that take place in the back rooms of museums. This essay draws attention to the behind-the-scenes places in university museums as a pedagogic site where students learn through the close examination of artefacts. It addresses the social context of learning through the study of incomplete objects, which may involve handling them. This process of using artefacts to engage with different (...) groups of people (collectors, curators, teaching staff and students) contributes to the physical and intellectual development of academic disciplines. It enhances the museum's institutional mission and survival as an incorporated body that is embedded in a greater whole, the university itself. The Ashmolean Museum, in the University of Oxford, and the Balfourian and Sibbaldian Museums, in the University of Edinburgh, were founded in the seventeenth century. But whereas the Ashmolean survived as an institution, the first Edinburgh collections did not. These historical antecedents serve as a backdrop to a discussion of how one particular example, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CUMAA), trains new generations of learners to evaluate empirical evidence and by working with different communities of users—students and the wider public—it ensures its survival. (shrink)