Strange Blooms by Jennifer Potter

Author:Jennifer Potter [Potter, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

While including Gerard’s text in his revised edition of the Herball, Thomas Johnson nonetheless introduced a note of realism by declaring that barnacle geese hatched from eggs like any other birds, a discovery he credited to ‘some Hollanders’ making a third attempt to find a passage to China.17

Stirn’s inventory of other marvels seen at Lambeth reflects Tradescant’s own obsession with size (‘a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 pounds’) and his fondness for foreign boots and shoes, as well as the century’s taste for the gruesome (a piece of human flesh on a bone and the poisoned arrows used by West Indian executioners; Peter Mundy invariably noted and even sketched outlandish methods of executions encountered on his travels). The cult of celebrity was alive even then, for among the precious objects on display was ‘a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham’ (a bejewelled feather reminiscent of his splendid French wardrobe for the wedding festivities in Paris) and a scourge reputedly used by Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Christian relics remained popular and Tradescant’s collection could apparently boast (without qualification) ‘a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ’.

The spirit behind Tradescant’s collection is clearly one of curiosity and wonder: here are the wondrously strange birds, beasts and fishes he sought from the sea captains adventuring to the coasts of Africa and America, the East and West Indies and all points in between. Here too are the curious clothes and artefacts that distinguish the Turk from the Jew, the Christian from the Moslem, the Barbary Arab from the Greenlander. While Tradescant sought ‘the Bigest that can be Gotten’ in his natural history specimens, he was equally in thrall to the miniaturist talents that could render ‘the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone’. In its very breadth and equivalence lies the essence of Tradescant’s collection. Although later naturalists such as John Ray and ornithologist and ichthyologist Francis Willughby might inspect the rarities for purposes of identification, John Tradescant collected them for the sheer joy of collecting, seduced by the merchant adventurers whose brave voyages sparked the beginnings of global consumerism. The Latin inscription that appears under his portrait in Musaeum Tradescantianum quite fittingly refers to his Lambeth ‘storehouse’ near London (‘in Reconditorio Lambethiano prope Londinum’) where he mingled the wonders of nature with variations on the exotic trinkets he would have seen displayed at Britain’s Burse on the Strand: bracelets from Guinea, tobacco pipes from Brazil, a cow’s tail from Arabia, a variety of China dishes, a rich vest from the great Mogull.18

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