A museum is a place that houses and exhibits objects of historical, scientific, artistic, and/or cultural interest. It acts as a representation of the identification and classification of knowledge. How knowledge is classified, organized, and displayed is of particular interest. In the preface to The Order of Things (1970), Foucault begins with a passage from Borges describing an unusual taxonomy for classifying animals. Borges’ system of classification offers an absurd and limited range of categories. The enumeration and proximity of the categories in an alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) bestows coherence to the unlikely list. In considering Borges’ ordering, Foucault asks “what is the ground on which we are able to establish the validity of this classification with complete certainty?” The validity, Foucault retorts, is established through “grouping and isolating.” What are the implications of museological grouping and isolating?

 

I will examine the implications of typological classification on artifacts with specific attention to medieval objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England. The role of medieval objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum is interesting because the museum opened in the late nineteenth century concurrently with the resurgent interest in the Middle Ages, and also because the typological ordering of the museum’s objects is unusual.

 

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford England was opened in 1884 and houses the University of Oxford’s anthropological and archaeological collection. The museum was established with 20,000 artifacts donated by Lieutenant-General Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, a nineteenth-century collector. What marks this museum as particularly unique is that the museum’s artifacts are organized, displayed and classified typologically. Most museums classify and display based on place or period.

 

General Pitt Rivers was a collector of medieval objects in the nineteenth century. This is noteworthy because that era marked a renewed fascination with medieval culture as well as a coexisting fascination with collection and display. According to Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, it was the nineteenth century that “made” and “invented”’ the Middle Ages as we know it. Their book, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France (2003), addresses the ways in which the many competing and differing claims placed on the past have affected the reception of the Middle Ages. Emery and Morowitz speak of “medievalism” as a separate construction within a given historical era—in short, almost as something foreign or detached from the actual Middle Ages. This is significant to the development and understanding of my project because of the notion of translation, i.e., how one period translates and constructs the history of a medieval object.

 

What makes the position of medieval objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum particularly fascinating is how this typological classification changes the ways in which the objects are read. What are the implications of classifying objects based on function? What does it mean to separate objects of the same period or place? What is lost or gained? To explore these questions, I borrow from archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf’s chapter on “Past Meanings” in his book From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture (2005). Holtorf asserts that an artifact can have an enormous variety of meanings because of the potential for it to have many contexts. To understand any object it is imperative to study the varied contexts. He argues that archaeology is actually focused on our own present culture rather than the past and asserts that the past is a “renewable resource,” thus questioning the idea of authenticity. This idea is reminiscent of that laid out by Emery and Morowitz in Consuming the Past. Within the framework of my project, this notion is significant because some archaeologists are acknowledging that the meanings of objects change according to context, and that there is no “right” way of interpreting them. In this context, we can return to my primary question: what are the implications of the typological classification of the Pitts Rivers Museum on medieval objects?