ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Replicating Brahe’s quadrant: reproductions from the Special Loan Collection for the South Kensington Museum

• In Event: Spirit of 1876: The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus: International Science Museum Links. 1

English Abstract

This paper will look at a small group of replica objects that were commissioned by the South Kensington Museum at the close of the 1876 exhibition for acquisition by the museum. The dozen or so electrotypes and casts were generally of historically important objects loaned internationally, which would likely not have been eligible for gift or sale to the museum owing to their importance to their host institutions. I will examine the objects that were chosen to be replicated – a small number, out of a potentially huge pool of candidates—for evidence of these objects’ particular significance to the museum or scientific teaching of the time. Replication had both its proponents and opponents in the later 19th century, and I will also use the group of objects as an entry point into exploring the Victorian discourse around the perceived respective values of originals and reproductions in museum and teaching contexts

Author

• Mary Clayton-Kastenholz, Warburg Institute