Solomon’s House in Oxford: an introduction to the exhibition

Dr Jim Bennett

The first exhibition in the Museum’s new Special Exhibitions Gallery will be previewed to participants in the XIX International Scientific Symposium on the evening on 5 September 2000. Objects will be on view for the first time since they were buried at the back of the Museum in the later part of the eighteenth century.

The new gallery covers the site where the archaeological finds were made at the commencement of the building work. The finds comprised some three thousand bones (human and animal) associated with anatomy teaching and display in the basement of the building, and the largest find of chemical vessels in British archaeology: some twenty-five ceramic crucibles, two retorts, a flask and a stoneware bottle, as well as a large number of fragments. Many of the crucibles retained residues of the chemical experiments performed in them. In addition, a series of interesting discoveries were made beneath the floorboards at the top of the building.

The building was the original home of the Ashmolean Museum in the seventeenth century and modern visitors might well be surprised to discover that the archaeology of the Museum uncovers chemical vessels and human bones. In fact as much space was devoted separately to laboratory work and to science teaching as was allocated to housing and displaying collections. It was to avoid misleading modern assumptions, that this exhibition was given the title ‘Solomon’s House in Oxford’.

‘Solomon’s House’ as described in Francis Bacon’s utopia New Atlantis, carried on a programme of collection, documentation and experiment, aimed at increasing natural knowledge and applying it for the benefit of mankind. The idea had a powerful influence in seventeenth-century England and was one of the intellectual sources for the foundations of both the Royal Society and the Ashmolean Museum.

Building the Old Ashmolean: fabric and function, 1683-2000

Mr Giles Hudson

The Old Ashmolean building, now home to the Museum of the History of Science, holds a special place in the history of museums and the history of architecture as the world’s oldest surviving purpose-built museum building. For this reason changes that have been made to its fabric over the last three centuries have a more than passing relevance for historians. The arrangement of the fabric is often the key piece of evidence in our understanding of the nature of the museum enterprise as a whole and the relationship between the individual activities that go to make it up. This paper will provide an illustrated survey of the fabric of the Old Ashmolean from 1683 to 2000 and reflect on what this tells us about the changing nature of the Museum as an institution over this period.

‘Solomon’s House’ in Oxfordshire: the origins and early years of Ashmole’s Musaeum in context

Mr Anthony Turner

The Musæum founded in Oxford in 1683 by Elias Ashmole was devoted to the Baconian enterprise of the collecting and classifying of natural and artificial rarities, and to the knowledge about them. Instruments were an integral part of the Musæum’s collections just as they were an essential part of the equipment of the scholars who frequented the new institution. Under the direction of Robert Plot the Musæum became the centre of a lively survey of nature. The present paper presents the Musæum, its instruments, apparatus and activities, in its intellectual and collecting contexts, and extends the investigation to parallel activity throughout the county of Oxfordshire.