Chapter 8 - Catalogues as Instituting Genres of the Nineteenth-Century Museum

Summary

This chapter makes a case for writing the institutional history of museums as the history of process. Rather than focusing on the choices of individuals or structural elements that uphold museums’ claims to permanence and stability, I examine manuscript and published catalogues to excavate the nineteenth-century museum’s ‘procedural rhetoric’, the way processes were used persuasively to support systems of meaning and instil specific values. Through comparative analysis of the Hunterian museums in London and Glasgow, I argue that processes of sequencing, labelling and organizing objects on paper were deployed to forge and consolidate, or, alternatively, disrupt and dispute, each museum’s nascent institutional identity. Catalogues function as ‘instituting genres’—that is, genres of writing that enact and thereby make visible the dynamic processes of institutional formation and evolution.