The curiosity cabinets described in Before Museums are simultaneously dated and ahead of their time. To some collectors, the cabinets represented goals as lofty as attempting to “not only contain, but to order all known things” and to assert “symbolic power” over the world. This description seems to match the section in What Is a Museum? which describes “cabinets” and other collections from the 16th and 17th centuries. In that text, these collections are presented as hoards of valuable or culturally significant objects kept in private collections as “playthings of princes, popes, and plutocrats.”

However, the curiosity cabinets Bowry describes also had an interactive and dynamic nature that their description in What Is a Museum? fails to recognize and that many public collections which followed them failed to recapture until much later. Bowry explains that the cabinets sought not just to catalogue objects but to “actively perform the entangled nature of objects” and “experiment with the limits of representation.” This idea of a collection of objects dedicated to creating novel representations and exploring new kinds of connections sounds more like Nina Simon’s “participatory museum” than a 400 year old treasure hoard.