The editors of this strikingly illustrated volume open by presenting the image of an imaginary Wunderkammer, filled with objects both natural and man-made compiled from across the globe. An embroidered north Indian tent, they propose, houses birds of paradise collected in New Guinea, while Tahitian shells and jewellery, a Japanese-inspired Mexican folding screen and various coloured manuscripts in multiple languages line the perimeters. Porcelain plates made in China and French mirrors made of Vietnamese tin hang from the walls. A curious collection indeed, and one rife with questions both ontological and epistemological. Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin bring together, here, twelve essays were written primarily by art historians, spanning several centuries (roughly 1500-1800) and most of the world, each contribution considering one of the cross-cultural objects included in this fantastical cabinet of curiosities.

So why bring these objects together? Starting first as a conference held at the Getty Research Institute in 2013, and then published as a special volume of Art History, the authors have clearly thought through not just what these individual objects meant and how they travelled, but why such a volume is necessary for scholars across disciplines and historiographic leanings.Footnote ¹ Even in ‘local’ studies of material culture, they argue, objects like manuscripts, luxury goods, and natural specimens are considered either as belonging to their creators or their eventual owners; little attention is given to how these objects moved, and how movement itself might change and define their status. The term ‘hybridity’, often helpful in describing how local and foreign practitioners produced new forms of knowledge and material culture in situ, is well considered throughout the volume. Most of the essays grapple with and move beyond the notion by arguing that such objects were constantly transformed and transforming—that hybridity is, and was, just the starting point for understanding global knowledge production. By focusing precisely on objects designed to travel, a vastly understudied theme in scholarship on both art and science, the authors not only illuminate the rich visual and material culture moving across oceans, but demonstrate that mobility itself ‘made objects not only itinerant but also polyvalent, mutable, and interpretively richer than if they had stayed at home’.Footnote ²

In considering how and why objects travelled in the Early Modern period, the authors situate themselves at the intersection between several well-developed bodies of literature. Scholars like Nicholas Thomas, Igor Kopytoff, and Arjun Appadurai have demonstrated the rich interpretive lens through which historians can study objects as indicative of cross-cultural contact and exchange, and Martin and Bleichmar seamlessly move between such foundational texts and more recent museum displays and digital projects that point to new, still undervalued, methods of historical practice. Critical interrogations of geographical boundaries and connectivity, deeply bound up in political and economic Early Modern historiography, are enriched by many of these essays; drawing on scholars like Chandra Mukerji and Craig Clunas, the volume challenges simplistic one-way movements between East and West, undermining traditional colonial hierarchies.

Claudia Swan opens the volume with its only natural object, tracing the exchange of birds of paradise between the Netherlands, the East Indies, and Ottoman territories around the turn of the seventeenth century. These curious natural specimens, she argues, often serving as diplomatic gifts, transcended their economic value and entered the realm of the wondrous, creating an aesthetic or even affective economy. Nancy Um similarly deals with objects employed by Dutch East India Company (VOC) merchants, examining furniture shipped to Yemen as administrative tools—although seemingly unmoveable in their size and weight, VOC servants used writing desks and cabinets in recording and communicating their mercantile activities. Demand for these objects facilitated new a new artisan market, as workshops based in India strove to create smaller, more mobile versions of furniture specifically for VOC shipping and travel. ‘Unmoveability’, winding its way through the volume, provides an especially effective way of studying movement itself. In one of the volume’s most arresting contributions, Meredith Martin turns her gaze to the mirrors at Versailles as indicative of the complex trade economy between the French and Thai courts in the late-seventeenth century. By tracing the movement of mirrors—perhaps the most fragile object imaginable—from Thailand to France, Martin aptly demonstrates the two-way political motivations at work in diplomatic gift-giving, bound up in performative and ceremonial court negotiations.

Other contributions explore the various meanings of ‘translation’ borne through mobile objects across oceans. Bleichmar’s essay tackles this issue most explicitly, unravelling the multiple types of linguistic, contextual, and physical translations of the famous Codex Mendoza, a Mexican pictorial manuscript produced in 1542. Within this single document, Bleichmar argues, we see both pre-Hispanic and European traditions in conversation with each other; rather than representing a stable object, the Codex was defined by its movement across space and media. Later in the volume, Sofía Sanabrais examines another form of translation in the reworking and spread of the traditional Japanese folding screen in Mexico from the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries. Initially sent to New Spain as diplomatic gifts (a form of exchange privileged throughout the volume), Mexican artists transformed them into secular biombos, sent on to Spain and absorbed into its colonial fabric. Indeed, many of the objects featured in the volume, from porcelain plates to German automata, moved not just from one place to another, but between multiple locations, continually reworked and transformed while acquiring new meanings and uses. Hybridity, as they state, seems too simplistic of a term here.

The volume’s lack of chronological or geographical structure mirrors the design of Wunderkammern: forced to move from eighteenth-century Yemen to sixteenth-century Mexico and back to late-seventeenth century French courts, the reader gains an appreciation for the sheer globality of these objects, their utter lack of comparability encouraging a more nuanced understanding of how things are created, how they move, and how they are consumed. While by no means making an argument for atemporality or universalism (indeed, the authors argue the opposite), refusing to comply structurally with such boundaries allows the essayists to follow objects on their own terms, moulding the collection of essays into a whole more significant than the sum of its parts. One wonders, given the broad range of subjects, how natural specimens like plants and animals—whether dead or alive—might fit into this narrative of travel.

Admittedly, the volume’s broad geographic and temporal range, along with the authors’ admirable refusal to sacrifice specificity, occasionally leads to some bogging down in detail. For example, each essay necessarily begins with a brief overview of regional political history, sometimes too short to situate the reader but at other times too long to allow adequate focus on the object itself. Similarly, some objects seem better defined than others, although all leave the reader salivating for more. Nevertheless, Bleichmar and Martin have assembled a stunning collection of objects and essays, filling a gaping hole in the history of Early Modern global exchange. All the chapters thoughtfully engage with both art and science, successfully employing various methodologies to ask and answer new questions about why we should care about objects in and of themselves. This is a remarkable volume for historians across a wide range of disciplines and provides a much-needed model for writing beyond boundaries.