« He onely reades those charactars, where time hath eaten out the letters »: du vain compilateur au fin collectionneur

Abstract

This article deals with the representation of curious men within the literary corpus of seventeenth-century English character-books. It studies the ways in which such representations reflected and contributed to the changing perception of « curiosity » throughout the century. By supplanting the biblical commonplace of the vanity of all things with specific descriptions of vain behaviours and by showing that not all curious men are vain, authors of character-books introduced a liberating distinction between the notions of curiosity and vanity. This article demonstrates that through their relentless exploration of human behaviour and their miniaturized accumulation of bizarre and unique pieces of description, character-books celebrate both the curiosity of those who desire to know and that of rare objects otherwise known as curios.

Keywords

• characters
• essay
• seventeenth century
• collection
• collector
• antiquarian