About four hundred years ago, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei was starting to understand, along with others throughout Europe, something of the way the universe works.  The earth, it seemed, was not at its centre, but travelled around the sun, along with the other planets.

These new discoveries didn’t sit well with the church, which feared a threat to divine authority and forced Galileo to recant his revolutionary ideas.

Around the same time, two English gardeners, John Tradescant and his son, also John Tradescant, were gathering rare seeds and plants for their employers, including king Charles I.

They travelled to Palestine and Africa, the Arctic north of Russia, France, the Low Countries and America.  They were insatiably curious, so wherever they went, they brought back strange and wonderful things, which they collected in to a sort of museum, Tradescant’s Ark, at their home in South London.

A description from 1638 said it contained, among many other things, ‘two ribs of a whale…a salamander…a flying squirrel and another squirrel like a fish… a cheese… the hand of a mermaid…many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots…some very light wood from Africa and the robe of the King of Virginia.’

To our modern eyes, it seems a weird, random bunch of stuff.  But the Tradescants’ Ark became the basis of one of the world’s greatest teaching museums, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.  Nowadays, it is used to teach students of literature, classics, biochemistry, medicine, modern languages, archaeology, maths and pretty well every other subject you can study – including theology.

The book of Proverbs in the Bible teaches that “A man shall be known by his learning: but he that is vain and foolish, shall be exposed to contempt”.  Nonetheless, Galileo’s opponents despised his learning,  fearing what they did not know.  The Tradescants seemed much more afraid of not knowing – and as can be seen in our amazing universities and museums, it is their legacy of curiosity, inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge which, thankfully, has come out on top.

Working at the Ashmolean Museum has been one of the great joys of my life. To learn from the collections and my colleagues and to be part of their wider community of learning is a daily privilege.