Ashmolean Museum

Introduction On 21 May 1683 the Duke of York (later King James II) and his Duchess, accompanied by the Lady Anne (later Queen Anne), inaugurated the freshly installed Ashmolean Museum on Broad Street in its newly completed building next to the Sheldonian Theatre. They inspected the...

FOREWORD Elias Ashmole in his most prescient moments, with all astrology at his command, could not have foreseen the shape and character of his museum in 1970. Still less could those two eminent gardeners and botanists, John Tradescant father and son, whose "closet of rarities" Ashmole acquired,...