In the West, modern museums evolved from so-called Cabinets of Curiosities, which typically displayed wondrous artifacts of the natural world—shells, fossils, plants and organisms—taken from their context and mounted inside. The natural world is sampled and split apart, studied and displayed.

Florilegia were compilations of excerpts from other writings, essentially mashing up selected passages and connecting dots from existing texts to illuminate a specific topic or doctrine or idea. The word comes from the Latin for “flower” and “gather.” The florilegium is commonly considered one of the earliest recorded examples of remix culture.

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