Major spent his career in a strategic borderland where knowledge was embroiled in long-running territorial disputes. Competing princes built collections, laboratories, and intelligence-gathering networks in attempts to strengthen the resources of the land and their hold upon it. Their rival attempts to found global colonies and establishing long-distance trading networks entangled tightly with their global collections. The Gottorf dukes intended the new university to be another fixture of a state-building apparatus that already included glassworks, a chymical laboratory, extensive gardens, a celebrated collection, a planetarium, and an impressive library. These nearby facilities offered the University of Kiel sophisticated resources. They also illustrated the dangers of intertwining knowledge tightly with use. The shifting political situation allowed and even required scholars to seek beyond a single patron for support. This setting can illuminate Major’s attempts to defend academic independence, to develop audiences across rival states and a broader public, and to develop "unprejudiced" approaches.

Cannon shot and military engineering broke the earth’s crust, churning up amber, sand, shells, and petrified animal remains. These fossils allowed early modern people to rewrite the history of the earth. Against many contemporary views, Major argued that plant, animal, and other bodies hardened into rock slowly over time through the contingent motions of salt in conditions of changing humidity. He conjectured about how stones that were widely collected as wonders of nature could be explained through geological processes in their sites of excavation. He collected locally on the beaches of Kiel and aimed to travel to a famous cave in the Harz mountains where so-called dragon’s bones, unicorn horns, and human-like rocky formations could be found. However, Major never completed his cave study nor a planned major work on lithology. Relatedly, he sought to establish a science of shells but never finished it to his satisfaction. As Major gained new knowledge, he continually rearranged his own collections into new formations that gave rise to new perspectives. His increasing recognition that some underground stones were ancient artifacts shifted his interest from petrifaction to archaeology.

Some fifty years after Francis Bacon had urged the study of the history of learning (historia literaria) in the early seventeenth century, this new discipline began to be developed in the Hamburg region. One of its main proponents was Daniel Georg Morhof, Major’s colleague at the University of Kiel. Major himself engaged in this study in many ways. The history of learning offered a platform for scholars to review the institutions, media, and genres of global knowledge from the dawn of time. Scholars studied how varying knowledge practices related to knowledge’s advance or decline. The premise of this study was that current scholarly practices in Europe were flawed and could be improved through attention to global epistemologies and practices. These views infused Major’s approaches, as in his attention to prehistoric knowledge or his study of global curating practices as the basis for a new approach to the museum. As this chapter explores, he also participated in the critical review and reform of knowledge infrastructures including dissertations, journal publications, critical commentary, citation practices, cataloging, note-taking, and ways of connecting disciplines together.

This introduction sets out Major’s view of his age, "the experimental century," in relation to curiosity and curation. Although curiosity had been recuperated from a vice to a virtue in early modern Europe, Major continued to relate curiosity to original sin as a faulty, bodily lust for knowledge. This insatiable desire drove all people since Adam, but it did so more than ever in his age when the bounds and divisions set upon knowledge in the traditional encyclopedia were torn down. Curators applied cura or care (from the same root as curiosity) to knowledge. By acknowledging their own flaws, curators could guide the passion for knowledge closer and closer to truth, which, however, always remained out of human reach.

Major founded a discipline for arranging collections, "the Taxis of Chambers." Taxis was a military term for the strategic mobile arrangements of troops and supplies. Major understood all forms of order, from nature to society, as a form of taxis. In order to advance knowledge of these other forms of order, collections needed to be remade into dynamic repositories that both supplied materials for investigating taxis and themselves could be rearrangeable as knowledge of other orders shifted. To effect this redesign, Major surveyed practices of collecting around the world in a vernacular serial. He built a broad tent for museology while integrating knowledge from a public in ways that often undermined the authority of their views. Curators ought to be experimental philosophers, he maintained. He chided those who did not appreciate order, rather than monetary value, as the most precious part of a collection. He designed shelving, signage, and cataloging to make the museum into a tool of knowledge change. Through experimentation in the collection and discussions in the conference hall, he sought to transform the collection from a site that stupefied to one that awakened awareness.

In the sixteenth-century Lutheran university, anthropological studies related the human as a microcosm analogically to the world as a macrocosm. The great chain of being dictated hierarchies corresponding to parts of the human body, forms of knowledge, and cosmic structure. Major claimed to found a new anthropology that spurned analogy and related the human to nature through experiment. He set experimental anthropology as the basis for the entire encyclopedia of arts and sciences because human cognitive processes shaped all knowledge. Major first exhibited his anthropology in a public human dissection in 1666. He deployed it against both academic and Rosicrucian views of the microcosm such as those maintained by his nemesis Johann Ludwig Hannemann. He also countered profit-driven arguments about humans. Having already argued in 1665 that the anatomist could correct Biblical interpreters’ views of black skin, he orchestrated in 1675 a public human anatomy of a Black woman, which was the first anatomical study of skin pigmentation. His colleague, Johann Nicolaus Pechlin, performed the dissection, arguing against Hannemann that skin color offered no justification for the slave trade.

Megaliths, burial mounds, and other remnants of ancient human civilization littered the region. No textual sources about them survived. Competing with ancient Greece and Rome, local scholars composed rival visions of antiquity that supported Swedish, Danish, or German imperial ambitions. By contrast, Major developed a distinctive approach to prehistory that served no political interests. Assuming a prehistoric state of human desperation, Major reasoned about prehistory by using the intellectual approaches of the history of learning and experimental philosophy. He developed a multiyear research project that deployed extensive excavations, purposeful travel, distinctive visual techniques, and novel note-taking methods. He identified so-called thunderstones as ancient artifacts as well as the varying deployment of stone, bronze, and iron in different time periods through the use of stratigraphy and the ordering of finds by the materials used. In 1688, he opened a public museum and conference hall where members of opposing sides in the war could discuss the history of their shared region. Although this institution did not long survive Major’s death, his archaeological approach did.