Word: narwhal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...embellishment of European collections from the 16th century onward. They were anthologies of real and artificial oddities, things astonishing by their exoticism or the intricacy of their making--or outright fakes, like a dead mermaid fashioned from dried fish and monkey skin. Their cabinets were stuffed with baroque pearls, narwhal tusks, mandrake roots and fossils. The cult of the Wunderkammer rose where the demonic or angelic world view of the Middle Ages shifted into the classifying rationalism of the Enlightenment. "Those are pearls that were his eyes/ Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into...