1. On Beginning 'The Wunderkammer'

This "cabinet of curiosities" was the Renaissance collector’s answer to a world too rich to organize neatly. Into it went everything that astonished. These letters do the same.

LETTER FROM THE WUNDERKAMMER #1:

The Paston Treasure, ca. 1663, oil on canvas, by an unknown artist of the Dutch School.

Dear CCR Reader,

I want to tell you about a room.

In the sixteenth century, a prosperous merchant or scholar or nobleman might set aside a chamber in his house for the things that astonished him. A nautilus shell, its interior chambers curving in perfect Fibonacci sequence. A Roman coin bearing the profile of an emperor dead fifteen centuries. A drawing by a student of Vesalius, mapping the musculature of the human shoulder. A dried orchid from the New World. A fragment of ancient verse, copied in a careful hand. A small bronze figure of uncertain origin and undeniable power.

This room was called a Wunderkammer. The best English translation: cabinet of wonders. And it was, in its own way, a philosophy.

The objects in a Wunderkammer were not random. They were assembled by convictions about what the world contained and how its contents related to one another. The nautilus and the mathematical proof were placed in conversation. The ancient coin and the anatomical sketch were understood as facets of a single inquiry into the human person: where we had come from, how we were made, what we were capable of.

A Wunderkammer was the Renaissance collector’s answer to a world too rich to organize neatly. Into it went everything that astonished. The point was not the individual object but the conversation between them. This letter works the same way. Every issue draws from architecture, literature, classical education, language, beauty, and whatever else has been demanding attention. Examined closely these subjects are never unrelated.

Why This, Why Now?

I have spent my career resisting confinement to any one discipline. I am an architect by training, an educator by vocation, a writer by compulsion, and a reader by necessity. I have taught architectural history to students who came in skeptical and left unable to walk past an old building without stopping to read it. I have introduced students to Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dickens and watched them become engaged in the Great Conversation.

I have written about classical education to audiences who thought they were getting curriculum theory and discovered they were getting a philosophy of the good life. I have argued, in print and in person, that beauty will save the world. That the classical tradition is a living inheritance. That a person who knows how to read a building and a poem and a piece of music and a historical moment, and who understands how these illuminate each other, is more fully equipped for human flourishing than any specialist, however credentialed.

University of Paris, circa A.D. 1200

I am, of course, not the first person to believe that the disciplines belong together. The medieval university understood this. The Renaissance polymaths understood it when they moved without apology between painting and engineering, between theology and anatomy, between the design of a cathedral and the composition of a sonnet. Leonardo’s notebooks are not a collection of unrelated jottings. They are a Wunderkammer in paper form, the record of a mind that could not look at anything without asking what it meant and how it connected to everything else.

I am more modest and less talented than Leonardo. But I share the conviction.

What to Expect

Each issue of Letter from the Wunderkammer will arrive every-other Thursday. It will be built around a single animating idea, the kind of idea that, once you have it, you begin to see everywhere. Some weeks the entry point will be architectural. Some weeks it will be literary. Some weeks it will arrive through a word, a historical figure, a teaching moment from my years in the classroom, a building I stood in front of recently and could not stop thinking about. It may come by way of a doorknob.

There will always be books. Not lists but recommendations, offered with reasons, the way a trusted friend recommends rather than a catalog suggests. Three books per issue, chosen because they speak to each other and to the central argument. Some will be old. Some will be recent. All of them will repay your time. (Scroll down for the first three book recommendations.)

There will be personal material, stories from the classroom, observations from the drafting table, the occasional dispatch from wherever I happen to be when the thinking gets interesting. Rome and Florence and Siena, I hope, before the year is out. Cincinnati, always, because it is home and there is more to learn from one’s hometown—any hometown—than most people give it credit for.

There will be connections you did not expect. This is not a promise I make lightly. It is the thing I most enjoy, the moment when a sixteenth-century Flemish painter and a contemporary education debate and a question about what doorknobs communicate about human dignity all turn out to be the same argument from different angles. I have been making these connections for thirty years. I have not run out of them yet.

And there will be, woven through everything, the argument I have been making my whole professional life: that beauty matters, that the classical tradition is not finished, that genuine education forms persons rather than producing credentials, and that the person who knows how to truly see — with trained attention and cultivated judgment — inhabits a richer world than the one most of us were taught to expect.

Who This Is For

I have written Letters from the Wunderkammer for anyone who suspects that his education left something out, who feels the pull of beauty and doesn’t have the vocabulary to defend it, who reads widely across disciplines and has been told, occasionally, to pick a lane.

Pick no lane. That is my advice. The people who have most shaped my thinking, the ones whose books I return to, whose arguments I find most durably useful, are almost never the specialists. They are the people who moved freely across domains and trusted that the connections they discovered were real. Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas. Leon Battista Alberti. Christopher Wren. John Henry Newman. John Senior. Flannery O’Connor, who wrote fiction and theology simultaneously and did not consider these different projects.

These are your people. This letter is for you. Welcome to the cabinet.

The Subversive Art

My new book, The Subversive Art of a Classical Education, argues that genuine classical education is inherently countercultural. Not because we’re trying to be contrarian, but because we’re trying to be human in an age of efficiency and specialization.

The system wants workers. We’re raising free persons. The system wants consumers. We’re raising contemplatives. The system wants specialists. We’re raising renaissance souls.

This is why classical education makes bureaucrats nervous. A truly educated person is ungovernable — not rebellious, but free. Free to see through propaganda. Free to recognize beauty. Free to say “no” to the tyranny of the new.

What I’m Reading This Week

Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci — the biography that reminds you, on almost every page, that the greatest mind of the Renaissance was not great because he mastered a single field but because he refused to. Isaacson spent years with Leonardo’s notebooks and what he found was a genius who moved, in a single afternoon, from the mechanics of bird flight to the hydraulics of the Arno to the musculature of a human lip. The notebooks are a Wunderkammer in motion. Start here if you want to understand why the disciplines belong together.

Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ — the fifteenth-century devotional that has never been out of print, which is itself an argument for its continued relevance. À Kempis opens with one of the most bracing sentences in the Christian tradition: “What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility?” It is a book that has very little patience for erudition pursued for its own sake, which makes it the perfect counterweight to everything else on this list, including this newsletter. Keep it nearby. It will keep you honest.

And Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose — what happens when a medievalist and semiotician decides to build a medieval library in fiction. It is the best argument in novel form I know that the disciplines belong together. You cannot understand what happened in that scriptorium without understanding the theology, the architecture, the politics, and the epistemology of the world that produced it. It’s the Wunderkammer principle, embodied in a murder mystery.

I’m convinced that reading biography, theology, and fiction together makes you better at all three. The biography teaches you to see ideas incarnate in a life. The theology gives you categories for what the narrative is showing you. The fiction helps you feel why any of it matters.

Specialization is for insects, as Heinlein said. (Though I disagree with Heinlein about almost everything else.)

What’s Coming (for Paid Subscribers):

Monday (April 13): On the commonplace book as a way of thinking. It gathers fragments—lines, ideas, observations—and places them in deliberate relation, allowing them to speak to one another across time.

Thursday (April 16): Leonardo’s unified vision of knowledge: How the greatest mind of the Renaissance saw painting, anatomy, engineering, and theology as a single inquiry, and what that means for how we educate today

Monday (April 20): The Top Ten Polymaths and Why We Should Get to Know Them. From Aristotle to Franklin to Wojtyla, a curated guide to the minds that refused the single lane, with reading recommendations for each

In gratitude for beauty,
Michael S. Rose
Classical Compass Rose

Letters from the Wunderkammer arrives every Thursday — one central idea, approached from three angles, with books, history, and at least one connection you won’t see coming. If someone forwarded this to you, or you’ve been reading without subscribing, now is the moment to make it official. Free subscribers receive every letter. Paid subscribers receive the deeper dives — the guided templates, the annotated reading lists, the material that doesn’t fit in a Thursday letter but deserves to exist somewhere.

Michael S. Rose is author of The Subversive Art of a Classical Education (Regnery, 2026), The Art of Being Human, and other books. His Letter from the Wunderkammer is sent out every-other Thursday.

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