Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 3, 2024
The Secretum was a British Museum collection of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that held artefacts and images deemed sexually graphic. Many of the items were from pre-Christian traditions and covered wide ranges of human history and geography. Many of the early artefacts with erotic or sexually graphic images acquired by the museum were not put on public display. Modern scholars believe this segregation was probably motivated by a paternalistic stance from the museum to keep what they considered morally dangerous material away from the public. By the 1860s there were around 700 such items held by the museum. In 1865 the antiquarian George Witt donated his phallocentric collection of 434 artefacts to the museum, which led to the formal setting up of the Secretum. The collection began to be gradually broken up in 1912, with the transfer of items into departments appropriate for their time frame and culture. The last remaining items were moved out of the collection in 2005. (Full article...)