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Abstract:  SCIENTIFIC SPECTACLE IN BAROQUE ROME: ATHANASIUS KIRCHER AND THE ROMAN COLLEGE MUSEUM In the middle of the seventeenth century the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher became the curator of one of the most famous museums throughout Europe: the Roman College museum. This essay explores the social, political and cultural circumstances that made Kircher’s museum one of the most intellectually vibrant centers in baroque Rome. It examines the networks of information and patronage that made this Jesuit museum a nodal point of the republic of letters, Catholic missionary culture, and the activities of learned princes. It also underscores the role of occult, particularly Hermetic, philosophy in shaping Kircher’s image of Rome as a “theater of the world”. Between 1680 and 1870, Kircher’s vision of a museum that represented Rome in microcosm gradually disappeared- But at the height of its glory, the Roman College museum gave testimony to the power of the Jesuits to remake Rome in their own image.