In this learned and well-illustrated work Daston and Park explore
the attitudes of scientists, churchmen and philosophers to wonders
of nature in western Europe between the high Middle Ages and the
Enlightenment. Intellectuals and clerics alike were fascinated by
monsters and strange phenomena, by a natural world filled with
magic, myth and beauty. Explanations of such things in print and
depictions of them in art were used to justify religious polemic,
support princely power and further scientific inquiry. Only in the
18th century were ancient and medieval beliefs about the natural
and supernatural world coming to be shaken by a new empiricism and
scepticism. This is a intriguing study, expertly executed. (Kirkus
UK)
A rich exploration of how European naturalists used wonder and
wonders (oddities and marvels) to envision and explain the natural
world. Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize"This
book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of
the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through
the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural
inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of
nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is
simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of
naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how
the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective
sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than
opposed to one another."-From the Introduction Wonders and the
Order of Nature, 1150-1750 is about the ways in which European
naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment
used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision
themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the
dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions-these were the
marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured
collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of
art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and
Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified
princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and
shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the
passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes
dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted
through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a
spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.
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