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During the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by
the proliferation of new worlds geographic worlds found in the
voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by
natural philosophy, or science. The response to incredible overseas
encounters and to the profound technological, religious, economic,
and intellectual changes occurring in Europe was one of nearly
overwhelming wonder, expressed in a rich variety of texts. In the
need to manage this wonder, to harness this imaginative
overabundance, Mary Baine Campbell finds both the sensational
beauty of early scientific works and the beginnings of the
divergence of the sciences particularly geography, astronomy, and
anthropology from the writing of fiction.Campbell's learned and
brilliantly perceptive new book analyzes a cross section of texts
in which worlds were made and unmade; these texts include
cosmographies, colonial reports, works of natural philosophy and
natural history, fantastic voyages, exotic fictions, and
confessions. Among the authors she discusses are Andre Thevet,
Thomas Hariot, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Margaret Cavendish, and
Aphra Behn. Campbell's emphasis is on developments in England and
France, but she considers works in languages other than English or
French which were well known in the polyglot book culture of the
time. With over thirty well-chosen illustrations, Wonder and
Science enhances our understanding of the culture of early modern
Europe, the history of science, and the development of literary
forms, including the novel and ethnography."
Surveying exotic travel writing in Europe from late antiquity to
the age of discover, The Witness and the Other World illustrates
the fundamental human desire to change places, if only in the
imagination.Mary B. Campbell looks at works by pilgrims, crusaders,
merchants, discoverers, even armchair fantasists such as
Mandeville, as well as the writings of Marco Polo, Columbus, and
Walter Raleigh. According to Campbell, these travel accounts are
exotic because they bear witness to alienated experiences; European
travelers, while claiming to relate fact, were often passing on
monstrous projections. She contends that their writing not only
documented but also made possible the conquest of the peoples whom
she travelers described, and she shows how travel literature
contributed to the genesis of the modern novel and the modern life
sciences.
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