Daston and Park 1998

"In placing wonder and wonders at the center of our narrative, we have had to challenge the traditional historiography of science and philosophy in fundamental ways. Most obviously, we have let go of not only the usual periodization, which divorces the medieval from the early modern study of nature, but also the much more basic ideas of distinct stages, water-sheds, new beginnings, and punctual or decisive change. These narrative conventions, imported into intellectual histoey from 18th- and 19th-century political historiography, only distort the nonlinear and nonprogressive cultural phenomena we describe. For the most part our story is not punctuated by clearly distinguished epistemes or turning points, but is instead undulatory, continuous, sometimes cyclical." (17)

The Topography of Wonder

Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia (ca. 1210)

• wonders come from novelty and ignorance of cause (23)
• paradoxography

periphery of the circular world -- more marvels (e.g. East)

language of wonders links to language of romances (33)

marvels were not necessarily threatening or an expression of anxiety; too far away

"At their most transgressive, they served to satirize courtly and aristocratic culture or to figure a fantasy realm of freedom from the sexual restrictions and pervasive poverty of European culture. The wonders of the East had overwhelmingly positive associations; liberating precisely on account of their geographical marginality -- unlike, say, the real and proximate difference represented by a resident Jewish population -- they were viewed with a relatively benign and tolerant eye." (34)

goose barnacle tree, lamb cabbage: 35-6

wonder and religion: Augustine, Vincent of Beauvais, Thomas of Cantimpre use marvels to show God's omnipotence; wonder as a religious emotion (43ff.)

• "The Augustinian framework of the thirteenth-century encyclopedias fell away as their audience expanded and shifted to include lay and vernacular readers. In the process, the marvelous natural phenomena they contained shed their vestigial associations with the fear of divine retribution, to emerge as objects of unadulterated pleasure and fascination." (48)

extraordinary species vs. extraordinary individuals (monsters)

• many monsters were only prodigious signifiers, and therefore died after birth according to Isidore (53)

credibility: opened space for imaginative exploration rather than exacting belief; different medieval models for belief (60ff.)

• monsters and prodigious births, though, had to be entirely credible if they were to portend anything

The Properties of Things

"wonders were also commodities: to be bartered, bought, sold, collected, and sometimes literally consumed" (67)

"Medieval collections bore little resemblance to early modern or modern museums. They functioned as repositories of wealth and of magical and symbolic power rather than as microcosms, sites of study, or places where the wonders of art and nature were displayed for the enjoyment of their proprietors and the edification of scholars and amateurs." (68)

"The medieval collection, in other words, was not a musaeum but a thesaurus ("treasure" -- the term most commonly used to refer to it) in the sense of a repository of economic and spiritual capital." (74); treated as monetary reserve, like gold or gems

also reservoirs of power, not just symbolic but literal/supernatural (74); mostly institutional collections until later middle ages

marvels of automata: 89ff.

Wonder Among the Philosophers

"academic natural philosophers interpreted wonder as the usual response not only to the rare and unfamiliar, but also to the phenomenon of unknown cause ... [they] rejected wonder as inappropriate to a philosopher" (110)

• instead saw natural order as imbued with "habits" or "rules"
• wonders as praeter naturam -- i.e. the "preternatural" (see 121)

Augustine portrayed curiosity as a form of incontinence that scattered the body's energies (123)

Ramon Llull, Llibre de meravelles (c.1310); story of Felix sent to explore the world by his father; found explanations, but they never dispel his wonder, which is rooted in Augustinian reverence for creation (125)

Marvellous Particulars

"preternatural philosophy": "rehearsed new empirical methods of inquiry and new types of physical explanation" (137)

healing waters (138ff.)

Ulisse Aldrovandi, describing his collection in 1595:

"Today in my microcosm, you can see more than 18,000 different things, among which 7000 plants in fifteen volumes, dried and pasted, 3000 of which I had painted as if alive. The rest -- animals terrestrial, aerial and aquatic, and other subterranean things such as earths, petrified sap, stones, marbles, rocks and metals -- amount to as many pieces again. I have had paintings made of a further 5000 natural objects -- such as plants, various sorts of animals, and stones -- some of which have been made into woodcuts. These can be seen in fourteen cupboards, which I call the Pinacotheca. I also have sixty-six armoires, divided into 4500 pigeonholes, where there are 7000 things from beneath the earth, together with various fruits, gums, and other very beautiful things from the Indies, marked with their names, so that they can be found." (Aldrovandi, qtd on 154)

Francesco Calzolari of Verona collected similarly

Johannes Kentmann, Nomenclatura rerum fossilium (1565); Calculorum qui in corpore ac membris hominum innascuntur (1565)

• early colelctor of rocks and stones
• kept them in an armoire divided into 26 categories

collections served many purposes

• "places for research, where medical scholars could study the range of variation possible in human and animal anatomy, or where they could explore the healing properties of natural substances"
• "operated as tools in professional and social self-fashioning, allowing their proprietors to build reputations, careers, and networks of clients and patrons through visits and the exchange of objects as wella s through their written works"
• to transfer the emotion of wonder from the objects themselves to their erudite and discriminating owner" (158)

Giambattista della Porta, Phytognomonica (1588); relationship between plants' "signatures" and what governs them

Cardano, "subtlety"

Monsters: A Case Study

evolution of c16-17 attitudes as one of naturalization as monsters become sites of scientific inquiry;

• reject that teleological model;
• example of monsters as portentious in late c17, and proponents of rationalization in medieval era (176)

"Instead of three successive stages, we now see three separate complexes of interpretations and associated emotions -- horror, pleasure, and repugnance -- which overlapped and coexisted during much of the early modern period, although each had its own rhythm and dynamic." (176)

"Earlier, learned treatises offering ominous interpretations o mosnters had flourished alongside those that furnished strictly natural explanations. But by the 1670s theologians as well as physicians and natural philosophers increasingly rejected portents as politically and religiously volatile. It is this emergent unison among elites, rather than a coherent and novel movement to naturalize monsters and other prodigies, that requires explanation." (176)

Ravenna monster -- composite of sins, like memory palaces (178)

Lycosthenes (183)

printing made an avalanche of new material/prodigies available; seemed like a final reckoning; Lycosthenes even included 18 blank pages at the end of his 1552 edition o Julius Obsequens's c4 book on prodigies, "so that readers could register portents as they occurred" (187)

natural and supernatural, first and second causes, not mutually exclusive in early modern period (192)

James Duplessis, A Short History of Human Prodigious and Monstrous Births (1680)

• manuscript
• was Samuel Pepys' servant; sold his mss. and memoirs to Royal Society president Hans Sloane in 1730
• contains image of hermaphrodite with flap

Leibniz saw monsters as evidence of Nature's diversity (201)

Varchi; earliest repugnance toward monstrous births (202)

c18: begin to see frenzy for attaching form to function; anatomies of monsters (204)

"The essence of the new attitudes toward nature among natural philosophers was not so much naturalization as subordination: the subordination of anomalies to watertight natural laws, or nature to God, and of citizens and Christians to established authority." (208)

Strange Facts

c17 collecting; becomes "curiosities"; diverse group socially and economically

"We argue that marvels played a brief but key role in forging a new category of scientific experience: the fact detached from explanation, illustration, or inference." (220)

Francis Bacon -- owes much to preternatural philosophy; wanted to look not just at the perfection of nature, but attested accounts of witchcraft, divination, and sorcery (222); this would 1) "correct natural philosophical axioms derived only from commonplace phenomena" and 2) "pave the way for innovations in the mechanical arts" (222)

for Bacon, art is nature under constraint ;"Nature under the compulsion of art resembled nature erring in the variability of ffects visible in both cases, revealing possibilities hardly glimpsed under ordinary conditions. When nature wandered from its wonted paths without the prodding of art, the marvels thereby produced mimicked the variability induced by art -- or rather, marvels were proto-art, naturing anticipating art" (222-3)

• similar instances: resemblances of form
• singular instances: exceptional species within a genus
• deviating instances: marvelous individuals
• bordering instances combined two species
• instances of power: wonders of art (225)

"The function of the preternatural cluster was as much destructive as constructive: marvels would be the battering ram that broke down the axioms of Aristotelian natural philosophy and would clear the way for the new axioms of Bacon's interpretation of nature. A mind awakened by wonders would reject syllogisms based solely on the familiar and the commonplace." (227)

however, whereas preternatural philosophy looks for proximate causes, Bacon wants to look to deeper common causes that govern even the exceptions (227)

late seventeenth century's appetite for "strange facts" shows "much of what was distinctive about 17c scientific empiricism, particularly the collective empiricism promoted by the new scientific academies of the late seventeenth century" (236)

"The strange facts of the 17c natural philosophy were the Ur-facts, the prototypes of the very category of the factual. Strange facts defined many (though not all) of the traits that have been the hallmarks of facticity ever since: the notorious stubbornness of facts, inert and even resistant to interpretation and theory; their angular, fragmentary quality; their affinity with concrete things, rather than with relationships. The disparity between strange facts and modern matter-of-fact facts is equally revealing: strange facts were anything but robust, seldom public, and too singular to be amalgamated into sums or tallied in tables. The strange facts of early modern natural philosophy show that scientific facticity has a history, one that begins but by no means ends in the 17c." (236)

"What chiefly distinguished the new empiricism of facts from the old empiricism of experience aws not experiment but the sharp distinction between a datum of experience, experimental or observational, and any inference drawn from it. The distinction between explanandum and explanans -- hoti and dioti -- was as old as Aristotle, but the epistemological autonomy and centrality of matters of fact in 17c natural philosophy was unprecedented." (237)

17c facts neither certain nor robust (238); strange facts were "rare and came unbidden," making them hard to study