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.)