Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750

by Lorraine Daston, Katharine Park

Overview

Wonders and the Order of Nature 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780942299915
Publisher:	Zone Books
Publication date:	10/10/2001
Series:	Zone Books
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	7.25(w) x 11.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is the coauthor (with Katharine Park) of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 and (with Peter Galison) Objectivity and the editor of Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, all three published by Zone Books.

Katharine Park's book Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books, 1998), coauthored with Lorraine Daston, won the Pfizer Prize for the best book in the history of science. She is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Historians of science Daston and Park's sweeping investigation into theplace of wonder and wonders in natural philosophy and history—fromthe High Middle Ages to theEnlightenment—is dense with eruditionand pleasingly light on its scholarly feet."Kirkus Review

Zone Books

Editorial Reviews

"A handsome and endlessly intriguing book."

Washington Post

Winner of the Pfizer Award, History of Science Society

Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize, Sixteenth Century Society & Conference

From the Publisher

"Park and Daston’s splendid book opens up a whole new perspective, not only on the modern aspects of the collections … but on the larger history to which they belong. Their rich illustrations and detailed, learned captions, ingeniously laid out in dialogue with the erudite text, bring the reader into a series of spaces where natural objects were laid out for display and study, from the court banquet to the early laboratory."

New York Review of Books

...dense with erudition and pleasingly light on its scholarly feet.

—Kirkus Review

Reviews

Historians of science Daston (Harvard) and Park's (Max Planck Inst.) sweeping investigation into the place of wonder and wonders in natural philosophy and history—from the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment—is dense with erudition and pleasingly light on its scholarly feet. The era covered here starts with the gathering abundance of travel narratives and bestiaries and lapidaries, and goes through the ontological gerrymanderings of Bacon, Newton, and Descartes. It was during the 12th century, Daston and Park make abundantly clear, when early travel narratives and encyclopedias spread the word of strange and wondrous things to be found in the outlands, that unfamiliar objects and counterintuitive phenomena—visceral and vertiginous—began to hover at the edge of scientific inquiry, defining borders, goading further study. And for the next six centuries, except for a few moments of ridicule and rejection, wonders were embraced by natural philosophers and historians as sources of pleasure and delight, as wellsprings for curiosity; treasured by royalty and the court as unmediated contacts with another world, possession of which meant one was noble and cultivated, as rare and marvelous as the objects themselves. The authors situate wonders in the circular mental map of medieval geography, which had the wildest of the wilds at the margins and the Mediterranean at the center. They also detail the contexts that set the tone for the reception wonders had from the powers that were—the court, the Christian religious orders, the universities. That reception modulated between adulation and disdain as first rational explanation and then the search for universals, regularity,and causal knowledge took hold in a world that now took its cues from the secular and the empirical. An informed and original look at the role of wonder during a time when there was a whole lot to wonder about. (114 b&w illustrations, not seen)

Kirkus Reviews