Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 [Hardcover]

Lorraine J. Daston (Author), Katharine Park (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0942299906 | ISBN-13: 978-0942299908

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 IntroductionWonders 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus 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) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

"...dense with erudition and pleasingly light on its scholarly feet." Kirkus Review

"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 the Enlightenment—is dense with eruditionand pleasingly light on its scholarly feet." Kirkus Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Zone (May 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942299906
• ISBN-13: 978-0942299908
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 7.8 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #285,823 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unusual and Engrossing, May 23, 2001

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absent_minded_prof (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Hardcover)

The authors of this study do a magnificent job of looking at a cross-section of the history of Wonder itself, sort of "in the large," as well as the history of wondrous objects, from the slice of time upon which they focus. This book was twenty years in the making, off and on, and it really shows. Every point they make clearly has been carefully weighed, backed up, and illustrated, as often as not, with beautiful selections from poetry, etc. The authors state in the preface that they began with the study of monsters, which in the final, published version of their book is relegated to chapter five. Know, O Reader, that the material in that chapter constituted the starting impetus for this whole study, and you will have a better understanding of various structural oddities in the book.

One of the main themes the authors deal with is not exactly an historical overview of science, but more along the lines of social and cultural history. They write about the relationship of elites, be they religious, social, or academic, to various kinds of wonder. Do the elites embrace wonder? Do they despise it? And what about lone philosophers? Where do they fit in? The answers vary greatly, according to multitudinous factors. For me, one theme to bear in mind while reading this book was my own experience of wonder, or curiosity, and the clashing of that feeling with "The Game" in school... Anyone reading this book will, obviously, have an extremely active, inquisitive mind, to say the least. Think back (or think forward, as the case may be,) to your time in school. Did you tend to keep the topics that provoked genuine wonder in you private? Did you generally avoid mentioning them, lest they should happen to become candidates for impacting "The Game," over which the more sociable people in any classroom preside? These are two very different states of mind, and their interplay can be quite fearfully tumultuous. If you know what I'm talking about, then you already have a feel for the kind of issues that the authors of this book delve into, and deal with on an incredibly grand scale.

By the way, I'd like to recommend a couple of other titles for people looking at this book. For some reason, neither of these are in this book's bibliography. I'm not sure why not -- probably because they are so basic that the authors may have felt that anyone reading their book would already know about them. For people who might NOT know about them, I'd like to recommend "The Great Chain of Being," by Arthur O. Lovejoy, and Rudolph Pfeiffer's two volume study of "The History of Classical Scholarship." These volumes will add whole dimensions to your understanding of the matters that Daston and Park discuss, if anybody out there is interested.

This book is a prodigious feat. Worth scoping out.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonder and Exclusion, August 14, 2008

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Michael D. Barton "darwinsbulldog" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Paperback)

_Wonders and the Order of Nature_ is more than just a collection of stories about marvels. As a cornucopia of contexts, this book provides a wealth of social, cultural, religious, and political forces behind the history of wonders and the history of the emotion of wonder itself. In several ways, however, Daston and Park offer some broader themes. In their sweep through six centuries (from the High Middle Ages through the enlightenment), they show how the passions of wonder and curiosity have defined what objects were worthy of study and collection (and use) by European elites, be they courtly princes, natural philosophers, medical men, or theologians. Within those definitions emerge a multitude of boundaries - natural/unnatural, domestic/exotic, learned/lay (cultivated/vulgar), particulars/universals, theology/secularism, natural/artificial, empiricism and reason/ignorance, common/rare, physical experience/text experience, utility/futility, and ordinary/extraordinary - that help to understand how European elites viewed wonders and connected them to their lives.

Always with a dictionary at-hand, I found this book difficult at times to grasp a larger picture and yet redeemed as the authors summarized the main themes in each chapter. Chapter 1 places wonders geographically (or more exactly topographically), where marvels were "compiled, collated, analyzed, and multiplied" (25). Most important here is the boundary between the domestic and the exotic. Marvels were found on the margins of Europe, to the east in Asia and Africa, and to the west in, at one time, Ireland, and later in the sixteenth century, the New World of North and South America. Recalling Pliny, the English monk Hidgen said "Nature plays with greater freedom secretly at the edges of the world than she does openly and nearer us in the middle of it" (25). How geography defined marvels said something about the society of those experiencing the marvel. Marvels on the margins reflected Nature acting against her own laws, while marvels (of a different sort) that appeared within European society were considered horrors, signs of sin from the people. Those marvels on the margins were often exotic races such as the Cyclops (part of the natural order), while marvels at home were singularities: a monstrous birth, a comet, or blood-rain (ruptures of the moral order). While horrific marvels at home caused fear, exotic marvels, since they were not local, were viewed with tolerance. Part of this tolerance emerged from a view of relativity. Earlier readers of texts about monsters thought the exotic races barbarous and threatening. Medieval readers, however, saw exotic races through their eyes. Despite this new perspective, Europeans still expressed their superiority over exotic races.

While some viewed the marvels of the East as pleasurable (and non-threatening), Augustine placed them in a theological context. Representing the omnipotence of God, marvels should evoke religious awe. An Augustinian practice - by fellows like Bartholomaeus, Thomas, and Vincent - was to pour over catalogues of marvels and "bring out the moral sense" (41). "He told of wonders," a Christian author wrote about Pliny, "and I speak of morals" (41). According to Daston and Park, the principal difference between singularities (prodigies) and marvelous (exotic) species "lay in their signification rather than their form" (52). If a marvel were on the boundaries, then they represented symbols of the "power and wisdom of their Creator" or "figures of some higher theological or moral truth" (52) if they were found within society, then they acted as signs of God's pleasure or displeasure "with particular situations or actions" (52) and required immediate documentation because they "engag[ed] immediate human interests" (65). Another aspect of the exotic versus domestic nature of marvels I found interesting is that travel writers relied on eyewitness experience in their accounts of visits to the east because "they needed to present their narratives as both literally and morally true" (62).

In the next chapter, Daston and Park discuss wonders as physical objects and commodities of material culture rather than how they were significant to their observers or fit into literary culture as textual objects. As physical objects, wonders represented the wealth, power, and cultivation of those who owned them, and thus emerges their association with courts and nobility. The medieval collection was not a museum, for objects were not "prized for cognitive or philosophical reasons," but rather a collection of treasures as a "repository of economic and spiritual capital" (74). Daston and Park describe medieval collections as having "little resemblance to early modern or modern museums" and that they "functioned as repositories of wealth and of magical and symbolic power rather than 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). I somewhat disagree with this statement, for some modern museums were created and continued to represent the power and wealth of their donors or proprietors, and were intended for use by the wealthy and upper class citizens of society. Although offering their collections to public institutions, museum historian Marjorie Schwarzer notes that some self-made tycoons of the early twentieth century in America "expressed power through acquisition" [_Riches, Rivals & Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America_ (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 2006), 70]. Isabella Stewart Gardner named her art museum after herself and gained a "great increase in social stature" (_Riches, Rivals & Radicals, 10). Thus, some modern museums retained symbolic expressions of wealth and power (but probably not magic), not only by what they collected but also how they displayed their objects. Almost the entire collection of museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was on display, a symbol of the institutions extent of acquisitions.

Although accessible to European elites, medieval collections were essentially off limits to laymen. It seems that by restricting access to treasures, the wonder they elicited from laymen was not only enforced, as Daston and Park note, but in some manner even constructed by those keeping them restricted. "[T]he wonders of the Crista were not generally available for popular contemplation," and "ordinary laymen had to wait for one of the special festivals when the treasure was exhibited to the avid multitude, resulting in intense and sometimes rowdy scenes" (77). Had these wonders of spiritual and economic capital been open to the masses more regularly, would they have elicited the same wonder and caused the same rowdy scenes? Chapter Two closes with a discussion of "wonder at court." Daston and Park show how collections of marvels held social, economic, and political means for princes and dukes. Whether to impress court visitors, as symbols of Eastern conquest, or as symbols of wealth and power, courtly princes made "repeated and specific use of the marvelous as an elaborate system of emblems and signs to dramatize both their particular historical situation and their political aims" (101).

Chapter Three looks beyond the role that wonders played for courtly princes and theologians of the Middle Ages to the place they held for natural philosophers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Natural philosophers generally rejected wonders as worthy of inquiry not only because of their rarity but because of their unknown causal mechanisms. They viewed them as irrelevant to their work and as being outside or beyond the course of nature. Despite Aristotle's claim that wonder, as ignorance of the causes of natural phenomena, and the study of particular natural phenomena (different from the marginal and strange marvels of the medieval period, however) created inquiry to search for those causes, Latin natural philosophers used Aristotle's emphasis on causal mechanisms as the basis for their dispelling of wonders. In order to make sense of the natural order, these natural philosophers did not study particulars - individual marvels - but instead sought to understand natural variability through "elaborating general statements about the causes of certain types of phenomena" (114). They studied universal principles rather than particular phenomena, and instead of observing natural phenomena, the natural philosopher's task was "to refine and distill the universal truths he found in books and received from his teachers" (118). Thus, the work of Latin natural philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did not rely on direct experience.

From Thomas Aquinas we get three types of physical occurrences. _Wonders and the Order of Nature_ is not concerned with the supernatural (miracles), but with both the natural (naturalia) and the preternatural (mirabilia, marvels, wonders, you name it). There were problems with distinguishing between these three realms, but for the most part wonders and the passion of wonder they carried with them belonged to the preternatural. "Because wonder was associated with the ignorance of causes," write Daston and Park, "it was a peculiarly unsuitable passion for one whose entire discipline was organized around the causal knowledge of nature" (124). In their attempt to "make wonders cease," natural philosophers in the fourteenth century posited explanations by natural causes without seriously invoking divine or demonic intervention. Moreover, they claimed that particular wonders, as objects which had to be experienced to be known, could not become part of natural philosophy.

Daston and Park move to Latin medical writers in their fourth chapter. Working for princely patrons who admired wonder and wonders, medical writers thus viewed... Read more ›

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Daston and Park's 'Wonders', June 7, 2011

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Ryan S. Mease "scott.godwin" (Chicago, IL, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Hardcover)

This is an engaging history of 'wonder' as a concept traded among several intellectual eras. It is a history of the Foucauldian fashion, with a clear thesis on the development of wonder and plenty of historical evidence at its back.