Daston & Park - Wonders and the Order of Nature

First of all, don't be daunted by the reported size of this volume. For some unexplainable reason, the publisher decided to number the footnotes, bibliography, and index, so the report of 500+ pages in every review on this book is incorrect. There are actually a mere 368 pages of text and several full pages of images, to boot.

The Scientific Revolution was anything but abrupt, if approached through the history of Wonders and the history of science from one of its earliest forms in the Middle Ages. In this book about wonders and wonderment, Daston and Park chronologically trace the non-linear evolution (and sometimes regression) of beliefs regarding some of nature's—and imagination's—most bizarre creatures and happenings. One of their main goals, aside asking us to rethink familiar categories and make new connections in pursuit of historical study, is to re-merge the occult with science (and to some degrees religion). "Pursued in tandem," they write, "these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order (natural sciences) and subjective sensibility (wonder), were heads and tails of the same coin, rather than opposed to one another" (14).

Who was the study of science for? Aristocrats and increasingly, around the fifteenth century, learned, wealthy professionals like lawyers and doctors who considered the exploration of wonders a hobby and a force for intimidation as well as entertainment. As such, accounts of wonder in the book are limited to elite sources.

Daston & Park also assume the trend of current scholarship of abandoning what is known as the "teleological master narrative" that depicts science (good) triumphing over the Church (evil) and the unsupportable conviction that the medieval church suppressed the growth of science, which we can add to the long list of negative legacies attributable to nineteenth century academics Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper. In reality, natural philosophy and theology were intimately linked throughout the "early modern" period, as were wonders (which, by the way, are to be distinguished from miracles, which were not the result of natural phenomena insofar as people were, apparently, concerned).

Here is a basic timeline of wonder, which should help to organize this rather thick book:


 * Middle Ages - Literate elites are fascinated with exotic things and with religous wonders. Wonderous monsters are remote, marginal beings that remain objects of wonder, rather than of horror, by their very remoteness.


 * Mid-12th to Late 14th - sees the birth of Reason, and writers like Aquinas attempt to merge theological issues with reason. Features of natural philosophy, especially wonders, are equally integrated with ideas of an underlying regularity of nature. Everything has an explanation, and wonder loses its vibrancy as scientific anomalies (for lack of a better word) are increasingly excluded from the fray of study. Natural philosophy has become a largely academic pursuit, although some rich elites continue to dabble in wonders for pleasure, and in some cases, as power plays. Wonders gain negative connotations, particularly among academic natural philosophers.


 * Late 14th to Late 16th - Wonders become popular once more, although academics continued to look down on them. Physicians, early pharmacologists (more alchemists, really), and a few wealthy professionals & merchants shape the latest development, although the latter's involvement would come into its full force during the 17th century. Their interest is practical, but also magical and alchemical. As such, they linked these interests to some of the preternatural views of nature and its philosophy from the Middle Ages. Nature was bound by limits imposed on it by the God who created it, but it also had a form of its own agency and could be bent by magic, demons, etc. Fueled, in part, by empirical forms of study and especially by the discovery of the New World and the Age of Exploration.


 * On the flip side, wonders could now be positive fascinations, or horrifying abominations, signs of God's wrath (especially in the early 16th century). M onstrous births were big in Italy and Germany in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and feared. This is the first times that wonder truly becomes associated with horror, partly due to the much closer proximity of these "monsters" than those marginal creatures described by Augustine. Even Cynocephali, often placed somewhere in the East, were closing in as near as Norway.


 * In terms of divining through monstrous births, and it was attempted by several individuals, the very meanings changed from 1512 to 1557, before and after the Reformation was launched. In 1512, monstrous births represented sodomy, avarice, pride, worldliness, but in 1557, they were God's warnings for blasphemy, religious error, heresy, conspiracy, and sedition (182-7). This relationship to religious strife and their peak in Italy during the destructive Italian Wars of the early 16th century are evidence of the larger trend in science of seeing monstrous births as outside of nature. If so, they could only be caused by external sources, " anxieties and aspirations of the moment…: foreign invasion, religious conflict, civil strife."


 * Late 16th to 18th - By the 1650s, medical and philosophical writers on marvels had fully "reclaimed wonders as useful objects of philosophical reflection" (137). They became, once more, good to think with. People started collecting wonders and wondrous information with less interest on explaining them as in having and displaying them. A few early versions of museums appear, which put them on display (in most cases during earlier periods, wonders were often hidden away and shown only to select few, important peoples because of a fear of depleting their powers). These were known as "Wonder Cabinets" or "Cabinets of Curiosities".


 * Late 17th Mid-18th - Elites begin to find wonders repulsive and they are subsequently no longer signs of wealth, power, or social status. Plausibility of wondrous phenomenon had to be established to be considered valid, whereas before there was no such concern, only the feeling of wonder in itself was enough. As a result, feelings of wonder are reduced to vulgarity, and those interested in such things superstitious, obscure, mad, or simply uneducated subalterns. Behind all these shifts, Park and Daston see a reaction to the political, social, and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a preoccupation less with reason, science, and naturalization than with decorum, propriety, and order.


 * After 1750, the authors describe a "wistful Counter-Enlightenment" encompassing the romantic rediscovery of everything from popular magic to fairy tales; they see this movement, however, as predicated on the Enlightenment's own self-image as the product of a passage to adulthood, with childish wonder now rep- resented as charming innocence rather than contemptible ignorance and incapacity.

Several other themes appear in this book and some of the more important of those not already covered above are identity and the violation of social boundaries. Just as with art, there were patrons for wonders and the purpose was essentially the same: wonder was "partly constitutive of what it meant to be a cultural elite in Europe." In this sense, there is social identity in wonder. The transgression of social boundaries is a theme that appears elsewhere in history, not just in questions of wonder. Wonders represented the margins, "markers of the outermost limits of what they knew, who they were, or what they might become," throughout the history of wonderment. When they became more frequent at home, especially the increase in monstrous births around the sixteenth century, wonders violated social norms of what it meant to be "them" or "us". As such, it is only natural that they should become horrifying. Other examples of this are cross-class marriages and sodomites and witches, who violated social norms by sleeping with animals or partners of the same sex and the devil, respectively.

This book is a long read, but well worth it if you're interested in the more "occult" topics of medieval and early modern history and their dialogue with science. It introduces a number of potential "good reads," so if you're struggling to pick out related books, you might finger through the "Secondary Literature" at the back of the book. Good luck!