Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (Zone Books) - Tapa dura

...dense with erudition and pleasingly light on its scholarly feet. -Kirkus Review 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 * Reviews * A handsome and endlessly intriguing book. -Washington Post * Reviews * ...a vast, ambitious history of marvels...learned and light in equal measure. -Times Literary Supplement * Reviews * ...dense with erudition and pleasingly light on its scholarly feet. -Kirkus Review * Reviews *

A rich exploration of how European naturalists used wonder and wonders (oddities and marvels) to envision and explain the natural world. 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 Introduction Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 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.