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LORRAINE DASTON and KATHARINE PARK, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Pp. 511. ISBN 0942299-90-6. L24.95, $36.50.
What is the relationship between wonder and science? Wonder, as Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park tell us in their rich and informative history, is the playing field on which a great deal of pre-modern science roamed. From the late Middle Ages until the Enlightenment, many natural philosophers, physicians, naturalists and the broadly inquisitive of nature perceived wonder to be a fundamental impetus to knowledge. Wonder was the initial act that stimulated the quest for knowledge. It was also a potential resolution for knowledge, a kind of knowing and a way of looking at the natural world that emphasized the intricate artisanship, paradoxical beauty and occasional horror of nature. Privileging the exception over the rule, the aberrant over the ordinary, wonder offered an epistemology of knowledge and the senses that delighted in the luxuriate particularity of the world.
Wonders and the Order of Nature describes the process by which wonder came to play a central role in Western science. The product of a lengthy collaboration between Daston and Park, it is the fruition of their separate and collective meditations on the place of monsters, marvels, prodigies and a host of other unusual phenomena in late medieval and early modern science. More generally, their book analyses and describes the cultural and intellectual milieu in which wonder became a fundamental scientific category. Roaming broadly across the European landscape, it takes us from the pages of Augustine, who warned his readers not to be too curious, and the writings of Mandeville, who imagined a topography filled with nothing but wonders, to the medieval and Renaissance courts, classrooms and cabinets of curiosities where wonders were displayed and discussed for several centuries.
Park and Daston succeed admirably in demarcating the process by which marvellous natural objects became more than just a textual presence in this world. In the wake of the Crusades, they describe a steady influx of `marvels of the East' into western Europe, filling the abbeys, princely treasuries and later cabinets of the curious. They correlate the material presence of wonder with the flowering of new research programmes in late medieval and Renaissance science, among them,...