Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 - by Lorraine Daston & Katharine Park (Paperback)

About the Book

A rich exploration of how European naturalists used wonder and wonders (oddities and marvels) to envision and explain the natural world.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A handsome and endlessly intriguing book."-- "Washington Post"

"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"

"Winner of the Pfizer Award, History of Science Society"

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

About the Author

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.