Kara Wittman

Jan. 31, 2003

History 313

P. Findlen

Book Review: Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-17501

In 1980, historian Howard Zinn published the first edition of A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. The book takes as its premise the now-familiar idea that American history has been dominated by a textbook inculcation of hegemonic values and ideals and has been taught in the F.R. Leavis tradition of "great men," "great books," and "great events." Zinn's book subverts this master narrative by assuming the perspective of "the people," in this case the marginalized, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and the silenced. While Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park's Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 may appear to have little in common with such a project, I invoke Zinn because the overarching theses of the two works are strikingly similar, and thus Zinn's counter-hegemonic historiography offers an illuminating point of entry into Daston and Park's tremendous and elegant book. Wonders and the Order of Nature offers a radically different perspective on the Scientific Revolution, writing a history of science based on objects and passions of inquiry at the margins rather than those occupying the dominant central ground. It is, in effect, a look at Kuhnian scientific revolutions from the perspective of the anomaly.

In their introduction, Daston and Park attempt to distance themselves from the "familiar narratives of high medieval and early modern European historiography: the rise of universities, the age of European exploration, the course of the Scientific Revolution...and the like" (18), claiming instead simply to offer "a history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry" (14). The claim, however, is somewhat disingenuous, as Daston and Park well recognize: a historiographic enterprise which places previously marginalized epiphenomena dead at its center challenges "the traditional historiography of science and philosophy in fundamental ways" (17). And indeed this book does successfully challenge a linear, epistemic view of the history of science and specifically of the scientific revolution; comprehensive and lucid, Wonders and the Order of Nature makes a powerful argument for the tidal nature of the extraordinary and for the paradoxically central place peripheral, strange, and marvelous objects have occupied in the history of empiricism.

Necessarily, therefore, Daston and Park avoid a definitive chronology, exploring instead the ebb and flow of wonders and the passion of wonder in the evolution of science and culture from 1150-1750 (even these dates come to seem somewhat arbitrary, and are intentionally troubled by Aristotle on one end and contemporary notions of wonder in the epilogue at the other). Their work instead traces the rise and fall and rise of wonder as a passion of inquiry and wonders as the objects of its inquiry, a non-teleological exploration. Ultimately Daston and Park do offer a version of a master narrative, expanding the boundaries of the Scientific Revolution all the way to the "margins" to reveal how anomalies and anomalous passions have been central not only to major epistemological revolutions, but also to the very development and shaping of empiricism and experiment across history. This book places the Scientific Revolution under the microscope to reveal the particulars–the objects and individuals, witting and unwitting, that have had a perhaps more profound (if less showy and apparent) impact on the developments and changes in science over the 600 year period examined in this study than many of the great discoveries and "great men and women" canonized in history books.

Daston and Park begin their narrative in approximately 1150–the book is, as they concede, organized along "only roughly chronological lines" (19)–with an overview of the attitude toward wonder and wonders in the High Middle Ages. Chapter one looks at the myriad forms of wonders cited in medieval travel narratives, romances, and encyclopedias, all of which form what the authors call "the genre of medieval topographical writing" (27). Not of particular interest to the natural philosophers of the period, objects of wonder and marvel were enthusiastically collected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by monasteries, convents, lay households, and particularly the medieval courts. The chapter emphasizes the necessity to "topographical wonder" of personal experience, and eye witness report: travel writers, encyclopedists, and the like realized they were writing about highly unlikely and marvelous phenomena and thus placed extreme stress on what Shapin and Schaffer have called "virtual witnessing."

During this period of unadulterated pleasure in the strange and wondrous, Augustine was recasting the emotion of wonder in light of the Scripture, rhetorically shaping wonders and prodigies into symbols of divine retribution and wrath; for example, he spent a great deal of time looking at the salamander, a wondrous creature reputed to be able to burn infinitely. This was, for Augustine, evidence that God really could make bodies burn forever and was therefore evidence of eternal hellfire. The relationship of God, fear, and wonder undergoes many mutations over the course of Wonders; the first adduced is the falling away of God and fear from wonder, and the separation of marvelous races (fantastic and delightful, purely natural) from prodigies and individual monsters (portents and divine symbols). During this period, the presence of the marvelous impelled an exegetical reading of the "book of nature."

Daston and Park then move to wonders as commodities, focusing on the medieval collection as the "repository of economic and spiritual capital" (74). In a case study of the Duke of Burgundy, ca. fifteenth century, the authors examine the use of wonders and marvels to represent the power and wealth of the elite; owndership of the strange and unusual had a certain sociopolitical efficacy based on the symbolism with which they were invested. The wonders and marvels of this period were both natural and artificial, and can be understood to represent an early chapter in the technology race that has characterized tensions between nation-states and empires throughout history.

In chapter three, the book shifts its focus to natural philosophy, heretofore largely excluded, as wonders were the province of lay people, the clergy, and the court elite, and not of much interest to natural philosophers. Revealing that twelfth century philosophers rejected the phenomenon of wonder as "inappropriate to a philosopher," the authors use as their touchstone Aristotle's comment that "it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first begin to philosophize" (110-11). From here they structure their discussion around the varied interpretations and responses to the Aristotelian statement, tracing the exclusion of wonder from philosophy in the twelfth century to the sixteenth century, at which point it becomes central to philosophical investigation.

The entrance of Francis Bacon and the turn from Aristotelianism explored in the fourth chapter, and the thorough examination of the incorporation of the marvelous into natural philosophy in the sixth, mark one of the strongest points in an impressive and original study. The intersection of Baconian methodology with the concept of the object of wonder signposts a convincing argument for the relocation of wonder and wonders at the center of the Scientific Revolution. Bacon, the argument goes, saw the epistemological consequences of the monstrous or marvelous individual as evidence for the rejection of Aristotelianism: according to Aristotle's philosophy the general and the universal could be deduced from a single individual and the presence of monstrosities and wonders that defied categorization threatened that notion. Bacon, therefore, used these anomalies as arguments against deduction and generalization. The authors write, "marvels would be the battering ram that broke down the axioms of Aristotelianism natural philosophy and would clear the way for the new axioms of Bacon's interpretation of nature" (227).

Chapter seven explores the transformation of the ontological categories of art and nature via the Wunderkammern, or "cabinet of wonders." The cabinet of wonders confused the previously discrete categories of art and nature by displaying art composed of natural objects and "natural wonders" created by artists. Citing Bacon and Descartes (and specifically the Cartesian automata) as the major figures confusing these boundaries, the authors explore the ways in which the blurring of art and nature via the marvelous resulted in a new conception of the "art of God." Chapters eight and nine then turn from the object of wonder to the passion of wonder, and to that passion's relationship with curiosity.

By the early seventeenth century, wonder was accepted as fundamental to the natural philosophic quest. Until this time, the authors argue, there existed an irreconcilable tension between wonder and curiosity. Wonder was reverence and awe; curiosity was nosiness, pride, and moral deviance. It was in part thanks to Thomas Hobbes that the two became allied in the seventeenth century: wonder was the result of seeing, and curiosity was then the philosophically inflected reason to look even further, perchance to know. Wonder had, in this relationship, the slippery status of catalytic and glorious indulgence, while curiosity held the moral and intellectual status of rigor. Apparently not sustainable as a respectable passion, the authors posit, by the eighteenth century wonder was cast away from curiosity, and thought of as indolent, ignorant, and idiotic–the apparent extremes of the fascination, delight and indulgence by which it was once characterized. This sloughing off of pleasure and delight in favor of rigor and discipline marks the beginning of the disenchanted Enlightenment and the closing, the authors finally contend, of wonder.

It is impossible to capture Daston and Park's richly nuanced argument in brief a review of the book. Their research is vast and thorough, and the complicated argument holds throughout the text, even without the organizing rubrics of chronology or Kuhnian "paradigm." If the book suffers from anything it is its own tremendous ambition; in covering a six hundred year history the authors must reconcile themselves to raising more questions than they could possibly answer. This does not amount, however, to a failing, as the reader comes away provoked and interested rather than frustrated.	Overall, Wonders and the Order of Nature provides a provocative and rich look at the history of our fascination with the strange and marvelous, and simultaneously offers a revision, or perhaps an expansion, of the traditional discourse surrounding the Scientific Revolution.