Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

R.J.W. Evans, Alexander Marr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351946667
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

'Curiosity' and 'wonder' are topics of increasing interest and importance to Renaissance and Enlightenment historians. Conspicuous in a host of disciplines from history of science and technology to history of art, literature, and society, both have assumed a prominent place in studies of the Early Modern period. This volume brings together an international group of scholars to investigate the various manifestations of, and relationships between, 'curiosity' and 'wonder' from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Focused case studies on texts, objects and individuals explore the multifaceted natures of these themes, highlighting the intense fascination and continuing scrutiny to which each has been subjected over three centuries. From instances of curiosity in New World exploration to the natural wonders of 18th-century Italy, Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment locates its subjects in a broad geographical and disciplinary terrain. Taken together, the essays presented here construct a detailed picture of two complex themes, demonstrating the extent to which both have been transformed and reconstituted, often with dramatic results.

1

Introduction

Alexander Marr

If any thinke these histories strange, he may see the very title sayes as much. And it is good for an author to be as good as his title. And this being a translation, it must be strange. If any thinke that by the name of history all should be true, he may knowe Historiographers confesse they may write as they list … And very tales are heard or read by most of us with good delight. These from good authors to good purpose are in good sort set down. Then sit thee down and make thy good of them for have thou a good memory and they will prove memorable.

E. Grimestone’s preface to his translation of S. Goulhart, Admirable and Memorable Histories Containing the Wonders of Our Time (1607), A3^v

Il n’est desir plus naturel que le desir de connaissance. Nous essayons tous les moyens qui nous y peuvent mener. Quand la raison nous faut, nous y employons l’experience.

Montaigne, ‘De l’experience’, Essais, bk. III, ch. 13

Curiosity and wonder share a common history. Aristotle followed his famous statement in the Metaphysics – ‘All men by nature desire to know’ – with the assertion that this desire for knowledge is closely related to the passion of wonder: ‘For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are …’.¹ As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park observe in their masterful study Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, ‘wonder has its own history’, but this history is ‘tightly bound up with the history of other cognitive passions such as terror and curiosity.’² One of the guiding principles of this volume is that in the early modern period connections between wonder and curiosity are sufficiently explicit, intricate and widespread to merit their thematic coupling.³ This is not to suggest, however, that the terms are or were interchangeable. Despite their lexical and semantic proximity in a host of discourses, from the proper approach to investigating nature to the description and interpretation of works of art, each has its own trajectory, though often difficult to disentangle from its neighbour. Indeed, one of the problems facing historians of the meaning and interpretation of curiosity and wonder from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is finding plausible ways to distinguish between these and a host of related concepts, words and things.⁴ As Neil Kenny explains: ‘the behaviour of “curiosity” has much in common with many other “concepts” which served, in early modern contexts and times, to construct knowledge and/or desire: “interest”, “wonder”, “marvel”, “strangeness”, “subtlety”, “secret”, “rarity”, to name but a few.’⁵ Indeed, if it can be said that there is any consensus, no matter how loose, about the nature of curiosity and wonder in the early modern period, it is the sheer diversity of meanings, interpretations and uses attached to these objects from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. For Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara Benedict, Mary Campbell and others, a defining characteristic of early modern curiosity and/or wonder is ambiguity.⁶ Kenny, in particular, has highlighted the instability of curiosity as both a ‘concept’ and a set of words, noting the ‘fuzzy boundaries’ of its semantic and conceptual borders, rendering the study of curiosity (and indeed wonder) inherently problematic. Similarly, Peter Platt has noted the difficulty of isolating any specific definition of wonder given that ‘no unified vision of the marvelous existed: it was a concept full of inconsistency and variety in the Renaissance.’⁷

Such plurality is reflected by the different topics addressed in the contributions to this volume: the perils of curiosity and sixteenth-century travel; debunking wonders in mid-eighteenth century Italy; the princely cabinet of curiosities; collecting as metaphor, spoof and melancholy satire; the contested curiosity of wonder-working and occult science; early modern introspection and curiosity about the body; the location of wonders within eighteenth-century selves. This variety of subject matter is paralleled by the abundance of words and things used to denote curiosity and wonder in early modern Europe. For example, John Minsheu’s celebrated Guide into Tongues (first edition, 1617) parades the lexical and semantic proximity between wonder, marvels and admiration, in both Latin and European vernaculars:

251: to Admire. G. Admirér. I. Amirare. H. Admirár. B. Werwonderen. T. Werwunderen. Vi. Wonder, and Maruell.

b. an Admirer, or wonderer. G. Admiratéur. I. Ammiratóre. H. Admiradór. L. Admirátor, óris. B. Werwonderer. T. Werwunderer.

7895: a Maruaile, or wonder. G. Merueílle. I. Marauíglia. H. Marauílla, à Lat. Mirabilis, wonderfull. L.Mirum, Miráculum, à miror, to wonder. Gr. θοῦμα, à θαυμάζω, i. miror, hoc autem à θεώμαι, i. video, circumspicio: quæ enim suspicimus & admiramur, ea quàm maximè intentis oculis solemus intueri. Vi. cætera in Wonder.

b. to Maruaile. G. Merueillér. I. Marauigliáre. H. Marauillár. L. Admirári. Vi. to Wonder.

14588: to Wonder. B. Werwonderen. T. Werwunderen, Wunderen. G. Admirér, S’ esmerueillér. I. Marauigliársi. H. Marauillárse. L. Admirari, Mirari. Gr. θαυμάζω, à θαδμα, i. miraculum, ¶ Etym: Vi. to Maruaile.

b. a Wonder. B. Wouder. T. Wunder. L. Mirum,* Miriones dici, ¶ Varro de ling. Lat. lib. 6. H. Milagro o Marauilla. G. Mirácle, Meruéille. I. Mirácolo, Marauiglia, à L. Miraculum. Gr. θοῦμα, à θέαμα, i. spectaculum. Vi. Maruaile.

14589 Wonderfull. B. Wonder-lijc, Wonder-bar. T. Wunderbar. G. Merueilléux. Vi. Maruailous.⁸

This variety is exacerbated when we distinguish wonders and curiosities from, for example, the ‘passion’ of wonder or the ‘concept’ of curiosity. The intertwined histories of these objects and objectifications reveal inconsistencies and contradictions that have been viewed either as constitutive of the very meaning of early modern curiosity or unwelcome aberrations in the modern reconstruction of overarching ‘concepts’.⁹

How, then, should we go about studying curiosity and wonder? The last three decades have seen a veritable cornucopia of studies devoted to various aspects of curiosity and wonder, predominately, though not exclusively, focused on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the chronological span of this volume. Historians of science, religion, literature, art and society; anthropologists, literary critics, philosophers; all have contributed to what has become a large and complex literature on the subjects examined here. Yet if curiosity and wonder are increasingly (though by no means universally) acknowledged as important topics for students of the early modern period, disagreement about how and where they should be studied and interpreted is similarly growing.¹⁰ The extensive, sometimes bewildering, range of subjects and objects embraced by the study of curiosity and wonder are informed by an equally extensive set of methodologies. As such, this introduction does not aim to provide an exhaustive list of works concerned with curiosity and wonder but, instead, to offer a guide through this literature and some of its historiographical developments, identifying the different approaches at work, pointing to areas where there is agreement or disagreement, and suggesting potential areas for future research.¹¹

One of the principles underlying this volume is that the lens of curiosity and/or wonder offers a legitimate tool with which to assess the rich interconnections between early modern objects, texts, individuals and ideas. The present volume does not offer up curiosity and wonder as a unique new ‘key’ with which to unlock, for example, the Scientific Revolution. Rather, they are suggested as vantage points from which to view the intersections and divergences of a host of currents, motifs and sensibilities in early modern cultural and intellectual life.¹² The study of curiosity and wonder offers, we believe, rewarding ways in which to link the voyages of discovery to medical practices, collecting to the formation of scientific academies, without resorting to anachronistic terms of reference or convenient, but historically inaccurate, conceptual categories. There is, of course, the danger that curiosity and wonder can be applied superficially and a-historically. Indeed, one result of the surge of interest in curiosity and wonder has been a tendency to fit anything and everything to the study of these themes, creating an indiscriminate Wunderkammer of dubious historical veracity.¹³ If, as Barbara Benedict has claimed, curiosity took on ‘distinct historical shapes’ in the early modern period, it is surely important to attend to those contexts that allow us to accurately identify and describe these shapes and how they changed over time.

1.1 Magnified flea from Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665). Reproduced by kind permission of the Provost, Fellows and Scholars of The Queen’s College, Oxford.

To do so means recognising that what we might understand today as ‘curious’ or ‘wonderful’ is not necessarily equivalent to what early modern individuals understood these terms to mean. To take a recent example, Philip Fisher’s assertion in Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences that for wonder ‘there must be no element of memory in the experience’, simply does not hold when specific instances of wondering are analysed in their appropriate historical context.¹⁴ Turning to that locus classicus of early modern wonder – the engraved representations of magnified natural objects in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (Fig. 1.1) – we find that the marvelling engendered by the ‘new visible World discovered to the understanding’ by the microscope was, at least in part, excited by the remembrance of regularly observing ‘little Objects … a Flea, a Mite, a Gnat’ without the aid of instruments.¹⁵ The essays in this book all attempt to approach curiosity and wonder through early modern eyes.

Hooke’s observations using the microscope serve to introduce some of the key recurring themes in the study of curiosity and wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment – human enquiry into the natural world; the sustained scrutiny of specific objects; the revelation of the hidden; rapturous admiration at the handiwork of God; the emotional and cognitive response at experiencing the new or unfamiliar – subjects that were intricately interconnected in the period with which we are concerned. These interconnections pose problems for the historian of curiosity and wonder. How do we go about writing an integrated history of either concept, let alone both? By far the most frequently adopted approach is the (entirely reasonable) setting of subject parameters. Benedict’s wide-ranging Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Enquiry, for example, is emphatically not a history of science, while Kenny’s excellent Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories addresses its theme by focusing on semantic shifts in the lexicon of curiosity.¹⁶

By offering a collection of essays this volume aims to overcome some, but by no means all, of the problems associated with the study of curiosity and wonder. By presenting several sharply focused, individual s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Out of the frying pan …’: Curiosity, danger and the poetics of witness in the Renaissance traveller’s tale
• 3 The metaphorical collecting of curiosities in early modern France and Germany
• 4 The New World collections of Duke Cosimo I de’Medici and their role in the creation of a Kunst- and Wunderkammer in the Palazzo Vecchio
• 5 The jocund cabinet and the melancholy museum in seventeenth-century English literature
• 6 Curious knowledge and wonder-working wisdom in the occult works of Heinrich Khunrath
• 7 Enthusiasm and ‘damnable curiosity’: Meric Casaubon and John Dee
• 8 Gentille curiosité: Wonder-working and the culture of automata in the late Renaissance
• 9 Nosce teipsum: Curiosity, the humoural body and the culture of therapeutics in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England
• 10 Back from wonderland: Jean Antoine Nollet’s Italian tour (1749)
• 11 Curiosity and the lusus naturae: The case of ‘Proteus’ Hill
• Epilogue
• Index