Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (review)

Other early modern people besides Desdemona thrilled to hear tales like those of Othello, "of antres vast and deserts idle." They thrilled even more when many of the items in these and similar tales, or things that evoked or represented them, actually turned up in various European places, including the Wunderkammern of princely and scholarly collectors, the latter inspiring Krzystof Pomian to designate the age as possessing a "culture of curiosity." But curiosity and wonders are (or were) both passions of the soul and inhabitant-terms of particular vocabularies and word-histories and had best be approached in particulars lest they become mere buzzwords for a premature and alarmingly vague "unified grand narrative" (8). Or, in the wise words of Neil Kenny, they are best considered in "the ordinary language of curiosity in all its messiness" (52).

The essays in this fine volume come from a double seminar sponsored in 2003 by the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford at the inspiration of Alexander Marr. Marr's introduction, easily the most comprehensive and useful survey of recent scholarship on the subject for the early modern (but not the patristic-medieval period), emphasizes that the essays here deal quite properly with "local narrative": that is, they "chart the ways in which curiosity and wonder changed or remained stable over time, in different contexts, and from place to place, through a variety of comparative case-studies cross a broad chronological perspective" (8). The essays by Paola Bertucci on Jean Antoine Nollet's Italian wonder-debunking tour of 1749 and by George Rousseau on the eighteenth-century English polymath "Proteus" Hill range across a somewhat broader set of topics than the other essays and in many ways effectively frame the ambivalent Enlightenment career of both terms in the book's title. The illustrations are mostly unfamiliar, well-chosen, and clearly reproduced, and the extensive index by Michael Tombs is very helpful.

Among the themes treated here are satires on improper claims to, professions of, and anxiety about, knowledge (in the essays by Claire Preston on Thomas Browne, Paola Bertucci, Stephen Clucas on Meric Casaubon and the dangerous sources of John Dee's revelations, and George Rousseau); the ambiguities of the New World (in those of Wes Williams on Panurge, André Thevet, and Jean de Léry, and Andrea Turpin on Cosimo I's New World Wunderkammer); the role of curiosity in both historiography and naturalist discourses (in the essay by Neil Kenny derived from his excellent 2006 book); contested devotional forms (in those of Clucas, Williams, and Preston); the activity of impressarios of wonder (in those of Marr on automata, Bertucci, Rousseau, and Peter Forshaw on the hermetic theosophy of Heinrich Khunrath); humoral medicine (Deborah Harkness), and the subtle and shifting dividing line between art and nature (Bertucci and Marr).

But even local narratives may inadvertently reproduce long-discarded generalizations. Thus, Deborah Harkness — in an otherwise fascinating study of a distinctively English aspect of the therapeutics of humoral medicine — notes that "a highly subjective curiosity flourished between the patristic, medieval view of curiosity as an intellectual vice and the new sensibility of curiosity, emerging in the seventeenth century that prized curiosity as a disinterested, even objective form of inquiry into features of the natural world" (172–73), which simply echoes the fabricated Begriffsgeschichte of Hans Blumenberg, as do a few other essays in the volume (although Marr's and Pomian's criticism of Blumenberg is there in Marr's introduction). Unfortunately, none of the writers cites the work of Richard Newhauser and others on the subject of "patristic-medieval" curiosity, which might have spared them their unfortunate reliance on Blumenberg.

The scholarship in the essays is up-to-date and suggests the immensely broad range of semantic neighborhoods and subjects that terms like curiosity and wonder encompassed. Some very recent publications extend that scholarship. The doctoral dissertation by Brian W. Ogilvie noted by...