Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize"This book is                  about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and                  wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as                  objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders                  of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a                  history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem,                  these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and                  subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than                  opposed to one another."-- From the IntroductionWonders 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.

Wonders and the order of nature, 1150-1750 PDF

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