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.
"A handsome and endlessly intriguing book."
Über den Autor Lorraine Daston
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Lorraine Daston, geboren 1951, war bis zu ihrer Emeritierung 2019 Direktorin am Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Peter Galison, geboren 1955, ist Joseph Pellegrino University Professor für Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Physik an der Harvard University sowie Direktor der Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments ebendort. Christa Krüger übersetzte u.a. Werke von Louis Begley, Penelope Fitzgerald und Richard Rorty. Sie lebt und arbeitet in Berlin.
