Curiosity & Wonder Intertwined. Many historians have traced wonder’s appearance in texts throughout the Middle Ages and Enlightenment.64 Wonder in the middle ages, Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxx Xxxxx argues, was not the same as wonder in the early modern period: “Medieval theorists…understood wonder (admiratio) as cognitive, non-appropriative, perspectival, and particular.”65 It was cognitive in the sense that “you could wonder only where you knew that you failed to understand.”66 The wonder reaction was described in the texts she studied as not merely a physiological start or a flood of emotion, a definition that would be popularized by Xxxxxxxxx,67 but as entailing the desire for information and an invitation to seek it—much as curiosity would entail in the modern era. In contrast to the appropriative narrative of early modern wonder, which tended toward collecting and cataloguing as part of a universal scientific framework bound up in projects of empire and colonization, medieval wonder recognized the specificity of the event or object that inspired wonder and the situatedness of the wonderer. It assumed a hidden significance beyond the object’s place in a system or as an object of knowledge to be possessed.68 64 E.g., Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx Xxxxx, “Wonder,” The American Historical Review, 102:1 (1997): 1-26; Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxx, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Daston and Park, Wonders; and Xxx Xxxxxxx, The Age of the Marvelous (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991). 65 Xxxxx, “Wonder,” 3. 66 Ibid., 24. 67 Xxxx Xxxxxxxxx’ definition of wonder: “Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.” From The Passions of the Soul, trans. Xxxxxxx Xxxx (Indianapolis, IN: Xxxxxxx Publishing Company, 1989), Part II, Article 70. See also Part II, Article 53. 68 Xxxxx, “Wonder,” 4-5, 24. In Wonders and the Order of Nature,69 Daston and Xxxx’s assessment of medieval wonder hits similar notes—many wonders described in chronicles and encyclopedic accounts of the middle and late medieval period were “particular, localized, and concrete,”70 with an “emphasis on verification through personal experience and oral report.”71 Travelogue reports of distant lands replete with wonders made up the bulk of medieval writing on wonder. In terms of what this epoch’s wonder was directed towards, it typically fell into two categories: the rare, novel, and unfa...
