People
Wonders and the Order of Nature:
1150-1750
by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park
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, Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston 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 specturm of orders, a tour of possible worlds.
Contact
- Email: park28@fas.harvard.edu
- Phone: (617) 495-9922
Classes
- HS 112: Health, Medicine, and Healing in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
- HS 200: Research Methods in the History of Science
- HS 212: The Sciences of Life, Medicine and the Body in Medieval Renaissance Europe
- HS 215: Science and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Seminar
- Historical Study B-24: Utopia in the Age of the Scientific Revolution
Books & Publications
- Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985
- (with Lorraine J. Daston), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, New York: Zone Books, 1998
- Secrets of Women - Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection
- (with Lorraine J. Daston, co-editor), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Italian translation: Le meraviglie del mondo. Mostri, prodigi e fatti strani dal Medioevo all’Illuminismo, Rome: Carocci, 2000.
- German translation: Wunder und die Ordnung der Natur, 1150-1750, trans. S. Wohlfeil and Ch. Krueger, Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2002.
