Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Abstract

The book opens with Alexander Marr's beautifully lucid essay on the state of the research in this area. ‘If there is any consensus, no matter how loose, about the nature of curiosity and wonder in the early modern period’, he tells us ‘it is the sheer diversity of meanings and interpretations and uses’. Within this diversity, however, there emerges an opposition between a history of curiosity and wonder based on the study of collections, as exemplified by the work of Krzysztow Pomian, Stephen Greenblatt, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park and one working in the tradition of Hans Blumenberg to consider the status and value of curiosity and wonder as motives for intellectual activities. Neil Kenny's contribution to this volume is a subtle exploration of this complexity. In Kenny's writing, what is at stake in the examination of curiosity and wonder is the shape of knowledge in early modern Europe. He identifies twin approaches, the first being what he describes as ‘shaping matter or discourse into a collection of fragments’, the second he labels a ‘narrative tendency’. In his essay, Kenny outlines the triumph of narrative curiosity as the collection, he argues, gradually loses its capacity to bind together mainstream discourses on curiosity. The wider significance of this volume for students of the history of collections is that, unexpectedly, it leads the study of curiosity and wonder away from the collection.

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