1 Ideas and Identities WonderDomenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, 1690s Wonder

2 Not the feeling of wonder…

3 History of emotions—further reading‘AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions’, American Historical Review, 117 (2012), Lucien Febvre, ‘Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past’, in Peter Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (New York, 1973), pp Jan Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory, 49 (2010), Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), Peter N. Stearns, ‘History of Emotions: Issues of Change and Impact’, in Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones (eds), Handbook of Emotions (New York, 2000), pp Daniel Wickberg, ‘What is the History of Sensibilities?’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), Links/downloads to all of these can be found on the archived Ideas and Identities VLE.

4 The history of emotions—do emotions have a history?Various theoretical positions have been advanced, but two basic positions can provide a starting point in considering the question: Essentialism—there are certain things that are an essential feature of our biology and psychology as humans, and emotions are an example; various emotions (love, anger, fear, etc.) are part of the essence of being human, they are universal to all human societies and cultures, and as such are not subject to change throughout history. Constructionism—emotions are socially and/or culturally constructed; what we feel, how we feel, and how we express feelings varies according to the society and culture of which we are part, and further, our feelings are shaped by that society and culture; consequently, since societies and cultures undergo changes throughout history, so too do emotions.

5 Mont Blanc

6 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991) Joy Kenseth (ed.), The Age of the Marvelous, exhibition catalogue (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 1991) Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, (New York: Zone Books, 1998)

7 Aristotle (384-322 BCE) on wonderit was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophize. To begin with, they wondered at those puzzles that were to hand, such as about the affections of the moon and events connected with the sun and the stars and about the origins of the universe. And the man who is puzzled and amazed is thought to be ignorant (hence the lover of stories is, in a way, the lover of wisdom, since a story is composed of wonders). And so, if men indeed began to philosophize to escape ignorance, it is clear that they pursued science for the sake of knowledge and not for any utility. Metaphysics, I.2, 982b10-18 (trans. by Hugh Lawson-Tancred)

8 René Descartes (1596-1650) on wonderWonder is a sudden surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it unusual and extraordinary. […] Of wonder… we may say that it is useful in that it makes us learn and retain in our memory things of which we were previously ignorant. For we wonder only at what appears to us unusual and extraordinary; and something can appear so only because we have been ignorant of it, or perhaps because it differs from things we have known… The other passions may serve to make us take note of things which appear good or evil, but we feel only wonder at things which merely appear unusual. So we see that people who are not naturally inclined to wonder are usually very ignorant. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp

9 Above: Leonardo, The Annunciation, 1472-5—a marvel (and a subject of art)Left: Leonardo, ‘The hemisection of a man and woman in the act of coition’, drawing, c —not a marvel (and a subject of anatomical illustration and philosophical/scientific inquiry)

10 Early woodcut, 16th century(Early woodcut, 16th century(?), depicting monstrous births; examples of lusus naturae (lit. sports of nature)

11 A representation (probably modern) of Salomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days’ Work, the centre piece of Francis Bacon’s utopian island in his New Atlantis (1626); the college contains ‘many things truly natural which induce admiration’ (Brian Vickers (ed.), Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 486)

12 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his proposed ‘academy of sciences’‘all sorts of optical wonders… unusual and rare animals… extraordinary rope-dancer… artificial meteors… ballets of horses… museums of rarities [alongside displays of calculating machines, the air pump, telescopic observations, an anatomical theatre, and an oscillating pendulum]. All respectable people would want to see the curiosities in order to be able to talk about them;… Princes and distinguished persons would contribute some of their wealth for the public satisfaction and the growth of the sciences. In short, everybody would be aroused and, so to speak, awakened’ From Daston and Park, Wonders, p. 215.

13 Detail from illustration to the Royal Society paper, ‘A Narrative of a Monstrous Birth in Plymouth, Octob ’, Philosophical Transactions, 5 (1670), pp The physician William Durston observed: ‘These Twins were exactly like one another: very well featured, having also pretty neat and handsome Limbs… We might have proceeded to further Observations, but time and the tumultuous concourse of people, and likewise the Father’s importunity to hasten the Birth to the Grave, hindred us.’ (Daston and Park, Wonders, p. 234)

14 Illustrations to Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665); far left, a fly; left, a louse; below, a flea.

15 Wooden crocodile (replacing a stuffed crocodile which had hung from the 13th to the 16th centuries) and elephant’s tusk in Seville cathedral

16 Crocodile hanging on the wall of a chapel at Oiron

17 Griffin’s claw of St Cuthbert, originally in St Cuthbert’s shrine, Durham, 14th century; the griffin is a mythological creature, half-eagle, half-lion; the ‘claw’ is in fact the horn of an ibex The Griffin’s Claw Cup, Germany, 16th century; the ‘claw’ is in fact the horn of a buffalo

18 Unicorn horns (in fact narwhal tusks)

19 Ostrich egg vessels Left: Halberstadt Cathedral, 13th century Right: Vienna, 16th century

20 Engraving depicting a cabinet of curiosities (which also came to be known as a Wunderkammer) in Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale (1599)

21 Frontispiece to the Museum Wormianum (1655), depicting the cabinet of curiosities of Ole Worms

22 Frans Francken (II), Chamber of Art and Curiosities, 1636

23 An Alchemist at Work, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, mid 16th century

24 Detail from the Hereford Mappa Mundi, showing exotic and monstrous animals and races in Africa; c.1300

25 Illustration depicting Cynocephali, in the Livre des merveilles du monde, c.1412-13

26 Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia (1554), with illustration within chapter on the ‘marvellous and monstrous creatures that are found in Africa’. A Blemmyae, from Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)

27 Albrecht Dürer’s 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros, based on another illustration of the first rhinoceros to be seen in Europe, originally a gift from India to the king of Portugal

28 Portrait of Pocahontas (cPortrait of Pocahontas (c ); engraving by Simon van de Passe, 1616

29 Relief from the façade of the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, Florence, c.1317In the said year [1317], in January,… there was born in Terraio di Valdarno di sopra a boy with two bodies; he was brought to Florence and lived more than twenty days. Then he died in the Florentine hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, first one body and then the other. And when it was proposed to bring him alive to the then priors, as a wonder, they refused to allow him in the palace [of the city government], fearing and suspecting such a monster, which according to the ancients signifies future harm wherever it is born. (Giovanni Villani)

30 The Ravenna Monster; illustration to a 16th-century German broadside‘It had a horn on its head, straight up like a sword, and instead of arms it had two wings like a bat’s, and at the height of the breasts it had a fio [a Y-shaped mark] on one side and a cross on the other, and lower down at the waist, two serpents. It was a hermaphrodite, and on the right knee it had an eye, and its left foot was like an eagle’s… It was evident what evil the monster had meant for them [the citizens of Ravenna]. It seems as if some great misfortune always befalls the city where such things are born.’ (Luca Landucci’s description in his diary of the monster)

31 The Ravenna Monster; illustration to Konrad Lykosthenes, The Doome Warning All Men to Judgement (1581)

32

33

34 The monk calf and pope ass, two monstrous births interpreted by Luther as signs from God about the corruptions of the monastic orders, the Pope and the clergy

35 Wonder narratives (some examples):A most true and marvelous strange wonder, the like has seldom been seen, of seventeen monstrous fish, taken from Suffolk, 1558 The Description of a monstrous pig, 1562 Five strange wonders concerning the flying in the air of a black coffin, 1659 Strange news from the West, being a true and perfect account of several miraculous sights … on London Bridge, 1661

36 Engraving of a whale washed up on the banks of the Thames, c.1690

37 Petrus Gonsalvus and his daughter, c.1580

38 Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656-7Below: possibly Giovanni Bona, court giant to Ferdinand II, with a dwarf

39 Conclusion Wonder was an important part of the culture of the learned, of elites and of commoners in the late medieval and early modern periods Collections, cabinets of curiosity, travel writing, literature and art, popular culture, the magical and practical arts—all these are evidence of the prevalence of wonder Much of this culture shaped the new learning of the 16th and 17th centuries, a learning that departed from the largely anti-marvellous tradition of the Aristotelian universities A shift among the elites and learned to the anti-marvellous in the 18th century—the end to the age of wonder?