num_pages: 480
description: 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.
title: Wunder und die Ordnung der Natur.
titlecomplete: Wunder und die Ordnung der Natur.
genres: History, Monsters, Science, Nature, Philosophy, Natural History, History Of Science, Medieval, Nonfiction, Art
ratings_count: 217
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Pfizer Award
publisher: Eichborn