Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750

"The long sweep is incredibly remarkable. It’s co-authored by a medievalist and an 18th-century specialist. It’s very rare for a co-authored book to be as seamless and successful as this has been. They were able to cover 600 years of history, which no one can do on their own. That speaks to this idea that the scientific revolution wasn’t this one-and-done sudden transformation in the 17th century. They’re able to talk about phenomena stretching across 600 years, and so tell a very well-researched story, very, very convincingly over a much longer timeframe. What they do in this book is look at phenomena that would have been totally ignored in prior visions of the scientific revolution because they’re creepy and weird. They look at monsters and curiosity cabinets and ask what the intellectual role of these was and what they said about changing views of nature. They have a very convincing argument. They take these phenomena that seem marginal to science, marginal to society—like two-headed calves—and make a very convincing argument about how they’re absolutely essential to changing views about how nature operates, and how it should be studied. It’s one of the really admirable books out there. Yes. In general, what all of these books do is challenge the Cold War idea that science meant new certainty, scientific method, new systems. They emphasize that, in fact, what changed in early modernity was, in large part, a rejection of a search for absolute truth, which had been what philosophy had always been about since antiquity. The shift was to a focus on studying changing cases and thinking about things more in probabilistic terms, understanding that change occurs over time. One thing that Daston and Park argue that is very persuasive is that the role of monsters was to show that a-priori systems of understanding of how nature works can’t explain away monsters. That’s what makes them monsters, that they appear suddenly, they’re not the way nature is supposed to work. And then what do you do with them? So, the focus on monsters was a way to undercut the entire system and say, ‘this system of knowledge that we inherited from Aristotle just can’t handle the study of all of these phenomena that we can’t fit into any box. That means our boxes are wrong.’ Instead of developing logical systems and organizations of knowledge, we need to look at particular cases, particular monsters, and get our hands on the material and figure out what’s going on here."