[...] role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder



wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)

catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)

prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme

Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature

portentous events بد شگون

(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit

many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupton

common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)

medically oriented monster literature

[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work


A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein

little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)

popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)

[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda

monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar

(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”

Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)

shift in *causal thinking* --> (expanded the power of) maternal imagination covering eventuality ==> a new way of talking about nature
{(from) in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent (a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned)}--to--> nature gained a new autonomy ( fertility of invention =/= wrath) --> *nature personified* (the artisan) [Pare: “chambermaid to our great God"], monsters were treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature

transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things

nonanthropocentric zoological studies



Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the history of arts

nature's aberrations for the finest examples of her workmanship

nature imagery of the wonder book

renaissance thought -->{ (antithesis of) art =/= nature }--> art may aid, imitate, modify or surpass nature
--✕--> Bacon: art (formal and final causes) should become more natural & nature (material and efficient causes) should be made more artificial --> monster: nature's artificial work
•nature in extremis =/= conventional wisdom
•monsters: models for the novelties of art

--Bacon--> enrichment of both speculative and operative natural philosophy (=/= books of fabulous experiments and secrets)

**wonder literature sacrificed accuracy to admiration**

corroboration


xxxxxx

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to take echoing abstractions (reason, nature, etc.) and try to cash them out in concrete practices
(transformation of) extremely abstract --to--> extremely concrete
-why is it so irresistible to reach analogies between the moral and the natural orders?
other orders of nature [**every order of nature sustains a moral order**]:
1. local nature (what happens when we scale up)
2. ontological identity card (what makes a squirrels)
3. universal natural laws
aggregation of these forms of orders ]**each provokes a characteristic cognitive passion** : they involve judgment + emotional reaction to its transgressions]:
1. disequilibria (--> terror: fear saturated by guilt) --> local nature
2. monsters (--> horror) --> specific nature
3. marvels and miracles (--> wonder) --> natural laws

[(a very recently) forceful kind of] argument to anchor moral or political order in a natural foundation

--Daston--> we are species that represent (**we must model our orders** : to make visible & external) --{with an appeal to a natural analog}--> *nature: the richest source of models of all kind of orders

[!!!today task of artist:] ***to give back humanity its childhood*** (that was lost in the age of objectivity) @Sina, Sarah

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Schutz
social nature of knowledge
how people grasp the consciousness of others while living within their own streams of consciousness

absent friends:
•his brother whom he has described to me
•the professor whose books i have read
•the postal clerk
•the Canadian Parliament
•abstract entities like Canada herself
•the rules of English grammar
•the basic principles of jurisprudence
•
--Schutz--> more one goes into the contemporary world, the more anonymous the contemporary inhabitants become

...................................

wonder
and its marvels

(Paris wall slogan from the student rebellion of 1968 -->) “every view of things that is not strange (bizarre, foreign) is false” --Bynum--> to jolt her listeners nad readers into encounter with a past that is unexpected and strange

past --> answer questions we haven't asked

-could “wonder” be the special characteristic of the historian?

wonder & marvels --> a medievalist's topic

Bynum represent a rearguard action to claim back from early modernists the irrational and grotesque and to “re-enchant” (if not the world, at least) the historical professional

1180-1320
a great increase in stories of marvels, monsters, miracles, ghosts
medieval europe awash in wonders


*the circumstances under which medieval men and women felt wonder*
•wonder-talk
•wonder-behavior [==>? empowering them]
•the *web of actual horror & delight* we can decipher in medieval texts (and on instagram, telegram, whatsapp) (=/= the idea of “knowing = appropriating” ==> knowing is impossible)

medieval theorist [& my bestiary research] --Bynum--> wonder: (admiratio) cognitive, nonappropriative, perspectival, particular, (not merely a) physiological response
[*]wonder: recognition of the singularity and significance of the thing encountered

‘thing =/= knower’ (in a context + from a particular point of view) ==trigger==> wonder

telegram bestiary --> capacity to be shocked by the singularity of the event (==Sina==> search for significance ~/= cause, explanation)


scholarship on (early modern[...]