[...]*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 and'>& 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

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

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 and'>& 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 and'>& 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 age of) wonder
1- enthusiasm for wonders = *expropriative and'>& appropriative* (ضبط و سلب) --> *orientalism: projection of self or construction of “other” as self --> the rape of the New World seems implicit in wonder at it
(early modern europe) impulse to *collect and'>& explore*:
◦collection of narwal horns and jewels, deformed fetuses and human captives (made by rulers, missionaries, and naturalist)
◦origins of museums in the wunderkammer (wonder cabinet)
◦voyages to the New World with their attendant goals of *conquering and'>& missionizing* (=/= Sinbad)
◦use of inquisitors and questionnaires by government to assemble information for juridical *processings and'>& taxation*
◦Columbus's “desire to know the secrets of the world” (glossed with) Jode de Acosta's praise of proselytizing curiosity
2- Aristotle's Metaphysics: “wonder = ignorance and doubt” { desire to seek causes (it did not understand) ==arose==> wonder (admiratio) ==> replacement by knowledge (scientia or philosophia) }--> miracula (marvel: natural effects we fail to understand) =/= mirabilia (unusual and difficult events [produced by God])
3- Descartes’ wonder: (first of all passions) a sudden surprise of the soul ==> tend to consider attentively those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
◦*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
◦Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
◦Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
◦early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar

}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response

middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the general)
2. religious discourse about wonder <-- sermons, hagiography, devotional writing, enormously popular genre of *saint's lives* (tazkirat تذکره نویسی) {
◦admiratio =/= imitatio (imitation جعلى) [the readers were urged to wonder at and not immitate the power and extravagant asceticism of holy men and women (in Attar?)]
◾admiratio ~= paradox (coincidence of opposites) [one finds mira (wondrous) again and again in the texts alongside mixta (mixed, composite things, chimera)]
◦admiratio ~/= curiositas (curiosity کنجکاوی)
◦admiratio ~/= disputatio (disputatiousness ستيزه جويى)
3. literature of entertainment: travel accounts, history writing, collection of odd stories called by one author
◦admirari (to wonder at) =/= rimari (to pay into)
◦(collected stories ==> amuse, instruct, move their aristocratic listeners -->) wonder =/= inductio exemplorum (generalizing)


12th 14th centuries
(twin authorities for middle ages) Aristotle + Augustine ==> tradition of understanding wonder as perspectival and'>& psychological ==> theological-philosophical discourse
•Augustine: marvel =/= what we know of nature (=/= nature) --> *lodge the wonderful-ness of things (not in our reaction to them but) in their ontological status*
•Anselm of Canterbury: marvelous =/= natural =/= artificial (voluntary, made by humans)
}--> miracles are objectively wonderful (because produced by God's power alone)


[1]
early middle ages latin texts --> mirabilia (wonder) ~= miracula (miracle)
13th century --> mirabilia (wonder) =/= miracula (miracle) ==ontological==> flatten the impulse to wonder:
1- (tends to) separate out (with hair-splitting distinction) a small number of phenomena as objectively wonder-inducing (*whereas all others no matter how odd are wonderful only to the ignorant*)
2- (suggests that) most events have natural causes: *if philosophers are diligent enough ==> wonder will cease* [= Sherlock Holmes]
◦(1235) William of Augergne --> people do not know how to go about investigating the cause [--> detective]
◦(1325) Oresme --> *vigorous imagining of a retained species + small external appearance + imbalance of some internal disposition ==> marvelous appearance* [--✕--> himself was fascinated and enchanted by the “marvelous properties” of animals and the *diversitas of human experience* especially of tastes in *food and in sexual positions and partners*]
◦a 13th century treatise “on the marvels of the world” (Qazwini?) --> a great part of philosophers and physicians believe that: natural things ==> marvellousness of experiences and marvels
◦Roger Bacon --> naturalistic explanation of saints who lived without eating... charms and amulets... *waxed lyrical over the infinite complexity of the common fly* (<-- is this what i did in telegram bestiary?)
◦Albert the Great --> physical manifestations of admiratio = "constriction and suspension of the heart” confronted with something “great and unusual”
◦Aquinas --> connect wonder with pleasure = a desire that culminates not so much in knowledge as in encounter with majesty, *wonder: the best way to grab the attention of the soul
◦
}--Bynum--> distinguishing ‘miracle =/= marvel’ ontologically =/= psychologically, perspectivally (or attributing marvels to natural causes) --✕--> eclipse of wonder

wonder as a response was not devalued or dismissed (even in a philosophical and theological tradition that de-wondered anomalies by insisting on an increasingly ordered world, whose laws were decipherable by the wise)



[2]
in the discourse of the homiletic موعظه and hagiographical تاريخ انبياء (tazkirat) --> wonder =/= imitable قابل تقلید (--✕--> the known, the knowable, the usual)
“non imitandum sed admirandum” (not to be immitated but to be marveled at)
heroes and martyrs =/= ordinary faithful
--> (Attar [master of rhetorics] in تذکرة الاولیا uses) a kind of *humility topos* intended to express an author's conviction that the miracle-working charisma of a saint was far beyond the capacity of author and reader alike (channel the attention of the faithful... towards the emulation of ordinary virtues: to control credulity ساده لوحی, extravagant asceticism, straining after flamboyant religiosity)
}--> nonappropriative nature of wonder

Bernard of Clairvaux (medieval piety)
(rhetoric of) wonder =/= curiosity
praying to the affairs of others
praying to the secrets of the universe
wonderful deformed beauty (of Romanesque sculpture)
--> ****imitatio (جعل) = appropriation = being in society with [---> go to drawing mimetics, literal CG 3D modeling], experiencing, learning, taking into oneself, consuming****

“we, when we take the deeds [of others] for imitation, ought to make the lofty things hidden and humble ones manifest” (like the shape of the seal: sculpted inward is appeared concave when printed) --> mimesis

*the encounter is made possible because an ontological similarity to that other is built into the experiencing self*

golden goblet 🏆
we consume, absorb, incorporate the drink (~= imitate the virtues) =/= we give back (~= we wonder at) the goblet, we wonder at what we cannot in any sense incorporate, or consume, or encompass in our mental categories --> we wonder at mystery, at paradox, at admirabiles mixturae <==Bernard== three hybrids:
1- mixture of God and man
2- mixture of woman and virgin
3- mixture of belief and falsity (in our hearts)


(Attar seductively drawn to the wonderful deformed beauty of saints of early sufism)


[title]
failed exorcism


[3]
(Bynum providing a) medieval theory of wonder in the *literature of enlightenment*:
history writing
travel accounts
story collection
عجایب‌المخلوقات ajayebnameh: the encyclopedic tradition of the ancient world known as *paradoxology: collection of oddities (monsters, hybrids, distant races, marvelous lands, [telegram beasts, instagram animals]) + antique notions of portents or omen: unusual events that foreshadowed the (usually catastrophic) future + accompanied by a vague sense of dread [it gives you goosebumps]
+ (Ehsan master of) [*]fabulae: (story) told without claims to their ontological status =/= historia
}==> theory of wonder: [@apass]
1. *response to facticity*
2. *response to the singular*
3. *is deeply perspectival*

•William of Newburgh --> (some sort of) probatio (testing, evidence) --base--> rimari (probe, pry into فضولی، با اهرم بلند کردن) =/= admirari (to wonder at)
•Gervais of Tilbury --> facts ==induce==> marvel ~= res gestae (deeds or historical accounts) =/= stories (fabulae, lies) [~= *you cannot be amazed by what you don't believe* (stories of ghosts, vampires, migration of quail, flight of squirrels, etc.)]
•John of Salisbury --> *marvellous singularity* (collection of advice for courtiers and princes) ~ wonder: response to majesty (hidden wisdom, significance) =/= generalizing = moralizing (inductio exemplorum, citing of instructive general causes --> forensic)
•

credible deeply unusual singular event ==> admiratio

[*]perspectival: reaction of a particular “us” to an “other” that is “other” only relative to the particular “us” (<-- this is why ajayebnameh is interesting)
•James of Vitry --> ***cyclopses who all have one eye marvel as much at those who have two eyes as we marvel at them*** (1200)
•Gosswin of Metz and'>& John Mandeville --> turning such perspectivalism into gently ironic comments on themselves
•William of Rubruck --> barefoot travel through harsh terrain and climate required by Franciscan asceticism seems as monstrous a practice in the East as certain Eastern customs appear when reported “back home”
•



**(how? can we simply?) study medieval emotion** =/= wonder stated by historians, travelers, theologians, philosophers, preachers, devotional writers

*traces of emotion* that survive are mediated through texts, pictures, artifacts --Bynum--> we are not entitled either to assume a sort of Darwinian universal emotion, or to think that emotion-behavior is culturally constructed (as to exist only where we find words for it)

***texts may give us access to reactions less through adjectives attached to nouns*** (by calling something “wonderful” or “dreadful” =/= indicating the responses of an implicit reader/viewer)
•a keyword search for “anger” will tend to turn up set pieces on how to control it --> discussions of where it is not
•reactions such as wonder, delight, or terror (do not simply occur) they are *evoked*, sometimes even *staged* --> we can explore what evoked them

finding wonder-words =/= finding wonder (complex semantic field)

wonder-reaction:
•terror
•disgust
•solemn astonishment
•playful delight

in medieval accounts wonder often has:
•a mischievous quality
Bernard of Clairvaux --> spice of stories
11th century --> (naughtily) impish girl saint jokes
Gerald of Wales --> nature's pranks
}--> moralizing bestiary tradition (taking more pleasure in the animal tales than in theology)
analogies between animals and humans are anything but solemn and didactic
•a dreadful quality
(Attar's accounts of saint torture)
Gerald of Wales --> recounting some of the earliest warewold stories to survive in european literature, he glosses the admiratio felt by those inside the story as stupor خرفتی, timor بیم, horror خوف
◦shape-shifting violating nature
◦tales of metamorphoses --> the real change of substance in the eucharist عشاربانى + the terrifying possibility that sexual intercourse between humans and animals might produce monsters


(Bynum asking) what in medieval accounts or artistic representations tends to trigger wonder? *where do the surviving source give us access either to intensely heightened reactions or to events and objects calculated to evoke or stage such reactions?*
--> where wonder is not?


(didactic purposes of) miracle collections
*hovering significance* (of unusual natural events: eclipse, earthquakes, famines) --> sometimes listed as clipped matter-of-fact prose
William Auvergne + Oresme --> natural causes can be found for marvels tend to flatten the language of some accounts of natural world as well
}==> miracles, portents فال بد, oddities are sites and stagings of wonder less often than we might suppose


12th - 14th century --> narrative accounts tell us of objects and events carefully constructed to elicit awe, delight, dread
*rulers (secular + ecclesiastical) --competed--> display of power and splender including tricks and automata --calculated--> to amaze and tantalize:
•(13th century) خانه وحشت 🏰 evidence of a count of Artois who built an elaborate funhouse with distorting mirrors, rooms that simulated thunderstorms, hidden pipes for wetting unsuspecting visitors and covering them with flour
•puppet shows in pastry (sotelties)
•food was often planned as an illusion or trick for the eye (---> go to instagram cake baked in the shape of ordinary objects)
•changes in church architecture in liturgy (آئین نماز) + fabrication of monstrances --> define the moment in the Mass when *the consecrated host (the devine installed in food or flesh or matter) was elevated as a sudden revelation of the unexpected and paradoxical*
◦collection of relics and their **elaborate containers** (reliquaries محفظه عتیقه) [--> similarity and historical connection to wunderkammer of early medieval princes]
•
--> theologians and many of the ordinary faithful continued *to value the supernatural power mediated through bone chips or dust* more than the intricate workmanship or sheer novelty of the container --> *object = a means of access to an other tham as a singularity fascinating in itself*
--> *relic cabinets ~= cabinets of novelties*
}--underlying--> ***impulse to collect***

mirabile visu!
****(12th century) abbot Suger of St. Denis describes the crowd (more desperate to touch, possess, appropriate) that is frantic over access to a power not only *beyond* but also in its nature *other than* what contains it
(God lodged in decayed body, manifested and hidden behind the crystal and gold)

narrative accounts not only described objects and events that were staged or constructed to produce wonder + they also *teemed with complex wonder-reactions*
--> hagiographer (Attar's) detailed in emotional sensual language the extravagant asceticism and para-mystical manifestations holy women experienced + the amazement such manifestations engendered in others {beauty was not merely referred to as wonderful, *it was also described in loving and lyrical language* as signaling a deeper pattern or purpose}

(old Augustinian idea that) the world itself is a miracle --> (homilist Aelfric) wundra (marvels) of God
•it requires no sorcery that the moon waxes and wanes, that the sea agrees with it, that the earth greens in response to its power 🌙
•(recounting the migration of salmon upstream to spawn) they leap from bottom to top with a leap that is marvellous, and except that is is proper to the nature of fish, marvellous


سندباد Sinbad
[fantastical] travelers’ tales (recounted) the *fearsome* and the *ugly* --as--> *wonderful*
to Marco Polo almost every animal he met was a marvel (the horrible crocodile, beautiful giraffe) [described with an earnest and urgent facticity --> ajayeb's tone]

in later middle ages (and in toda popular media) *strangeness appealed* --> stories abounded:
•of fabulous palces
•of stones with marvellous powers
•of monsters
•of mermaids
•of fairies
•of bizarre races with eyes in their chests or enormous umbrella feet

•Marco Polo's awkward and impoverished prose
•Mandeville's credulous tale-telling
•Sinbad: [a powerful sense that] what is wonderful: (is not chickens and peacocks, even cyclopses and cannibals per se, but) **a world that encompasses such staggering diversity** --Bynum--> ******the impulse to chronicle (such things) ~= a critique of the impulse to possess them******

“If you [Alexander the Great] had a body that matched your greedy mind and heart that know no bounds in their desires, or if your body equaled your great cupidity, the great world itself would not suffice to contain you ... Your right hand would hold the East, the left the West. Not content with this, in all your prayers you would be consumed with desire to investigate and find out where that amazing light hid itself, and would dare to climb into the sun’s chariot and ... control its wandering beams. So, too, you desire much that you cannot possess. Having subdued the world and conquered the human race, delighting in blood, you will wage war against trees, wild beasts, rocks and mountain snows. *You will not allow the strange creatures that lurk in the caves to be untouched. Even senseless elements will be compelled to experience your rages.*
--> ***Chatillon's powerful prose understands that marveling at diversity can be the prelude to appropriation***
*marveling at diversity ~=> appropriation*


*impulse to collect/chronicle/list --(critique[sublimated?])-->~?=>(<--)(~/=!!) impulse to posses*


beautiful + horrible + skillfully made ==induce==> wonder
bizzar + rare (~= that which challenges or suddenly illuminates our expectations) + *range of differences* found in the world ==> wonder

admirabiles mixturae: events or phenomena in which ontological and moral boundaries are crossed, confused, erased

[*]singularity: absence of cause [--> is enough to induce wonder]


human body appearing as meat to be masticated is an aweful condescension (in worldly terms: an assuming of an inappropriate nature) for God


Peter the Venerable (12th century collection of miracle stories)
reverents (those who returned from the dead)
...a monk who has been poisoned appears in a dream while the murder is under investigation: “When I saw him [the murdered monk], I got up full of joy and began to embrace and kiss him with much affection. Although a deep stupor [sopor] took the place of my outward senses,... I was not unaware that I was sleeping ... And what is more wonderful [mirum], it occurred to me immediately ... that the dead could not remain long with the living ... So I decided to question him quickly, for the vision seemed not a phantasm but true [non fantastica sed verax] ... [The monk attests his faith and affirms that he has been murdered; then he disappears.] I wondered greatly ... then rested my head again ... and immediately he reappeared ... I rushed toward him and ... began to kiss him as before ... I heard the same answers as above concerning his state, his vision of God, the certitude of the Christian faith, and his death ... [Then] I woke up and found my eyes wet and my cheeks warmed by fresh tears.
=/= Hamlet's experience with his father's ghost (--> has no epistemological wonder)

Peter of Tarentaise
confronted with a deformed man, questioned him closely and sent him away unhealed but with a new sense of self-worth

**moral reaction described in heightened emotion-language**
(we see) *the response enacted inside the story*

Julian of Norwich
her most wonder-filled language
because of the incarnation we are a marvelous mixture (medle se mervelous) of sin and grace

the unheards-of... عجایبِ (ajayeb-e)
describing unheard-of prodigy (of green children born from the earth)


👉
William of Newburgh
what he cannot grasp (attingere or rimari) [there must be a “reason"] ==> forced to marvel at (mirari) --means--> a significance or moral use (utilitas)
•mysterious dog discovered in a stone
•a crucifix in the sky
•
}--> rarity + (they have a) secret reason
}--Bynum--> *wonder-reaction = significance-reaction* ~= ****things are signs or portents (not because of their natures or their causes but [from their ontology]) because they indicate or point [from their utility]****
#telegram bestiary
#index finger

monster <-- monstrare: to know

(for theologians, chroniclers, preachers) wonderful = strange + rare + inexplicable (never merely strange or simply inexplicable)
--> it was ***a strange that mattered, that pointed beyond itself to meaning*** (--> #wonders of pits)


(my work for WIELS, Wonders of the Moon – A Thousand Years of Sleepwalking 2020)
•*not* all medieval statements about wonder were synonymous or compatible
•how people acted and reacted necessarily were *not* in very close synchrony with the definition they gave or the ابتذال platitudes they propounded


wonder in medieval texts
=/= increasingly rare exception to an enlightenment sense of unbreachable laws of nature
=/= startle reflex of early modern psychology
=/= appropriation practiced by early modern rulers, explores, conquistadors (adventurer)


(Bynum making the point that) although by late 15th century medieval artists had begun to paint wondering faces with the startle reflex --✕--> it is more difficult to be sure whether a figure confronted with stupendous, bizarre, or dread-filled news is amzed or not
--> ***the amazement had a strong cognitive component*** : you could wonder only were you knew that you failed to understand --entailed--> a passionate desire for the scientia it lacked, it was a stimulus and incentive to investigation

significance-reaction: a flooding with awe, pleasure, dread owing to something deeper *lurking in the phenomenon*

wonder was situated
wonder was perspectival (even if miracles were not)


(medieval theories of) wonder: nonappropriative (empathically not [...]