Wonder & Science

by Campbell, Mary Baine

• ISBN13: 9780801489181
• ISBN10: 0801489180
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-03-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

During the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by the proliferation of new worlds-geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by natural philosophy, or science. The response to incredible overseas encounters and to the profound technological, religious, economic, and intellectual changes occurring in Europe was one of nearly overwhelming wonder, expressed in a rich variety of texts. In the need to manage this wonder, to harness this imaginative overabundance, Mary Baine Campbell finds both the sensational beauty of early scientific works and the beginnings of the divergence of the sciences-particularly geography, astronomy, and anthropology-from the writing of fiction. Campbell's learned and brilliantly perceptive new book analyzes a cross section of texts in which worlds were made and unmade; these texts include cosmographies, colonial reports, works of natural philosophy and natural history, fantastic voyages, exotic fictions, and confessions. Among the authors she discusses are André Thevet, Thomas Hariot, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. Campbell's emphasis is on developments in England and France, but she considers works in languages other than English or French which were well known in the polyglot book culture of the time. With over thirty well-chosen illustrations, Wonder and Science enhances our understanding of the culture of early modern Europe, the history of science, and the development of literary forms, including the novel and ethnography.

Author Biography

Mary Baine Campbell is Professor of English at Brandeis University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
I Introduction	1	(22)
Wonder, and Science	2	(7)
Worldmaking	9	(4)
A Map	13	(10)
PART I IMAGINATION AND DISCIPLINE	23	(88)
II Travel Writing and Ethnographic Pleasure: André Thevet and America, Part I	25	(44)
Pleasure	26	(4)
The Isles of André Thevet	30	(14)
Anecdote	44	(7)
Thomas Hariot, John White, and Theodor de Bry: The Briefe report and America, Part I	51	(18)
III The Nature of Things and the Vexations of Art	69	(42)
Francis Bacon and the Novum Organum: Repression	71	(7)
Catalogues and Tables: Iteration	78	(7)
Sir Thomas Browne: "Ironicall Mistakes"	85	(11)
Knowledge Is Power	96	(5)
Robert Plot: Cybernetics	101	(10)
PART II: ALTERNATIVE WORLDS	111	(110)
IV On the Infinite Universe and the Innumerable Worlds	113	(38)
Sublimity: Bruno's De l'infinito universo et mondi	116	(7)
The Empirical: Galileo and the "Enchanted Glass"	123	(10)
Lunar Astronomy	133	(10)
Fiction: The Minuet of Fontenelle	143	(8)
V A World in the Moon: Celestial Fictions of Francis
Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac	151	(4)
The Man in the Moon: Imaginary Gardens, Real Toads	155	(16)
Cyrano de Bergerac's Other World - Mimesis and Alterity	171	(10)
VI Outside In: Hooke, Cavendish, and the Invisible Worlds	181	(40)
Truth Even unto Its Innermost Parts: Micrographic and the Details of the Corporeal Eye	183	(19)
Margaret Cavendish's Blazing-World	202	(23)
Other World	202	(4)
Inner World	206	(7)
What the Microscope Missed	213	(8)
PART III THE ARTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY	221	(98)
VII Anthropometamorphosis: Manners, Customs, Fashions, and Monsters	225	(32)
Anthi opainetanzarphodid	233	(17)
Categories and Misfits, or, What Is That Naked Monster Doing in a Book about Clothes?	250	(7)
VIII "My Travels to the other World": Aphra Behn and Surinam	257	(28)
Fashion Plates in Surinam	260	(12)
Exposed, Excised, Experienced	272	(6)
Fiction, Science, and Agency	278	(7)
IX E Pluribus Unum: Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages amériquains and Enlightenment Ethnology	285	(34)
On the Brink of Anthropology	286	(3)
Father Lafitau and the Moeurs des sauvages amériquaines	289	(4)
"La Religion influoit en tout"	293	(2)
Ventriloquism and Possession: Empty Bodies, Moving Souls	295	(4)
Torture	299	(11)
Psalmanazar, Formosa, and the Other Self	310	(9)
Coda: The Wild Child	319	(6)
Works Cited	325	(28)
Index	353