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 Andre 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.

About the Author

Mary Baine Campbell is Professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600, also from Cornell, in addition to two books of poetry.

Reviews

Wonder and Science analyzes colonial reports, works of natural history and travel, and popular writings to gather details on how concepts and worlds were challenged and remade. Chapters cover some great authors and thinkers in England and France: individuals who made their marks on a changed world.

* Reviewer's Bookwatch *

Wonder and Science is a tremendously learned account of the pleasurable yet uneasy coupling of fictional and scientific discourse in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The book traces the evolution, and the interrogations, of the epistemological category of wonder in a dazzling array of scientific and quasi-scientific texts, both English and Continental.... Wonder and Science masterfully illustrates this disciplinary flux-and reflux-of the early modern era, and the book's greatest strengths lie in its sustained focus on the formal and rhetorical synthesis of scientific and nonscientific texts during the period.

-- Jessica Wolfe * Journal of Modern History *


Awards
Winner of Winner of the 2000 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities.



Book Information
ISBN 9780801489181
Author Mary Baine Campbell
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 22mm