Back in 1981, Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston published a highly original and much acclaimed article: "Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth-Century France and England" (1981). Since then, the scholarly world has been awaiting the booklength version.
What we have finally got is a work somewhat different from what has been widely expected. "Monsters", as such, do not figure in the title and occupy only a chapter of the book. This may be because other scholars have meanwhile produced fine studies of changing models of monstrosity -amongst books, one thinks of Dudley Wilson's Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages (1993) or Dennis Todd's Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (1995). But it is clearly chiefly because, over the course of time, Daston and Park have broadened their conception of the kind of work they wished to write. The gain is undoubtedly the reader's, since the resulting study, focusing on the history of "wonder" -that is, beliefs and sensibilities governing attitudes to the abnormal at large -is all the more ambitious, thought-provoking, and, in the main, highly successful.
While too sophisticated to reduce their analysis to a single linear narrative, Daston and Park nevertheless believe that certain long-term changes may be traced. The medieval era expressed by and large welcoming and positive attitudes to "marvels", be they unicorns, petrifying streams, or gems that shone in the dark. Whole categories of wonders -like the phoenix or headless men -were particularly acceptable when conceived as existing on the margins of Creation, in Africa or the Orient, while individual marvels, like a monstrous birth or a rainstorm of blood, could be interpreted as prodigies, portents and divine signs.
In any case, Christianity fully sanctioned belief in miracles, relics, and the supernatural (including the diabolical), while encouraging expressions of wonder as part of the pious virtue of faith; curiosity, by contrast, had been expressly condemned by St. Augustine as prying and consupiscence. Finally, wonderment assumed a social meaning through the huge collections of rarities amassed by medieval rulers like Frederick II: the capacity to command awe and amazement was essential to the prestige of princes.
There were of course counter-currents. In particular Aristotelian scholasticism, associated with the Thomist philosophy pursued in the new universities, had a heavy investment in the idea of the rationality and orderliness of Nature. In general, however, the medieval mind was entirely comfortable with the notion that Creation was made up of a proper intermingling of the natural, natural wonders, and the supernatural.
In large measure such attitudes continued to be expressed, in modified form, through the early modern era. Renaissance courts remained the sites of collections of curiosities -in particular, the Wunderkammern that teasingly juxtaposed natural and artificial mirabilia. With their insistence upon the reality of natural magic, opponents of neo-Platonism and Hermeticism viewed the wonderful as integral to the divine and spiritual universe. Not least, the discovery of the New World afforded a new treasure-trove of wonders.
It will come as no surprise that Daston and Park perceive far more skeptical and derogatory attitudes to wonder emerging in the seventeenth century and culminating in the eigh-