Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe

Voorkant
Cornell University Press, 1999 - 366 pagina's
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.

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Inhoudsopgave

Introduction
1
IMAGINATION AND DISCIPLINE
16
Cosmographie universelle
22
Anecdote
40
Adam and Eve from Theodor de Brys frontispiece
58
The Nature of Things and the Vexations of
69
54
98
10
106
THE ARTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY
221
21
228
Anthropometamorphosis
233
Categories and Misfits or What Is That
250
Exposed Excised Experienced
272
Fiction Science and Agency
278
Lafitaus Moeurs des sauvages
285
La Religion influoit en tout
293

PART
111
15
121
Imaginary Gardens Real Toads
155
de Bergeracs LAutre monde
157
Cyrano de Bergeracs Other World
171
Hooke Cavendish and the Invisible Worlds
181
17
196
Torture
299
Psalmanazar Formosa and the Other Self
310
The Wild Child
319
Works Cited
325
Index
353
Copyright

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Over de auteur (1999)

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.

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