Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe

By Mary Baine Campbell

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 10, 2004
• ISBN: 9781501705052

Book preview

I ● INTRODUCTION

The second of July, we found shoal water, where we smelt so sweet, and so strong a smell, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden by which we were assured that the land could not be far distant: and keeping good watch, and bearing but slack sail, the fourth of the same month we arrived upon the coast.

—Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, in Richard Hakluyt’s

Principal Voyages . . . of the English Nation (1589)

THIS IS HOW I learned the adventure of the New World at Hudson Elementary School: as a moment of wonder, compounded of dream, surprise, delight, the trope of paradise realized on earth. It has been presented that way by many writers. Some of them were early explorers, others recent critics of the rhetorical contraption in the making among such reports and discourses as that of Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe. On an ocean voyage from New York to Southampton as a child, in 1963, I sniffed eagerly for the coast of England when it came in sight but had to conclude that only America could produce that flowery odor. On the way, I had dropped a tightly sealed bottle overboard; it contained a note about an island I’d discovered in the middle of the ocean, signed Christopher Columbus. My instruction had been clear: the distance between these shores marked the space of wonder, fantasy, invented worlds.

It has been a long and weary awakening to some of the New World’s other spaces—immemorial homeland of many now extinguished or deracinated nations, for example, or new home to a nation based not only on freedom but on slavery, home to an imperial upstart made dangerous to smaller and weaker nations by the myth of its own paradisal innocence and welcome.

But it is never possible to waken all the way, nor is it wholly desirable. The longing for another world seems to have been a real pressure on the construction of the Edenic narrative of America. Though Eden came to obscure terrible exploitations of people, nations, land, and resources, and came to it soon, that does not give us leave, as curious historians of culture, to dismiss the element of true desire in the false consciousness of colonial empire. The pressure of that same desire produced many kinds of other worlds, less usable, less phenomenal, and although they are all stained with the original sin of the conquests, they represent efforts of the imagination to see and yearn past the bounds of the known and approved, past the spiritual oppression of the dark existing ground.¹

Wonder and Science joins that effort. Without closing its ears to the din of the real, the book wants to render an account of wishes, pleasures, excitements, sublimities, and, above all, possibilities. Although one can see, in the stream of worldmaking texts to be encountered here, a narrative that terminates in Goya’s dark Dreams of Reason, the moments the texts encapsulate and the possibilities of vision they suggest are rich with ambivalence and undecidability. These texts make up, in part, a history of imaginative literature, a history of science, a history of their mutually determining emergence, a history of cognitive transformation and the means it expresses and is expressed by. The entanglements of these texts with one another and with the history of early colonial empires make up a fabric knotty with significance for all these histories, and for the characters of the forms and genres on which they are woven. Their future remains unwritten.

WONDER, AND SCIENCE

To recognize in paranoia a distinctively rigid relation to temporality, at once anticipatory and retroactive, averse above all to surprise, is also to glimpse the lineaments of other possibilities. . . . To read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious, paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new. . . . Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. . . . Because [the reparative reader] has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,

    Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading (1997)

This book was conceived at the height of paranoid achievement in the fields of literary and, as it had begun to be called, cultural studies.² As a literary historian myself, of a European corpus (travel writing) intimately complicit in the inception and expansion of imperial colonialisms, I was moved by the subtlety and fervor of the new critiques, particularly critiques of developments in the historical periods with which Wonder and Science is concerned.³ As a poet, however, I felt not only moved but implicated; I wanted to defend the value of the cognitive emotion associated at least since Aristotle with the writing and reading of poetry, and associated increasingly with the manipulation of the colonized, the selling of the colony to backers back home, the exoticizing of whatever could be (or seem to be) subdued.⁴ One cannot defend such a sentimentalized and caricatured concept as wonder against persons invested in despising or fearing its power (which is real—consider the origins of fireworks, and the message there). But one may certainly argue for the value of a pleasurable emotion, or relation to knowing, that requires the suspension of mastery, certainty, knowingness itself. And no one can deny the actual functionality of such a relation to knowing, at least no one who has ever observed a seminar or a lab in motion. The animus that relegates wonder and other cognitive pleasures to the trivial or sentimental sidelines of life’s serious business is a historical product of the transformations under observation in this book. Other transformations are under way now.

I will consider wonder, then, not as the sentimentally ennobling sensation of worldly conquistadors, stopped in their bloody tracks for a moment by the surplus of novelty or its temporary absence of visible use value. In this book, wonder might first be seen as a register opposed to that of paranoid reading—one which embraces surprise, enjoys the excess and alteration which generate it, is constitutively open to the rewriting of the past as well as the future, the making of new worlds. In short, wonder will be taken on its own terms, not as or not only as a rhetorical masking or a deflection of reality.

Wonder is a form of perception the necessary conditions of which have undergone radical changes between the highly rationalist but fact-poor Middle Ages and the end of the current millennium: evaluation of it has a history, recently rehearsed by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston in their Wonders and the Order of Nature and Caroline Walker Bynum in her 1996 address to the American Historical Society; earlier, by the poet and critic J. V. Cunningham in Woe or Wonder, a study of Shakespearian dramaturgy. All of these works address wonder, explicitly or not, as a historical phenomenon differently valenced and valued (and experienced) in different times and places. Its status in the last stages of modern Western culture in its dominant form is ambivalent—it is eschewed but also craved, wildly popular and markedly absent as a value, in discourses of power such as those of business, government, the sciences, and rigorous scholarship.

The period under examination here extends from the middle of the sixteenth century (by which time the novelty of the New World was starting to provoke innovations in philosophical and narrative genres) to the early eighteenth. It was a period of intense intellectual, technological, religious, and economic transformation in western Europe—not to mention the even more drastic changes it brought to the Americas and Africa.⁵ Transformations so multiple and simultaneous can interfere drastically with the sense of mastery that knowledge confers; wonder may be rife without being necessarily pleasurable. Quotations for this period from the Oxford English Dictionary’s article on wonder tend to emphasize its associations with stasis and incomplete understanding. From Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Courtier, for example, we get this: then he turning about, and beholding him . . . with a wonder, stayed a while withouten any word. A seventeenth-century citation speaks of Galen hushed into a wonder by certain anatomical observations. Speechlessness and a kind of paralysis are major symptoms of the state of wonder, as brevity and isolation often are, or were, of its rhetorical presentation (especially in the Middle Ages, when systematized knowledge—of most things besides theology—was less common). But this was an age of discovery, invention, venture capital, conquest; the active, not the contemplative virtues were in the ascendance. Increasingly, wonder was suspect, inconvenient, needed to be put in its (eventually aesthetic) place.⁶

From a fully modern point of view, a datum stripped of the ramifications of system, whether theological or scientific, is enjoyed in the same way that a fetish, a mantra, an icon are enjoyed. It arrests the gaze, the intellect, the emotions, because (consciously at least) it leads nowhere, reminds us of nothing. It has no use value. As a result, wonder is a form of perception now mostly associated with innocence: with children, the uneducated (that is, the poor), women, lunatics, and non-Western cultures. And of course artists. It is often, in our time and in the developed countries, a form of perception artificially contrived by the political obstruction of access for many people to the systematic explanations we call the sciences, or else by an overt evasion or rejection of those explanations.⁷ It is a form far less well studied than its elite relative, the sublime, for reasons that have something to do with the social status of those persons we conceive as most susceptible to it. And if literary critics and theorists have slighted the phenomenon on the bases of class, race, gender, and age, historians of science until Daston and Park have ignored it as well, in connection with its function as epistemological drag. The relation of wonder to knowledge is crucial but largely oppositional—broken knowledge, Francis Bacon calls it in The Advancement of Learning. No one has yet written a book called The Advancement of Wonder.

The science of my title refers to the epistemological innovation that eventually constituted wonder as a drag. It was a long struggle (not over yet), and what the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called natural philosophy brought as many marvels into the light as did the explorers and poets—often in highly figural or sensational styles. Nonetheless, the tension was significant, and generative.⁸ Even Bernard de Fontenelle (lifetime secretary of the Académie des Sciences), in his exquisite and fictional 1686 Convesations on the Plurality of Worlds, pooh-poohs the preference for ignorance as mystery: Most cherish a false notion of mystery wrapped in obscurity, he tells his female interlocutor, the Marquise, in the first of their moonlit conversations. They only admire Nature because they believe she’s a kind of magic, and the minute they begin to understand her they lose all respect for her (12). This sounds a little like Carl Sagan, whose corny sublime proselytized for science to the same kind of audience Fontenelle here scolds. Fontenelle was, like Sagan, a scientific popularizer, and the genre as we know it is one of those provoked to birth in the long period under discussion here. The medieval equivalent to popularizing (not a very close equivalent, as the populace wasn’t literate) tends to further isolate and fragment the data it purveys, in the interest of exciting the reader, while the ostensible impulse of early modern popularizing is to rationalize strangeness and correct error. John Wilkins’s Epistle to the Reader in his 1638 Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet advises us to come unto [the book] with an equal mind, not swayed by prejudice, but indifferently resolved to assent unto that which upon deliberation shall seem most probable unto thy reason (A3r). Such prefatory appeals to indifference are normal by Wilkins’s time, if often disingenuous. They may remind us of the conventional claims to historicity with which the fictions of the time, especially early novels, begin: we see in both conventions a form of repression that hints at an identity between the experiences of fiction and wonder, despite the fundamental opposition between the imaginary and what is offered as, however marvelous, the factual. But fact and fiction are in fact etymological brethren, both children of facere, to make or fabricate. Les faits sont faits, says Bachelard.

Wonder and Science concentrates on the mutually exclusionary process of development, in the brethren discourses of natural philosophy (which includes the cosmography and anthropology crucial to any history of worlds) and of fiction, of Truth seen as constitutively distinct from Beauty. Both narratives are subsumed in the larger narratives of the Age of Discovery, the age, epistemologically speaking, of the plethora. More poured in than had been dreamed of in anyone’s philosophy, and wonder poured out to meet it. There were deluges, plenum upon plenum. By the time of the compromised Enlightenment/siècle des Lumières/Aufklärung/Iluminismol/Ilustración there was order again, or system, institutionalized science and a recognizable new prose genre that offered for sale to small but growing literate publics the true histories of imaginary people and places, finally distinguishable from the false histories, travels, relations of real ones.⁹ Wonder was still an available experience, as in some sense it always is (see Charles Darwin), but its sources were more likely to be sequestered at public demonstrations of electricity, or behind the proscenium arch at the Coméedie Française.¹⁰ It was no longer a tidal wave; it no longer pressed upon people to devise systems of catchment and diversion. It no longer threatened.

The story encompassed by the chapters of this book, then, is one that ends in the world of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures (more recently and more analytically summed up by Bruno Latour as the modern Constitution).¹¹ It is also a story that points to the infiltration of the two cultures by the ghosts and powers of cultures destroyed or reduced to Christianity and colonial dependence along the way. These ghosts are at last being called up, at the end of the millennium or the end of a modernity constituted by divisions such as Snow’s.¹² Coptic roots for much of Greece’s sacrosanct literary language have been suggested, the Islamic sources unearthed of some of Copernicus’s key mathematical formulations, the West African cosmological symbolism hidden in the familiar motifs of nineteenth-century American quilts, the twelfth-century philosophical-allegorical romance of Grenadian Muslim Ibn Tufayl behind Defoe’s construction of Robinson Crusoe.¹³ The invisibilia and occult properties of the Neoplatonists are resurfacing in Boyle’s air pump, Newton’s laws, and the haunted courtrooms of colonial Massachusetts, the fine detail of pornography in the microscopical anatomies of plants (or vice versa).¹⁴

Most of us are old enough to feel something akin to wonder at the crossing of boundaries erected so long ago in the process of institutionalizing sciences, academic fields, nations. It is a different sort from the raw, even frightening admiratio of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people of enough leisure and education to concern themselves with New World societies, heliocentrism, plural worlds, or fiction. Then, wonder had a valence with horror and terror. Our epistemologically compartmentalized world of the intelligible, with its departments and dissociations, was the cure for that unmanageable excess. It was also a way of denying some of the depths, guilty or not, of representation. The breakup of the old colonial system in the second half of this century has turned out to be as well the breaking up of the fields, the walls between the compartments, indeed the whole Titanic with its equally regulated compartments of class, its designers who could not let themselves believe the power of a mute, unarmed, and merely natural iceberg.

It is interesting that the postcolonial is also the postdisciplinary, in an unmoored muddle of literary kinds whose ontological distinctions are melting. What held all that together? Why does it all go down at once? What had Jane Austen or Balzac to do with West Indian sugar plantations, the Moon, the microscope, the Journal des Sçavans? This book does not provide an answer, although it assumes a model in which the actual (if very much pre- and postfabricated) encounters of European explorers with new genealogies of humans in the New World provoke, infiltrate, inhabit other forms of discovery, reportage, storytelling, worldmaking. Such explorations and encounters quickly become long-lived metaphors, clichés for use in other prospecting ventures and texts, or sites of parody and fictional imitation. We might best see the picture of European imaginative thinking between the times of Columbus and Lafitau or Linnaeus in musical terms, as a many-voiced fugue whose first motif appears when Christopher Columbus writes his remarkable Letter to Queen Isabella’s Keeper of the Purse, instantiating a new earth, another paradise, even (as he would come prophetically to claim) a new heaven.¹⁵

But that would be to leave out the narrative truth: this fugue does not end where it began, though it ends, in the early eighteenth century, in a newly stabilized worldview shared by most literate Europeans despite sharp differences of class, gender, and belief. And its telos, from my point of view, is neither its modern end, nor (as nostalgic ideal) its medieval beginning, but its chaotic middle, where inventiveness and possibility, greed and hope propounded many new worlds beyond the one in which, always already, a nightmare of slavery began to forge its chains of association.

WORLDMAKING

If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or another frame of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing what is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or worlds.

. . . The many stuffs—matter, energy, waves, phenomena—that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds.

—Nelson Goodman, Way of Worldmaking (1978)

Many, many worlds were made and unmade between André Thevet’s voyage to Brazil and Joseph Lafitau’s to Canada, between the late masterpieces of Neoplatonism and the first of a theorized anthropology. I will not pay much attention to the construction of new religions, new nations, new polities, new colonies, or new empires, except as those condition or enable the new sciences, particularly cosmography, planetary astronomy, and anthropology, and the new genres of representation, particularly ethnography and the novel, though also the printed scientific report (an avatar of writing to the minute and an important developmental arena for the verisimilitude of detail). For someone trained in literary studies these genres and disciplines are more accessible and easily analyzed than the more deeply mathematized physics or optics of the period; more importantly, they are ways of making other worlds, which are what especially interests me, and should interest anyone who cares about the powers of the imagination and the consequences of its productions.¹⁶

In my use of the word world I will not go so far as Nelson Goodman, who seems to imply that for every proposition or axiom or even semantic pattern there is an implied world for which it is true. For my category of worlds I would like to retain as an attribute the social concept of the habitable or inhabited. This category would include what anthropologists call (or used to call) a culture, as well as what a literary critic might call the world of a particular novel (which requires far more than one axiom to found—we judge the success of realistic fiction in part on how many interlocking axioms or laws it manifests coherently). Perhaps more strangely, or less thickly, it would also include the unspecified habitability of the innumerable worlds of Giordano Bruno’s controversial speculations, and the extension and nonhuman sentience with which the microscopic world is represented in the first decades of its accessibility. It would be a mistake to require that a world be inhabited by human persons, at a time of such ontological insecurity about that category, and such jealous hoarding of its privileges.¹⁷

Modern cultural anthropology, or ethnology as I will usually be calling it, is the major arena of inhabited-world making (especially other-world making), at least in terms of its explicitness of focus and of its historical consequentiality. From within the borders of the culture of science it articulates entire and distinct webs of possibility for human relations, actions, imagination, meanings. Anthropology in its larger sense considers these cultural webs in pursuit of a more general and unified description of the human, per se. The ethnographies underpinning anthropological knowledge of cultures are subject to the limitations of human vision, especially vision of novelty, and human language (inevitably culture-bound as even the technical lexicons of the sciences are). The magnetism of the ethnographer’s own cultural assumptions curves her descriptions of other cultures into globes that tend to function as versions—better, worse, or merely wondrous in their difference—of the home globe.¹⁸ This process is even easier to watch before the development of masking vocabularies, when descriptions are made in ordinary language and without allegiance to an institutionalized megainvestigation. The earliest European ethnological societies all date from the first half of the nineteenth century, but one can see a century earlier, in the Jesuit missionary Lafitau’s comparative ethnology, as well as in lesser works of the early Enlightenment comparing ancient and exotic religions, the staking out of the territory for investigation, the invention of culture.¹⁹

Another modern genre, the fictional novel (whose very name recalls origins in the management of novelty and its associated wonder), bears a close resemblance to the structural features of ethnography and shares some literary genealogy with the enterprise we now call ethnographic. Exotic travel writing had equally intimate relations with the future science of anthropology and the art of the novel, both of which phenomena represent encounters with alien or exotic people or envision them collectively as cultures, and both of which seemed to emerge in recognizable forms at about the same time. The turbulent and transitional early modern period in European culture saw in fact any number of attempts to understand, trade places with, spy on, or see inside beings definitively abnormal: Tupinamba Indians, moon-people, flies, monsters, itinerant rogues, and, above all, women. The period saw, one might claim, the creation of an inside, characteristically located in those others crowding the world outside the sensorium, or nation, or species of the writer, and generating for its literary environment the novel. All the genres occupied in such exoticist probings were sensational in one way or another, as long as the turbulence lasted, and even the great natural historian Buffon was a rhetorician and a sentimentalist. But the systematizing effects of the life sciences in the Enlightenment seem finally to have formalized the exclusion of sensibility from elite scientific practice and the exclusion of information-value from mainstream fictional narrative—exclusions that until recently functioned as constitutive for the enterprises of the so-called Two Cultures.²⁰

The interesting textual worlds examined in the following chapters are rarely novels—even Cyrano’s Voyage to the Moon, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing-World, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko have been denied that formal affiliation in some histories.²¹ These disparate texts (cosmography, colonial report, empirical and theoretical works of natural philosophy and natural history, dialogues, fantastic voyages, utopias, exotic fictions, confessions) are interesting in many ways. One of these ways is in their preinstitutional uses of now-familiar novelistic conceptual structures and language habits: the first­person protagonist-narrator; the value of individual experience; minutiae of description; the rhetoric of facticity; the reportability of bodily sensation and the reader’s discovery of the sensational as pleasure; verisimilitude (Truth’s greatest enemy, said Richard Flecknoe in 1656 [Relation, 29–30]); the importance of identification in the reading experience; the suspension of disbelief; the exoticization of distance and the ratio of distance to the importance of belief; the salience of individual persons (characters) unaffiliated genealogically with protagonist, author, or implied reader; the fascination with internal states unmarked or disguised by describable exteriors of costume, carriage, or behavior (and the faith in their knowability); the conceivability of alternative cultures and environments (the assumption of what we might call the versionicity of the universe). All this and much more is present, in bits and pieces, among the texts and kinds of text to which this book solicits attention. These features in their eventual transfer to the zone of make-believe and aesthetic irreality seem to me likely to come trailing clouds of history, from the long period of heightened novelty and wonder which is their home, or homes. And these are the materials of worldmaking as we know it now.

A MAP

Modernizing progress is thinkable only on condition that all the elements that are contemporary according to the calendar belong to the same time. For this to be the case, these elements have to form a complete and recognizable cohort. Then, and only then, time forms a continuous and progressive flow. . . . This beautiful order is disturbed once the quasi-objects are seen as mixing up different periods, ontologies or genres. Then a historical period will give an impression of a great hotchpotch. Instead of a fine and laminary flow, we will most often get a turbulent flow of whirlpools and rapids. Time becomes reversible instead of irreversible.

—Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1993)

For the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, the past itself (as conventionally/narratively understood—as over) is yet another invention of the imaginary modern dispensation (as if there were a past! [We Have Never Been Modern, 72]). After a brief discussion of how the irreversible arrow—progress or decadence (73) has been laboriously constructed, starting in the seventeenth century, into a continuous and progressive flow in our historical imaginations, Latour introduces his quasi-objects, the innumerable hybrids of nature and culture which modernism, as he sees it, constitutively denies in its drive towards the purification and separation of kinds and pursuits and modes of consciousness: The beautiful order is disturbed once the quasi-objects are seen as mixing up different periods, ontologies or genres.²² Latour is writing in defense and celebration of the new discipline of science studies, but the present work of literary history and criticism attends to just this hotchpotch, with its capacities for reprise, repetition or revisiting (74). The hotchpotch came to my attention as a set of textual hybrids, which gradually revealed mixings, as well, of ontologies and periods, at least as I had been taught them. The value of their study is essentially an imaginative one, a liberation from rule-bound generic confines without a loss of context or density of resonance, and a reunion of disparate enterprises under the rubric of making new or other worlds—a job of the mind as necessary as clearing the air of the one(s) we live in.

Two features of exclusion and inclusiveness require some comment before I go on to describe the book’s arrangement of its materials. Enthralled by something closer to Foucault’s heterotopia, I have paid almost no attention to the concept of utopia, though more than one work analyzed or at least discussed here is commonly classed in the genre that goes by that name.²³ This may seem perverse after so much reference to the liberatory powers of alternative textual worlds, but the pedagogical moralism associated with that category renders it alien as a literary idea to the main focus of this book: utopia is not really a version of other world. Nowhere else can we see so plainly what Nelson Goodman means when he speaks of worlds being "made . . . from other worlds" (Ways of Worldmaking, 6). Normative examples of utopia exert a pressure on readers to alter their own worlds in its direction—one drawn, like satire’s, from the central conscious values of its author’s social time and place. Its potential or intended otherness, difference, alternativity, novelty, and capacity for invoking wonder are seriously compromised by its ethical density and conventionality.²⁴ (For a similar reason, among others, I have chosen not to write a chapter on Gulliver’s Travels, despite its having so obviously been made from the very other worlds presented in the following chapters.)

The borderless inclusivity of my choice of texts as far as nations of origin go might also need explaining. Although I focus on only two societies, English and French, I discuss Italian, German, and (more briefly) Spanish works as well, and include both Latin and vernacular works in my hotchpotch. This internationalism responds to the fact that, although the centuries from which my texts were drawn were important times of national consolidation for all but Italy, the book culture within which the management and eventual compartmentalization of wonder was perhaps most energetically taking place was one of polyglots and, as time went on, of translation. Personal libraries in the seventeenth century tended to be divided in auction catalogues by language (starting with Latin works and often ending with untitled and linguistically unspecified pamphlets, jest books, and curious or philosophical literature—that is, pornography); clearly early readers were not as picky as current academic departments about the language in which their reading was done.²⁵ As we move toward the eighteenth century, catalogues tend to consist more and more of books in the vernacular language of their owners, but translations are also increasingly common, and faithful, so the mixing of national intellectual cultures remains high—higher than it is at present (in America anyhow). Although the events of the Reformation and Counter Reformation certainly split Europe ideologically, these splits were intranational as much as international; and the long dominance of Latin as the language of philosophy and knowledge, as well as of serious poetry, had maintained a European culture of letters amidst the vernacular diversity, despite the hardship of travel before the centralization of nation-states began to provide connected infrastructures. Of equal importance for my relative indifference to national boundaries is the fact that the seagoing nations of Europe were almost uniform in their possessive and exploitative response to the geographical expansions of the known world; they all wanted and almost all created colonies, satellites—moons of their own.

Wonder and Science is divided into three chronologically overlapping parts. The two long chapters of Part 1 (Imagination and Discipline) set the stage by charting the process of shifting frameworks for representation and comprehension in the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, especially as this relates to culture and cultural groups. The first of these chapters examines both the increasingly readerly and phantasmatic cosmography and the increasingly scientized ethnography of sixteenth-century France and England. The works of Royal Cosmographer André Thevet mark a successful intersection of both old-fashioned wondermongering and newfangled fictional rhetoric, particularly in his accounts of such self-enclosed worlds as islands represent and his manufacture of an experiencing narrator. His English near-contemporary, the mathematician and colonial investor Thomas Hariot, lent a report on Virginia, marked by now-familiar features of scientized ethnographic representation, to the first publishing coup of Theodor de Bry and his sons, who published the popular illustrated series Les grands voyages for over forty years (1590–1634).²⁶ The second chapter is concerned with the attempted (and fitful) exclusion of wonder and the subjective from the codification of learning, and discusses such wonder-ridden and stylistically beautiful manifestoes and polemics of the seventeenth century as Francis Bacon’s Novum organum and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodxia epidemica, as well as an exemplum of the new orientation in Robert Plot’s microcosmography of Oxfordshire.

Part 2 (Alternative Worlds) addresses the wonderful, the sensational, and the sublime in several seventeenth-century works, many of them overtly fictional, that set out to represent new and/or imaginary worlds, inevitably habitable and usually inhabited: lunar fictions and Margaret Cavendish’s feminist quasi-utopia, The Blazing-World, but also Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, Fontenelle’s Entrétiens sur le pluralité des mondes, and Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, among others. Although pursuit of the real character and other universal (denotative) language schemes was alive throughout the century, philosophers and astronomers were often exploiting the powers of excitation as much as were writers of fictions (Steven Shapin’s term for their efforts is virtual witnessing), and these powers were largely released through language. Henry Stubbe called the new philosophers novellists.²⁷ One can offer only so many people a direct look through one’s telescope, and indeed many refused Galileo’s offer or saw nothing when they looked. These powers are now the special province of a dissociated literary institution, but they gained much in the way of technical development from the linguistic and communicative pressures borne by early modern natural philosophy. Stepping back for a very long view of the European world of letters, one might almost see the imaginative prose of the modern West as the persistent repetition and recall of those moments when a new planet swam into our ken. Keats thought so, at any rate.

The three chapters of Part 3 (The Arts of Anthropology) concentrate on one sixteenth- and several diverse seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century avatars of anthropology as both a discourse and a quickly changing set of genres. They take up the relations of ethnographic fashion plates and antifashion polemic to both anthropology and novelistic narrative. From this grounding in attention to the body and its culturally significant adornment, the discussion moves on to the shared and opposed aims and techniques of ethnography and realistic fiction, via a reading of Aphra Behn’s fashion­conscious and body-conscious novel, Oroonoko. The final chapter concerns the same generic tension, but in the form of a dialectical relation between two texts, Lafitau’s monumental opus of comparative ethnology, Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, and George Psalmanazar’s false but initially credited ethnographic memoir (read and absorbed by Swift), The Geographical and Historical Description of Formosa.

The early texts on fashions (including body fashions) convey a sense of other cultures (including European ones) as aggregates of performance, and in fact, early ballet often consisted of performance of these fashions and their associated props, both by exotic people themselves and by Europeans dressed in their borrowed finery or imitations of it.²⁸ Behn’s Oroonoko, once charged with plagiarizing a contemporary travel account of Surinam, and referred to sometimes as a voyage, is a perfect instance of the hybrid—as ethnographic as it is novelistic, and thereby offering us surprising insights into the germination of both enterprises. Lafitau’s Moeurs not only records voluminous ethnographic detail from his six years of fieldwork with the Iroquois of southern Quebec, but compares most of its data on the Iroquois with what he can gather from other reports on American peoples and with the ancient civilizations of Eurasia, forming from these materials a body of ethnological theory about the universal religious instinct in human societies (as well as describing systematically the kinship system of the Iroquois). Paired with Psalmanazar’s risky ethnographic hoax of a few years earlier, Lafitau’s work can show us the continuing but now unacknowledged number interpenetration of objective and subjective, epistemological and poetic texts, as well as illustrating the universalizing tendency of the emerging science of anthropology. Psalmanazar, the wonderful Formosan, especially in his life as temporary exotic toast of London town, literalizes to the point of criminality the notion of culture as performance, while Lafitau merely puts it to use in the process of acclimating himself to the social world in which and about which his studies were carried out.

The destination of Wonder and Science as originally conceived had been a treatment of Gulliver’s Travels, that summa of discourses, but Psalmanazar’s wonderful lie brings more clearly into focus the aggression and desperation (and underground success) of the outnumbered but undefeated forces of the thing which is not. Wonder and Science concludes with a coda looking ahead from lonesome Robinson Crusoe on his island to two resistant and anomalous aliens of the turn of the nineteenth century, the English working girl who called herself Princess Caraboo and Victor, the presumably French (?!) Wild Child of Aveyron, who was constructed and represented to the world first by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a physician who worked for the Imperial Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Paris, and later by the French filmmaker François Truffaut. The interest for me in these two aliens lies partly in their disturbance of the ethnological and anthropological graphs laid down by Enlightenment science and colonial capitalism over the elusive diversity of human behaviors and intentions. Where are these creatures from? Not from the imaginary Javasu, exactly, but is Devonshire a better answer for the Princess Caraboo? And in what sense is the mute and feral Wild Boy French? Or human?

As tiny black holes in the map of cultural space they stand not only for the incomplete assimilability of the human world into the world of the systematically known—for the human person herself as a wonder—but also for the poet and poetry as it came to be understood under the Romantic dispensation; Caraboo and Victor are inventors and refusers of language, an envelope wholly inadequate for them as it stands. Of course they are not texts (though texts have been made of them), but their salience is a salience in the history of representing other worlds. Caraboo created herself from such representations, and Victor evaded them altogether. And both of them could say, revising Milton’s Satan: I myself am a world.

Timothy Reiss’s Foucauldian classic, The Discourse of Modernism (1982), treats many of the same texts as Wonder and Science does in light of the rise to dominance of a new discourse class (or episteme) that he calls analytico­referential. One underlying hope of my account is that it can portray a persistence—or at least a latency—of ways of knowing less firmly exclusionary and dichotomized than this dominant modern discourse class. A feminist literary historian cannot be satisfied with a concentration on the dominant mode because it is constructed, in part, to exclude or objectifY women and their intellectual fellowship. This particular framework of understanding was constructed to objectifY and maintain as imaginary many forms of being occupied by the disenfranchised—women, monsters, colonial subjects, even the living things now understood as the proper objects of the human and life sciences. In trying to describe the expansion and fragmentation of representational prose in early modern Europe one must take into account the involvement of the disenfranchised, the obscure, and the imaginary, in whose ambivalent hands the features of a dominant discourse are usually undermined. Some of these imaginary beings were agents in the production of the separated and mutually exclusive domains. So my sense of the hegemonic is weaker than Reiss’s, as is my desire to find a systematic coherence in the events and objects gathered here.

Bruno Latour’s invigorating recent polemic on the intellectual developments of this period, already cited, downplays the hegemony and monotony of the mentalité Reiss explicates (as well as its revolutionary severance from an imaginary past). I don’t agree, though, with Latour’s solution to the improbable separation of spheres assumed by modern thought, that anthropology should not only come home from the tropics (Latour, 100) but expand its scope to become our way of knowing everything (though the prospect of a science that considered all cultures evenly, even its own, has its allure).²⁹ According to Freud, A room illuminated to its furthest corners would be uninhabitable. Wonder and Science agrees with him. And it is the troublesome heart of anthropology to be about faraway places. The discipline has functions other than those of serving an imperialist state or putting together a carefully organized portrait of the human. Or rather, it is a genre as well as a discipline and purveys an Imaginary as well as a rationality. Anthropology brought home has provided those of us in the unexamined groups with many fascinating new objects of attention and assuaged the guilt of those who feel understandably awkward about watching and explaining dominated cultures for a dominating one. But it continues to estrange and exoticize what it looks at; as the global village loses (for some of us) the dimension of space through the omnipresence of mass media, the internet, and air travel, it is less imperative that anthropological objects be located physically outside the home territory of the anthropologist (an increasingly difficult phenomenon to define, anyway). That does not mean that anthropology is home from the tropics, any more than are writers of science fiction who locate their plots in New York City.

The ethical problem of the poet (which category includes the novelist) is related to the closeness, still functionally resonant, between poetry and anthropology and between the travel relation and the expansion of European states. Wonder and Science means to find the entangled textual fibers of these increasingly differentiated modes of looking or understanding, as manifested in early modern texts of ambiguous provenance or genre, in part to restore a dimension of historicity to the particular language habits of emerging modern genres, in part to discover functions besides colonialist complicity for poetic estrangement and the cognitive emotion, wonder, which is its Final Cause.

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1. From Louise Glück, Vita Nova: By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green/pieced into the dark existing ground (Vita Nova, 2).

2. For the rest of the text from which my epigraph is drawn, as well as my energy in this Introduction, see Eve Sedgwick’s exhilarating introduction to Novel Gazing.

3. I am thinking, in particular, of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (chap. 4, To Fashion a Gentleman), Bemadette Bucher’s Icon and Conquest (La sauvage aux seins pendants), Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters, Patricia Parker’s Literary Fat Ladies, Mary Louise Pratt’s ImperialEyes, Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries, Michel de Certeau’s Ethnography, or The Speech of the Other.

4. See especially Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, and Louis Montrose, The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery.

5. I have not chosen to start this account with discussion of Columbus, Vespucci, and Peter Martyr, although their texts would have made another sensible place to begin. because I and so many others have already attended to that first wave of wondering reaction and conventionalized dissemination; for work in English in the last ten years, see my own Witness and the Other World, Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions, Valerie Flint’s Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, and Anthony Grafton’s New World, Ancient Texts. And we are not alone.

6. For a stimulating analysis of wonder as an aesthetic phenomenon central to mathematics and optics as well as to painting and architecture, see Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences.

7. For one of many contemporary works that could seriously complicate that statement, see the collection of letters written to observers at the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935, No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again (ed. Sarah Simons). The artificiality of modern conditions of wonder is certainly problematized in a letter like the following:

"I once was taking a minister of the gospel to his appointment to preach . . . and as I spake to him of the wonderfull creation of God how God had Created millions of other suns and worlds, says he what do you mean by saying other suns and worlds, I answered by saying the other suns and systems of worlds, for God would no doubt not make suns to shine without each sun had a system of worlds such a sun would be to no purpose it would not be of use to anyone not even its Creator one had Just as well to say I am going to build a big costly mansion but I am not going to let anyone live in it . . . , so no doubt from a reasoneble standpoint, each sun has its system of worlds and the worlds of each system are for the purposes of habitation for Gods inteligent creatures to lie on and be hapy. . . . then he sais to me is there an other world and where in the Bible do you find where it speaks of other worlds: well says I to him the Bible says in many places that God made the worlds and Jesus said himself that he mad the worlds St. John 1–3 all things were made by him and many other bible texts prove that God has made the worlds by millions and yet the minister did not believe that there was any other world only this one on which we live and it is as flat as a pancake round as a pancake but not round as a ball and that the sun did actualy go around this pancake every 24 hours (17–18). (Some of [my friends] think that [the stars] are only little sulpher balls up in the sky . . . but if I could only have a scope to convince them of theyr ignorance I should be Glad [19].)

8. See John Bender, Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis, which defines the generativity as, by 1750, a dialectic, in which the guarantee of factuality in science increasingly required the presence of its opposite, a manifest yet verisimilar fictionality in the novel (6).

9. See especially William Nelson, Fact or Fiction; Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel; Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions, and Michael McKeon, chap. 1 (The Destabilization of Generic Categories) in Origins of the English Novel. J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels is less crucially focused on that matter but has much to say about it with regard to the English novel.

10. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Darwin provided a gestural definition of wonder (raised eyebrows, open mouth, etc.) and a function for it in situations of danger—the gestures make for better vision and more oxygen intake—that would bring it ironically into the vigilant and defensive mode of paranoia as described by Sedgwick.

11. "These separations [of humans and nonhumans . . . and between what happens ’above’ and what happens ’below’] could be compared to the division that distinguishes the judiciary from the executive branch of the government. This division is powerless to account for the multiple links, the intersecting influences, the continual