Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe & At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modem Period.

Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe 

Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. 366 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-8014-3648-6.

Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman, eds., At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modem Period London: Macmillan Press, 1999. 288 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-312-22038-3.

Wonder and Science has as its focus the marketing and management of the sense of marvel that accompanied and often overcame sixteenth- and seventeenth-century encounters with the new worlds occasioned by geographical discovery, astronomical exploration, microscopic observation, and anthropological study. In this provocative work Mary Baine Campbell follows the complex career of wonder, showing, among many other things, its usefulness in early travelogues, its unhurried and several departures from proper scientific discourse, its rather factitious reemergence in female speakers such as Fontenelle's Marquise, and its inevitable metamorphosis into speechless horror in the colonial novel. Concerned for the most part with paired readings of contemporaneous early modern texts ranging from travel narratives, to philosophical essays, to accounts of telescopic and microscopic phenomena, to ethnographic histories, to unreal and proto-realist novels, Wonder and Science charts the relationship of these emerging genres t o the cultural conditions that produced them.

The structure of this study is tripartite, and involves the roughly chronological progression from contemplation of the remote New World, to that of the inaccessible alternative worlds beyond the telescope and microscope, and finally to fashion and faith, the proving grounds of anthropology. Among the many attractions of Wonder and Science is its sustained scrutiny of the afterimages of a wide variety of texts, an approach that frees them to some extent of convenient generic classifications and the expectations that such taxonomies engender. To focus on just two instances drawn from the second section of Campbell's work, that of "Alternative Worlds," she insists upon the relationship of the "unscientific" register of Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger to its ostensible task of providing novel telescopic observations to a curious public, and she explains the irreducibility of Francis Godwin's lunar voyage -- its resistance to satirical or utopian intentions -- in terms of narrative desire.

Both of these arguments bear some elaboration. Campbell's contention that "spyglasses, then as now, seem to have touched an erotic nerve" (126) is surely correct in some cases: there are a good many early modern references to telescopic observations of the "nuptials" of planets in conjunction and so forth. But the presence of erotic and homoerotic imagery in the Starry Messenger, appearing under the guise of a series of variations on the myth of the golden shower that impregnated Danae, appears to me somewhat more problematic, for the following reasons. In the first place, in regard to the problem of the ashen glow of the lunar globe, the description of a Sun "who penetrates and floods the Moon's solid body with his rays" is embarrassingly suggestive, and was a current figure for the Incarnation, but it is also, crucially, an explanation of secondary light that Galileo discarded in favor of his theory, that of a reflection off the surface of the earth. In other words, the movement is, in the case of this par ticular phenomenon, away from the decorous solar-powered sex of the Incarnation to the crushingly mundane involvement of the earth. Secondly, in light of the absolutist culture he sought to enter, Campbell's emphasis on the homoerotic language of Galileo's dedication to his former student Cosimo de' Medici does seem to me quite convincing -- the suggestion of all manner of submission being the emblem of the cortegiano -- but of greater political and social pertinence is her attention to imagery involving fertility and reproduction. In the decades preceding the pan-European disaster of the Thirty Years' War, dynastic succession was of real moment: the absence of legitimate, sane, male heirs contributed to the Habsburg conflict of 1608 with which Johannes Kepler's Somnium opens, and it precipitated the Julich-Cleves crisis of 1609. This the newlyweds Cosimo de' Medici and Maria Maddalena of the Austrian Habsburgs knew quite well, and the need for that sickly young man and his robust and slightly older bride to produce healthy sons (which they soon managed) in order to ensure the future of the court and patronage Galileo required explains, I believe, at least some of the erotic exuberance of the treatise's imagery. If there is a sexual dimension to the dedication -- and Campbell is persuasive on this point -- it moves from the Ganymede-like posture that the infant Cosimo's "tender little body" assumed under Jupiter's rays, beyond the young boy's leisurely lessons with his tutor "in that season when one seeks repose from the business of more rigorous studies," and finally to the fulltime imperatives of ruling and procreation, a literal and figural accession to the role of pater patria.

But while one might quibble, as I have done here, about the precise historical circumstances that provoked particular rhetorical figures, one cannot quarrel with Campbell's magisterial handling of more abstract issues of narrative structure and motivation, as for example in the case of Godwin's Man in the Moon. Though she countenances the tale's presentation of its endpoint, a Jesuit mission in China, as a disappointing version of our satellite -- and it was often said that the lunar body would be the next outpost of the Society of Jesus -- Campbell foregrounds the sheer intractability of Godwin's moon: "there is nothing to be done with it" (168). She reads this textual opacity in quite interesting and convincing terms, positing the desire for escape and for genuine alterity as the more or less natural outcome of a tall tale intentionally structured around the literal rise of a small man of slender means and still less luck. This seems to me a recognition of an important shift in the long tradition of lunar narratives. It suggests that subsequent to -- and surely as a function of -- Galileo's insistence on the fundamental similarity of earth and its satellite, and on their ability to reflect light upon each other, the tired trope of the moon as a terrestrial mirror was at last abandoned, or fundamentally altered, such that images of that world had less to do with narrow historical particulars of this one than with the shape of the narrative that we managed between us.

Wonder and Science offers an exceptional number of such insights and is, in my view, the most sophisticated and engaging study of the importance of genre development to historians of science and literature. Campbell's formulations of the issues at stake in each of her readings are supremely lucid, and she is among the most provocative and insightful readers of scientific texts that I have encountered. This work is of immeasurable value to all students of early modern culture.

At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period is a collection of twelve essays responding to the query; "What is, what was, human?" Arranged in chronological fashion and averaging about twenty pages each, the essays offer complementary treatments of the quandary of the human, and draw, for the most part, on recent work in literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and the history of science and technology. Their various foci, not surprisingly, overlap with those of Campbell: both volumes attend to the importance of marginally human figures of the child, the savage, the ape, and the machine, the significance of the old wives and nymphomaniacs populating this cultural landscape, and the relationship of scientific and medical discourse to genres ranging from fables to pornography to anthropology.

While all the essays in At the Borders of the Human are strong, I found four of particular appeal. The first and the last, Alan Stewart's "Humanity at a Price" and Mary Peace's "Economy of Nymphomania," discuss constructions of the humanist, on the one hand, and the refined woman, on the other, in terms of their presumed economic behavior. Desiderius Erasmus, Guillaume Bude, and Cuthbert Tunstall, who can speak for themselves, elaborate their relationships with the freewheeling Ladies Poverty and Philology in an effort to distinguish their activities from those of other early modern capitalists; the lady of delicate sensibilities, the byproduct, consumer, and sometime guarantor of a luxurious culture, has spokesmen as various as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and the obscure M. D. T. Bienville. Both Stewart and Peace articulate the perceived link between fiscal arrangements threatening the bourgeois household and unacceptable sexualities -- the Humanists' fearful fantasy of a courtier-like "Pretty Boy Ri ches" in which to indulge themselves, and the sentimentalists' anxious association of excessive material consumption with immoderate female desire -- and in so doing offer nuanced portraits of the marketplaces in which humanity was defined.

Concentrating more on genre and discipline than on social subtexts, Jess Edwards in "The Doubtful Traveler" and Susan Wiseman in "Monstrous Perfectibility" also expose the dual nature of other early modern meditations on the human. In his examination of an anecdote about a lost Puritan settler and his Indian guide, Edwards first reveals the connection of colonial and cartographical anxieties, then traces the "doubtful" nature of cartography itself to that indeterminate place where Leon Battista Alberti had lodged its practitioners, between the remote abstractions of pure mathematics and the crass materiality of craftsmanship, and finally suggests an origin to such binaries in the career of post-Platonic mathematics. Where Edwards' approach is one of separating out the diverse cultural implications and disciplinary strands of a single text, Wiseman's method, in her study of the indeterminate position of the ape in Edward Tyson's Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris or the Anatomy of a Pygmie, involves a recuper ation of the neglected man-monkey myths in that work, an insistence on the relatedness of comparative anatomy and anthropological narrative, and a formulation of the potential transformability of individual creatures and social institutions. 'While this review has privileged four essays from At the Borders of the Human, all are lively and original, and offer new perspectives on a provocative and seemingly inexhaustible subject.