Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture.

Peter G. Platt, ed., Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 341pp. $49.50. ISBN: 0-87413-678-4.

We think of the early-modern period as an age, indeed, the age of discovery. But if the early-modern work of knowing eventually resulted in a secularized historical-scientific discourse by which we now render our encounters with the unknown intelligible, what was that period's own epistemology of discovery?

It is the central argument of Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters that wonder played a critical role in the discursive transformations and emergent representational practices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The volume never offers a single, stable definition or location for the term, but, generally speaking, it is used to refer to an encounter with some disorienting otherness that signified the undeniable presence of meaningfulness even as it suspended or even cancelled all the familiar landmarks of meaning. In the early-modern period, in short, wonder marked the very limits of intelligibility even as it appeared to signify a presence that could neither be ignored nor articulated.

The rhetorical burden of the volume is to negotiate the complex, shifting terrain of wonder, at once explicating the unfamiliar grounds of early-modern experience while sustaining for the modern reader something of its mystifying strangeness. Taken as a whole, the collection of thirteen essays does manage to suggest two essential components of wonder: its status as a paradoxical mediator of meanings (at once violating and fixing category distinctions) and its multi-disciplinary functionality (present, variously, in scientific, political, religious, aestheticliterary, medical, philosophical, and cultural discourses and often forging new kinds of connections between these).

It is immediately obvious that what the volume gains in terms of its coverage is also one of its major liabilities, and this on at least two counts. In the first place, the concept of wonder is stretched so thin as to render it almost useless: because wonder is everywhere it can mean almost anything; it is not particularly productive, however, to group every possible permutation of what might have been considered a supernatural sign under the category of wonder since often times the discourse in question (theological, scientific, etc.) existed precisely to prohibit wonder's destabilizing force. In the second place, different essays in the volume give contradictory accounts of key issues; thus, to take just one example, it is impossible to know by volume's end how we might begin to describe the historical moment at which the marvelous is separated from a theological discourse and attached to a scientific one? Lorraine Daston's essay on how notions of scientific evidence emerged, in part, from changing attitud es towards prodigies and miracles is a valuable contribution to intellectual history precisely because of the way it attempts to document where and how ideas actually changed in the period. But other essays compete with her argument without even registering its particular claims, let alone challenging her conclusions. Because there is no sustained effort to offer consistency in terminology or to direct disputed points toward more open debate, it is easy to imagine that a monograph would be more consistently illuminating.

Perhaps what is most surprising is that, while the experience of wonder is being constantly (re-)located, this experience goes remarkably undertheorized, with a few exceptions (Daston's for example, or the excerpted section from Stephen Greenblatt's still provocative Marvelous Possessions or the piece by David Summers on ancient aesthetic models of imitation, a piece that isn't even concerned with early-modern texts). Taken as a whole, the essays simply are not posing questions -- or discovering them -- at a level that can sustain what should be a decentering experience even for the modern reader. Can it really be surprising, as one of the contributors argues, that that a 1607 text entitled Admirable and Memorable Histories containing wonders of our time should list "incident after incident" in which "the hand of God is seen in operation throughout the natural world" (177)? (The editor's introductory comment that this essay "provide[s] ... the most exhaustive exploration ever written" about this text complet ely misses the point that, as described in the essay at least, there is absolutely nothing exceptional about what the text being exhaustively explored actually offers.) The problem here, finally, is that too many of the essays offer up new material for consideration without fundamentally enriching our understanding of the broader topic.