ABSTRACT
From the second half of the seventeenth century at the latest, a process began all over Europe which can be called ‘the demythologisation of the miracle’. Natural scientists and scholars as well as philosophers and theologians made a significant contribution. Curiositas came to be the name for research which served only one purpose, that of discovering the truth (in the objective-empirical sense). The term curiosities no longer encompassed everything macabre or exotic, but referred only to the rare or strange phenomena that could be investigated with empirical experimental methods.
