Introduction

Curiosity and wonder share a common history. Aristotle followed his famous statement in the Metaphysics – ‘All men by nature desire to know’ – with the assertion that this desire for knowledge is closely related to the passion of wonder: ‘For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are …’.1 As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park observe in their masterful study Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, ‘wonder has its own history’, but this history is ‘tightly bound up with the history of other cognitive passions such as terror and curiosity.’2 One of the guiding principles of this volume is that in the early modern period connections between wonder and curiosity are sufficiently explicit, intricate and widespread to merit their thematic coupling.3 This is not to suggest, however, that the terms are or were

1 On the Aristotelian tradition of wonder, see, for example, L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 1998), especially ch. 3. Daston and Park point out that for Aristotle and his Latin commentators, the search for knowledge prompted by wonder (thauma) was distinct from what was then understood as curiosity (pereirga) (305). It is generally agreed, however, that histories of curiosity and wonder are profoundly concerned, albeit in many different ways, with enquiry and its objects. See, for example, N. Jacques-Chaquin, ‘La curiosité, ou les espaces du savoir’ in N. Jacques-Chaquin and S. Houdard (eds), Curiosité et ‘Libido Sciendi’ de la Renaissance aux Lumières, 2 vols (Fontenay-aux-Roses, 1998), i, 13-34.