Wonders and the Order of Nature

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A major task for the history of science is to understand how science rose and became such a driving force in the transformation of our culture. This project makes it clear that the rise of modern science in the Scientific Revolution was not simply a phenomenon connected to the rejection of the Ptolemaic system and its eventual replacement by the Newtonian theory of gravitation. The revolution went beyond this narrower scientific achievement to lay the foundation for a systematic study of nature. Such a study required the observer of nature to search for regularities and natural laws. Dr. Park, with her collaborator, Dr. Lorraine J. Daston, are seeking to document and analyze changing views of natural law and natural order in Western culture during the period broadly defined as the Scientific Revolution. They are tracing the shift in scientific writing from a view of nature that emphasized the anomalous and the bizarre (monstrous births, celestial apparitions, unusual meteorological phenomena, exotic plants and animals) to a view that privileged the typical and the regular. They argue that the former view, which grew out of both the new discoveries of the age of European exploration and the focus on portents and prodigies associated with the religious struggles of the Reformation, represented--despite its unfamiliarity--a critical phase in the consolidation of the new science. Their principal sources are the works of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, but they are also drawing on non-scientific sources--literary, legal, and artistic--to relate these developments to other aspects of contemporary culture.