Abstract

In recent years historians of science have come to an increasing appreciation of the role played by such moral and affective categories as “trust,” “wonder,” “pedantry,” and “self‐discipline” in the knowledge‐making enterprises of the early modern period. Barbara Benedict's book on curiosity is a most welcome contribution to the literature devoted to such topics. In a lively and entertaining work, Benedict sets out to “analyse literary representations of the way curious people, including scientists, authors, performers, and readers, were engaged in practicing and producing curiosity itself” . The author modestly states at the outset that the work is not, and does not claim to be, a history of science, and indeed as a whole the essay perhaps falls short of the more ambitious promise of the subtitle—“a cultural history of early modern inquiry.” Yet it deals with a subject that is nonetheless of profound importance for historians of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century science.Of particular significance is the way in which the book demonstrates how curiosity and its representations served to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate topics of knowledge and modes of enquiry. The discourse about curiosity thus served to inform central epistemological questions of the period: Is it appropriate to seek all knowledge on all topics, and is it to be sought by all people? If there are areas of knowledge that are illicit, what are they and why are they proscribed? What are the proper methods for the various spheres of knowledge? Benedict carefully articulates the role played by the discourse of curiosity in the sanctioning of some projects and the censuring of others. To take one of the many telling examples found in the book, the protagonist of Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso is presented as epitomizing the curious impulse, here manifested as a puzzlingly earnest quest for useless knowledge and a strange fascination with base and undignified natural objects. The odd proclivities of this character demonstrate in a forceful way how the new natural philosophy could be regarded as merely an outlet for the intellectual vice of curiosity—and how far the new knowledge‐making enterprises fell short of social approval amongst those whose approbation mattered most. The familiar seventeenth‐century rhetoric of the “usefulness of natural philosophy” was thus in part a response to accusations of curiosity leveled against experimental philosophers. Benedict observes that “early modern literary culture struggled to mold curiosity into forms that would preserve public values” . Apologists for the scientific activities of the Royal Society, in keeping with this goal, sought to depict the quest for natural knowledge as a legitimate expression of a curiosity that had been appropriately disciplined and directed in ways that would contribute to the common good.The book also traces the varying fortunes of curiosity, nicely delineating the reciprocal relations between subjective and objective, between the curious sensibility and curiosities, between wonder and wonders. At times it might have been helpful for the author to have transgressed the self‐imposed limitation of examining literary representations and to have considered some formal accounts of curiosity as they occur in contemporary works of moral psychology in which this human propensity is carefully described and precisely located among the other affections. Without more direct information about the contemporary taxonomy of the affections curiosity too easily shades into wonder, credulity, greed, avarice, and acquisitiveness. In short, the relations of curiosity with its neighboring affections—the subtle transformations of which constituted an integral part of the changing status of curiosity—could perhaps have been more finely drawn. This, however, is a minor issue. Benedict has written a good book on an important topic, not least for historians of science because it clearly shows how the eventual establishment of the social respectability of curious individuals and objects was an essential phase in the legitimation of natural history and natural philosophy