The Miraculous and the Monstrous in the Discourse on Nature of the XVII Century

Abstract

The spheres of the miraculous and monstrous are older than science, and perhaps even older than conceptual language. They belong to the reality of metaphors, or even deep emotions, therefore, in relation to science, their use, at first glance, seems evaluative and superfluous, because they do not refer to specific objects, labels and categories, but to what precedes any codification and cataloging phe­nomena, namely – moods. Nevertheless, the community of scientists, at the turn of the early Modern period developing as a group with distinctive behavior, habits and attitudes, cannot be adequately assessed outside the symbolic context, including in relation to the coordinates of the miraculous and monstrous, such value categories as hopes and fears. An example of this is the treatise “On Ly­canthropy, Transformation and Ecstasy of Witches” published by Jean de Ny­nauld in Paris in 1615, in which the werewolf becomes a basis for a number of fundamental appeals and tasks: a new approach to the amazing, to the imagi­nary, to the terrifying. To understand the meaning and significance of the questions posed in the treatise, the article carries out an analysis of specific embodiments of sensitivity to the miraculous and monstrous: from paradoxographs to the organi­zation of storefronts, from the art of automatons to symbolic construction accord­ing to speculative rules. It is shown how a community of scientists gets access to social attitudes and imagination, how their practices begin to define and form
interest in the society, how the amazing is monopolized by science.