---

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1611

---

The span of time from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment in Europe was marked by philosophical and religious efforts to distinguish vulgar enthusiasms from verifiable truths; dubious divinations from proper experimentation; the miraculous from the explicable; alchemy from chemistry; astrology from astronomy—in sum, inherited Aristotelian cosmology from an emerging world order we would eventually come to call “modernity.”

The sorting out of objects and ideas this past millennia has operated by a robust program of mastery over nature. Sir Francis Bacon’s 1626 treatise >New Atlantis described a scientific utopia in which men busily swarmed with their research, bringing nature to heel through gentlemanly order. The codification of scientific authority, and the proper methods and powers of observation and calculation necessary to embody it, enacted a systematic “rejection and removal of organic and animistic features” for “the substitution of mechanically describable components,” writes historian Carolyn Merchant in her classic book from 1980, The Death of Nature. The reordered social world followed the metaphor of a machine, in which citizens were atomistic cogs under a technician-sovereign, cut off from a sensual relationship with the seasons and the natural world.

To work against what German philosopher Max Weber described as a condition of modernity, the continuous “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of nature, we might return to the Middle Ages. Then, preternatural objects had not yet been fully sublimated into the modern scientific appetite for “curiosity” that would hew to an epistemology of empiricism and an attitude of moral certitude of later centuries. They instead hovered at the boundary of “wonder,” possible portals to magic, the divine, and prophecy, by which natural philosophers came to define the bounds of the miraculous, the natural, and the mundane. For the medieval elite, as eminent historians of science Lorraine Dalston and Katherine Park postulate, “The making and breaking of categories—sacred and profane; natural and artificial; animal, vegetable and mineral; sublunar and celestial—[was] the Ur-act of cognition, underpinning all pursuit of regularities and discovery of causes.”

A unicorn horn, a goat bezoar, a griffin claw, an ostrich egg, a coconut, an Indian magnet: such imported exotica to Europe, often from the Far East, were thought to exhibit salubrious and otherworldly properties. As such, they were symbols of power and wealth for both religious institutions such as the monastery of Saint-Denis and private collectors such as the Duke of Anjou. The magic of mirabilia was consistent with Christian beliefs; the abbot Suger of Paris, for instance, rhapsodized about Eastern gems that amplified his ecstasy of God. In 1204, the sack of Constantinople, the edge of Christendom, poured forth saint relics that monasteries and churches were eager to collect and commodify, establishing an economy of holiness.

Scholars, apothecaries, and cognoscenti in the High Middle Ages focused their collecting on naturalia (rather than mirabilia), like fossils, shells, medicinal plants, kidney stones, and even dissected, desiccated human corpses with too-many limbs and other corporeal anomalies. Natural philosophers transitioned from what Michel Foucault described as the age of the theater to that of the catalogue. This new order “was not the desire for knowledge,” he claims, “but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse.” Assembling such objects as a collection not only amplified visitors’ sense of wonder, but helped philosophers to tease out both shared and distinct properties, a method toward defining anatomical, botanical, and scientific systems. The reorganization of matter thus represented a reorganization of philosophy. For Foucault, it was a “new way of making history.”

Beginning in the late Renaissance these objects were often presented in a Wunderkammer, a “chamber of wonders” that might be a filigreed cabinet or an entire room ecstatically filled to the brim. Collectors, princes, and natural philosophers came to include artificialia like antiques that celebrated precise human artisanship and scientifica like astrolabes that mechanized the cosmos in miniature. Entwining practices of art and the discovery of nature through observation, these charismatic objects provoked questions about humanness and acts of creation. A quacking duck, a moving ship, and a music-playing chamber orchestra were automata one might find in a cabinet of curiosities. For René Descartes, humans and animals operated just like such automata. “I do not recognize any difference between the machines made by artisans and the various bodies which nature alone constructs,” he wrote in Principia Philosophiae in 1644.

In this present moment, we witness—and create—objects just as wondrous. Natural philosophers not only marveled at these objects, but also worked out fundamental ontological categories of being through them. We have the opportunity to do the same through an expanded collection of objects that are swiftly altering how we conceptualize “the human” alongside new natures and new technologies. Robots are now highly elaborated automata that mimic human facial expressions; synthetic, programmable organisms are redefining evolution; and simulated combinations of biochemistries catalyze the possibility to detect weird extraterrestrial life forms.

The objects presented in the collection are part of the Future Wunderkammer. Housed in a digital vitrine and following natural philosophers’ conventions of notation, the collection references the long and variegated history of cabinets of curiosity. But the objects here are future-facing, gesturing to inchoate wonders that venture to and indeed beyond the edge of the known. They are enticements to re-enchant humans’ present relationships with nature on Earth and elsewhere. They propel us across time and space; they represent both a departure and a return; their enigmatic properties call us to venture boldly into the futures of life in as yet unimagined ways. Ultimately, the purpose of this Wunderkammer is to inspire the generation of new forms of life, not just collection of life forms.

As such, we invite you to consider the objects not only as collectors of the past might have, but to navigate them with Diotima, a Future Archaeologist.