For medieval and Renaissance Europeans, natural wonders included all strange phenomena – some real, some mythical. Wonders did occasionally spring up in Europe – for example such abnormal births as conjoined twin or the hermaphroditic child born in Italy in 1512 with wings instead of arms and a horn growing from its head. Most, however, were engendered somewhere way over the horizon. Before Columbus opened up the Atlantic oceans and the south seas for European explorers and initiated the flow of birds of paradise, opossums, and polar bears, and, with subsequent generations of travellers, wombats, kangaroos, and platypus, the wonders which cluttered up the antechambers of princes and the cabinets of curious collectors had been mainly of Asian origin: the claws and eggs of the mythical beasts known as Griffins (part lion, part eagle), crocodiles, unicorn horns, ivory tusks perhaps ornately carved into a beautiful drinking horn, shark’s teeth, lion skins, and serpents’ tongues.

Mandeville desribes the cotton tree:
"There grew ... a wonderful tree which
bore tiny lambs on the endes of its
branches. These branches were so
pliable that they bent down to allow
the lambs to feed when they are
hungrie."

The East was surrounded by an exotic romance – nature played more wontedly at the edges of the world – and medieval writers envisioned a topography of wonders along the fringe of known world beyond which nothing existed but a giant blue encircling sea. In the late fourteenth century, Sir John Mandeville claims to have journeyed deep into that unknown fringe, through “many diverse kingdoms, countries and isles in the eastern part of the world, where live different kinds of men and animals, and many other marvellous things.” His book of travels teem with self-sacrificing fish and wild geese with two heads; diamonds grew as big as hazelnuts and giant shrubs were bent low with fragrant spices.

 

Transported back from the edge, exotic curiosities were portals to those distant lands, offering enticingly fragmented visions of worlds filled with incalculable strangeness. Medieval rhetoric of the marvellous, as Katherine Parks and Lorraine Datson explain in Wonders was “first elaborated in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature of romance – in its rhapsodic descriptions of Eastern luxuries, its emphasis on quest and adventure, its exploitation of the unexpected, its taste for exotic settings, its reliance on magical natural objects, its constant invocation of wonder and wonders, described in terms of diversity, and its association of those wonders with wealth and power.” The fabulous tales of Marco Polo’s took the romance of exotic travel writing to new heights. During his twenty-four years through Asia, he travelled the Silk Road, became the confidant of the Kublai Khan, and amazed his readers with tales of wonder. Describing the kingdom of Quilon, Marco Polo writes:

“The country produces a diversity of beasts different from those of the rest of the world. There are black lions with no other visible colour or marks. There are parrots of many kinds. Some are entirely white – as white as snow – with feet and beaks of scarlet. Other are scarlet and blue – there is no lovelier sight than these in the world. And there are some very tiny ones, which are also object of great beauty. Then there are peacocks of another sort than ours and much bigger and handsomer, and hen too that are unlike ours. What more need I say? Everything there is different from what it is with us and excels both in size and beauty. They have no fruit the same as our, no beast, no bird.”

Bigger, more beautiful, strange coloured and patterns. Azure breasts, flushed beaks, tuffs, plumes, rosy throats, and vermillion eyes. The marvels of the East streamed in an endless current of wonder. Birds as tall and swift as horses. Leathery beasts the size of houses. Anything, it seemed, could exist, any combination of colours, any variation in form.

Strange beasts were hung from the rafters in Christian churches to evoke awe in the faithful at the wondrous variety of God’s creations. In 1260 a crocodile was given to King Alfonso X by the Sultan of Egypt. When the animal died, its body was eviscerated, slowly dried, rubbed with astringent spices, and hung in the Portal of the Lizard (named for the reptile) which leads from the cloister to the Cathedral of Seville. Like so many early exotic specimens, however, the crocodile eventually decayed and was replaced by a wooden replica. The French royal abbey of Saint-Denis also housed an unparalleled collection of natural wonders, accumulated over generations by the royal family. Along with relics of saints, finely crafted vessels and bejeweled broaches, the hundreds of objects in the collection included a griffin claw and a unicorn horn, which measured no less than six and a half feet long. As the Bishop Guillaume Durant noted that “in some churches they are accustomed to hang two ostrich eggs and other things of this sort, things that prompt wonder and are rarely seen, so that by them the people are drawn into church and are more affect.” Strange and rare parts of God’s creation were sign left on earth to transport the faithful from the material world to a higher spiritual plane, from which to contemplate the divine. In other words, marvels stood for all that could not be grasped and securely held, all that intoxicated and enraptured.

Such rare exotics were of course appreciated as part of the natural world, but in a similarly detached and remote sense as saintly relic – the shrivelled toes and fingers, vials or blood or preserved hearts of saints: they quivered at the edges of human comprehension; they suggested untold mystical forces were at work in the earthly realm, and they became vehicles for infinite reveries of possibility, expectation, and hope in a way that lowly nature, abundantly available all around – cows, pigs, and cabbages – never could. And certainly, as Jacques le Goff suggests in his classic work The Medieval Imagination, the exaggeration of marvellous qualities of things was delicious compensation for the banality and harsh rigours of daily life: “it is no accident,” le Goff writes, “that one of the few medieval inventions was that of never never land, which first appeared in the thirteenth century. One can trace earlier roots or roughly equivalent notions, but the thing itself was a creation of the Middle Ages.” (32) In other words, marvels from distant lands entranced anyone lucky enough to get a glimpse. They inflamed the imagination. Just a piece of a crocodile or a hippopotamus tooth would do, not to mention a crust of griffon’s hide or a unicorn horn. From snippets, an entire landscapes were imagined, each with their own unique organic rhythms, places were rabbits were pink and men metamorphosed into storks and waters flowed up hill. And when outlandish creatures began surging into Europe in the fifteenth century in a torrent of wonder – creatures that rolled themselves into an armour ball or birds with tail feathers like broken rainbows – nothing, it seemed, was impossible.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosity or wunderkammen were filled with marvels and wonders of both natural and human construction. Whatever was rare in occurrence, exotic in origin, or in any way unusual or curious was avidly accumulated and arranged in the most enticing manner possible. Strange fish hung from the ceiling, stuffed birds and mammals lined the walls, shells and dried reptiles arranged in drawers. Exotic curiosities were portals to distant lands, offering enticingly fragmented visions of worlds filled with impossible creatures and untold wonders.

Image: The frontispiece from a treatise on natural history by the Neapolitan apothecary Ferrante Imperato published in 1599 is the first image of an early modern collection.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the chaotic arrangement of cabinets of curiosity was rapidly losing favour with natural scientists, who began arranging items systematically by order, family, genus, and species. A more rigorous ordering principle was certainly necessary as the number of species known to naturalists rapidly increased through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In part due to the poor knowledge of preservation and in part due to the devaluation of curiosity as a means of acquiring knowledge, the contents of early museums were either left to rot or were thrown away. For example, the curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford purged the mouldering contents of the museum in 1755 and tossed them on a bonfire. Among the “useless” items was a stuffed dodo from the late sixteenth century, thought to be the only taxidermied specimen in the world. Only the charred head and a foot were salvaged.

This chapter considers taxidermy which preserves animal aberrations and taxidermic displays which either accentuate the marvellous aspects of nature or which demonstrate an exuberant, perhaps even manic collecting urge. The images include curiosities such as a two-headed calf, the largest taxidermied bear, the oldest surviving example of taxidermy (a crocodile on exhibit at St. Gall, Switzerland from 1623), a nineteenth-century case crammed with over 200 hummingbirds, etchings of early cabinets of curiosity, and the charred remains of the taxidermied dodo.

Wonder is a strange emotional experience. We can attempt to control anger; we can learn to be afraid of snakes; we can strive to be happy, but you can’t force wonder. Either the object is strange enough to amaze or it isn’t. The wonderful casts a spell, and sometimes, like a bolt of lightening, scatters everything we believed about how the world works.

Taxidermied wonders are different from other genres of taxidermy. The reasons for preserving a two-headed calf is not the same as preparing a buffalo for museum display or a having a pet taxidermied unless, of course, the calf survived long enough to become a pet. Wonders are taxidermied because they are strange, singular, rare or exceptional. All living pieces of nature, however, wonders are notoriously fleeting: they die, they mould, they are devoured by worms and insects, and they slowly disappear from view. In a sense, to stuff a strange creature is to sustain an emotion encounter as much as it is a way of hindering the natural decay of the creature.

To understand why collectors desired to preserved natural curiosities, we need to understand the emotional experience of wonder. From our twenty-first century perspective, when the creatures and contents of our earth home have been microscopically probed and measured and labelled down the atomic level, when – in great part – wonder is an experience reserved for children, examining wonder may seem silly. But tell that to the great philosophers who spent time contemplating the benefits and downside of wonder.

In the early thirteenth century, the English nobleman Gervase of Tilbury outlined three categories of wonderful things: "We embrace things we consider unheard of, first on account of the variation in the course of nature, at which we marvel; then on account of our ignorance of the cause, which is inscrutable to us; and finally on account of our customary experience, which we know differs from others." [i] For Gervase then, wonders either disrupted the ordinary course of nature such as an animal with two heads or suggested some unexplainable origin such as the strange attracting power of a magnet. The third group – things beyond our customary experience – arouse wonder because they are new and strange to us, but perhaps of no worth or interest in their native country. All categories of wonders however, make us foreigners and children our own land: they disrupt, confuse, and mystify all our customary perceptions of how the world works.

Between 1210 and 1214, Gervase penned his great work, Otia imperialia or Recreation for an Emperor. Gervase had been appointed Marshal of the Kingdom of Arles in 1198 by King Otto IV. In 1209 Otto was coronated Emperor, and perhaps to exalt the Emperor and most certainly to entertain and instruct him, Gervase dedicated his great work to his patron.

Otia imperialia was an encyclopaedia of miscellaneous facts and curious phenomena in three books. The first examines the creation and early history of the world; the second is a description of the world, and the last and longest book sets out to describe what he called "the marvels of every province - not all of them, but something from each one." His catalogue encompasses 129 marvels. While a few were plausible or verged towards the credible such as intelligence of dolphins and the healing thermal baths at Pozzuoli, most were of highly dubious authenticity such as a peculiar race of twelve-foot tall Egyptians who metamorphosed into storks or a bean plant whose fruit somehow caused the feelings of the person who picked the fruit to be experienced by who ever ate it. Nevertheless, Gervase strongly declared that all of the marvel were the straight truth, some he had even tested or observed himself.

As most encyclopaedists of his age, Gervase mines his list of wonders from a wide range of sources including classical texts, biblical and mystical writings, and the oral traditions of Germanic, Celtic, and other peoples. He began his catalogue with a well-known and well-establish marvel of the magnet and concludes with a somewhat more obscure mystery - a spring near Narbonne that changed place whenever something dirty was put in it.

What united the eccentric catalogue of the strange likenesses, properties, virtues, and capacities of various marvellous plants, animals, minerals, people, and places, was precisely their marvelousness, their intrinsic ability to stupefy readers or any lucky observers, to cause them to wonder at the diversity of God's creations.

The 129 marvels Gervase outlines for his readers certainly gives us idea of what constituted as a wonder, but what sort of experience did wonderers undergo? How does a wonder capture our attention?

As part of his larger work on poetry, La deca ammirabile published in 1587, Francesco Patrizi introduced twelve sources of wonder available to the poet: ignorance, fable, novelty, paradox, augmentation, departure from the usual, the extranatural, the divine, great utility, the very precise, the unexpected, and the sudden. Even the usual can provoke wonder if its appearance is somehow unexpected: a shadow, for example, strangely enlarged can momentarily disorientate. Patrizi describes poetic wonderment as the experience of going back and forth between reason and emotion. When something new and unexpected appears before us, it “creates a movement in our soul, almost contradictory in itself of believing and not believing. Of believing because the thing is seen to exist; and of not believing because it is sudden, new, and not before either known, thought, or believed able to exist.” [ii] In other words, marvels, even if only encountered in texts, are experienced almost at a visceral level and not just passively observed. To wonder is to submit to a delirious experience of unknowing tinged with expectation and sometimes horror. One was not left unaffected by a marvel; each curiosities stimulated the mind to by the infinite possibility in the world. The merely pleasing or delightful can never evoke such a deep response.

Writing for poets, Patrizi encourages an indulgence in wonder to create startling scenarios and dramatic tension. Another parallel tradition, more philosophically inclined, was not so enthusiastic about wonder.

Like Patrizi, t he seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes described wonder a “sudden surprise of the soul” when encountering something rare and unknown. “When the first encounter with some object surprised us, and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we knew in the past or what we supposed it to be, this makes us wonder and be astonished at it.” But in contrast to Patrizi, Descartes aligned wonder with ignorance not poetic creativity. Wonder was only serviceable if it excited curiosity which could lead to knowledge. As Descartes noted, “those who have no natural inclination to this passion are commonly very ignorant.”

By aligning wonder and ignorance, Descartes was following the ancient philosopher Aristotle who likewise described wonder as an initial step towards knowledge. Wonder, Aristotle claimed, was the seed from which our interest in anything was first aroused. “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the great matters.” The inexplicability of strange objects hinted at a hidden but rational design, which if understood could explain the object’s existence. In a sense, Descartes and Aristotle sought to domesticate wonders, to make them comprehensible, to normalise their mystery. While wonder was serviceable, indulging in wonder stupefied rationality and muffled the brain. Descartes even argues that wonder could become chronic, perhaps addictive:

“rather than wondering too little, more often we fall into excess wonder and are astonished by things that are little worthy of our attention, if at all, a state of mind which may completely eradicate or pervert the use of reason. This is why, although it is good to be born with some natural inclination towards this passion since it disposes us to the acquisition of science, we must strive to extract ourselves from its sway as quickly as possible. … There is no other remedy for driving away wonder that to acquire knowledge of most things and to apply oneself to the consideration of all those which might seem the most rare and strange.”

Wonder could even become a sickness, “the malady of those who are blindly curious, that is to say, those who search out rarities only to wonder without an interest in learning about them.” Descartes sickness was perhaps Patrizi’s ideal state of poetic creation: a mesmerizing world in which wonder is soak in and absorbed.