Benedict's book is something of a literary curiosity cabinet, to use one of her favorite phrases. It is full of interesting little nuggets of information, but I am left somewhat puzzled as to the point. The era that she focuses on, 1660-1820, saw the rise of the empirical method, and she makes the case that many people thought that the researchers who would later be called scientists were pushing into forbidden knowledge. I found that part interesting, and I expected more on the subject. Most of the book, however, discusses the sort of curiosity that I would think is part of the human condition.

Its forms may change: books collecting oddities obviously only become possible with the development of inexpensive printing and the rise of literacy. Better communication, exploration, and travel made more curiosities available. But was there really any change in people's tendency to be curious? Benedict speaks of curiosities disappearing into private collections, but many of these things were never publicly available until the rise of museums. When did the average person get to see exotic plants, minerals, and artifacts, unless perhaps they were a servant dusting them?

In earlier times, villages, tithings, frankpledges were forms of communal responsibility that must have encouraged a lively interest in the doings of the neighbors, since the collective could be held responsible for individual negligence. Relics added greatly to the attraction of places of worship and pilgrimage, so much to that the houses competed for them, and the church had to limit the "finding" of new relics. Was this entirely for the religious merit, or was it also because the relics were curiosities? Didn't people stare at monstrous births and grisly accidents? I find it hard to believe that gossip and prying about a suspicious pregnancy or neighborly failure or the lives of famous people is not a constant, and Benedict does nothing to establish that it was new in her chosen period. The issues of healthy interest versus prying continue to this day with scandal magazines and tabloids. If one is interested in the particular details of how curiosity manifested itself in this single time period, well here's your book.

I must admit to ignoring a great deal of the theoretical framework.

Another review: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5731 ( )