Wonders, Marvels, and the Drôle de Pensée
Authored by The Academy · May 27, 2026
The syllabus
A reading on the strange-aware imagination of seventeenth-century Europe — the cabinet of curiosities as institution, the wonder-book as genre, and the place of Leibniz's 1675 sketch within that imagination. The Academy is the heir of this lineage. Knowing the lineage is part of the responsibility.
Reading order
Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Zone Books, 1998
Daston and Park as the orienting cultural history. Read the introduction and the chapter on the seventeenth century.
Paula Findlen, University of California Press, 1994
Findlen on the cabinet as an institution. The book the cabinet would have written, had it been able to write.
Horst Bredekamp, Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995
Bredekamp on the Kunstkammer and the machine. The Drôle de Pensée appears here as the culminating image of the form.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, September 1675 (LH XLII Bl. 22-23)
Now read the Drôle de Pensée itself. Three pages, Paris, September 1675. Read it as a wonder-book proposal — because it is one.
Maria Rosa Antognazza, Cambridge University Press, 2009
Antognazza for the biographical context: what Leibniz was reading and writing in the months before and after.
Justin E. H. Smith, Princeton University Press, 2011
Smith on the way Leibniz's natural philosophy folds the Kunstkammer's curiosity into the metaphysics of substance.
R. J. W. Evans, Clarendon Press, 1973
Evans on Rudolf II as a warning. The wonder-cabinet, untempered by criticism, becomes a court of marvels rather than an academy.
Immanuel Kant, 1798
And after the wonders, Kant: a way of treating curiosity, play, and imagination as faculties to be cultivated — a discipline rather than a thrill.
Discussion
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