All Curls and Pearls

Lorraine Daston

  • The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany by Neil Kenny
    Oxford, 484 pp, £68.00, July 2004, ISBN 0 19 927136 4

There has probably never been a society that did not erect barriers to certain kinds of knowledge. Moralists since Greek and Roman antiquity have frowned on busybodies who pry into their neighbours’ private lives; medieval Christian theologians condemned necromancers who wanted to discover the secrets of demons; today we fret about state surveillance of citizens and certain kinds of scientific research on human subjects. Curiosity has never been allowed free rein: there has always been a distinction between good and bad curiosity, legitimate and illegitimate knowledge.

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Vol. 27 No. 12 · 23 June 2005 » Lorraine Daston » All Curls and Pearls (print version)
Pages 37-38 | 2986 words