Until relatively recently, studying curiosity and wonder was a somewhat lonely pursuit, tinged maybe with the character of what was being investigated: a harmless if mildly eccentric concern. Sustained by antiquarians’ interest in the origins of their own discipline, these twinned concepts nonetheless did gradually garner more attention from historians (particularly of science), who were drawn to the softer areas of a difficult subject—to natural history, magic, human sciences, and medicine. For many of them, the lightning rod that brought these areas into dazzling focus was Michel Foucault's magisterial and incendiary book on words and things.

In its wake came some heavyweight investigations of curiosity from Krystof Pomian, Lorraine Daston, and Katherine Park and, more tangentially, from Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara Stafford, and even Marina Warner. Under their gaze, curiosity became a serious and sizable topic of inquiry. The questions posed in their important studies, and the gaps between them, encouraged others to follow, with the contributions from Stephen Bann, George Stocking, and Paula Findlen being among the most significant. Cumulatively, the work of these and dozens of other scholarly foot soldiers from a surprisingly scattered range of subdisciplines has now propelled curiosity into a certain limelight: the focus of substantial and sustained cultural investigation.

R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr's volume then is supported by rather impressive foundations, on which they mount a confident claim for just how much intellectual work was done under the banner of curiosity both as an active principle and a passive terrain, as subject and object, and for bad as well as good. Its ten essays attempt this by charting a series of local narratives about how curiosity and wonder were thoroughly entangled in the separate but related histories of travel and automata; language and literature; mysticism, enthusiasm, and the occult; anatomy, health, and sexuality; class, space, and professional showmanship; and, of course, museums, collections, and antiquities. This is a long list, and success must be measured not just in terms of whether the book meaningfully touches on each but whether it also genuinely extends our curiosity about wonder.

One of Pomian's most significant insights was to insist that curiosity be considered as a pattern of behavior rather than just an idea: that it essentially translated the desire to know into a set of disciplined actions that seeped their way out of cabinets and museums and into all sorts of other areas of intellectual activity. Curiosity then drove investigators infected with the bug to pursue research beyond the study, indeed to do field work away from their natural zones of comfort. And as Wes Williams's essay makes clear, carried along by the poetics of bearing witness, the curious traveler not infrequently found himself (and less frequently herself) face to face with real physical dangers, confronting hostile natives, extreme weather conditions, or serious bouts of ill health. What Williams is less clear about is how, if at all, those blood-chastening experiences were translated into the knowledge these voyagers gained from their adventures.

All of the important scholarship on curiosity has had to grapple with words as well as things, exploring the topic's literary and metaphorical as well as physical and literal history. A number of these essays further pursue this line of inquiry. Clare Preston, for example, looks into a literary tradition based on the self-conscious regathering, reordering, and remembering of written fragments. The intensions behind amassing them, however, were to mimic and mock the underlying futility of curiosity: a notion famously brought into comic focus by the hero of Thomas Shadwell's 1676 play The Virtuosi, Gimcrack, who proclaimed disinterest in any form of useful knowledge. Neil Kenny is also concerned with linguistic wonders. He has read broadly and finds the habits of curiosity (what he dubs the “grammar of testimony” [37]) cropping up not only in descriptions of curious things but also in practical how-to books, newspapers, records of antiquities, and explorations of the occult. Indeed, he has found enough evidence of a parallel effort to narrate curiosity in all these bookish traditions for him to urge us, for now at least, to reserve judgment about which came first: the literary traditions or those of collectors and early curators.

Other intrinsically interesting contributions investigate automata as the seeming fusion of the opposition between curiosity and utility (Alexander Marr’s) and the inevitably convoluted and slippery terrain of occult versions of wonder and curiosity—both divine and diabolical (Peter Forshaw’s). Even more illuminating are the final chapters, where the topic is followed into the lives of curious people—Jean Nollet, who carved out a source of gainful employment by shuttling between an Italian tour, shows of curiosity, and publications of wonders (Paola Bertucci’s), and Lord Cecil, among other English patients, who “medicalised curiosity about the self” (Deborah Harkness's [175]). What is particularly compelling about these accounts is the idea of curiosity as a common experience being lived through rather than just applied as an abstract concept. The focus on self-knowledge is taken a stage further in George Rousseau's investigation of John Hill, in whose hands the idea of curiosity moved on again from objects, words, and one's own health and deeper into a realm of interior (sometimes sexualized) wonders. But Rousseau may have taken us beyond the endgame of classical curiosity, into the stirrings of a distinctly different type of knowledge—one summed up by Alexander Pope's dictum in his Essay on Man—that the proper study of mankind is man. Tantalizing then, it is really only here in the epilogue that the book moves on from consolidating a sprawling inquiry and begins to reignite our wonder about curiosity.