Literatures of Wonder in Early Modern England and America

Abstract

This article surveys seventeenth-century narratives about ‘wonders’, ‘marvels’, ‘prodigies’, ‘providences’, and ‘remarkables’ and the scholarship that has treated them. Over the past 25 years, narratives about wonders and providences have played an increasingly important role in literary scholarship, the history of science, the history of the book, and the history of popular culture (and especially popular religious culture). The article considers the forms, meanings, and public roles of these ‘remarkable’ texts, and also discusses the scholarly movements that have led to their current prominence in the secondary literature. Although the article limits its focus to early modern texts produced in England and colonial America, it includes a wide range of print formats in which marvels and providences appeared, including cheap print formats such as broadsides and broadside ballads, almanacs, news pamphlets, and early chapbooks; as well as learned texts such as early natural philosophy (science) journals and anthologies published by ministers. The article opens by outlining the nexus of philosophical, political, and cultural developments that prompted an expanded interest in wonders, prodigies, and remarkables among both learned and common people in the period. It then explores the textual corpus itself and the varied rhetorical uses to which wonders were put by writers, publishers, and readers, using the history of Mary Dyer's monster birth for illustration. Finally, it examines the secondary scholarship on these texts.