Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos
Language: English
Published by Harvard, 2025, 2025
- Softcover
- Used
Seller: The Book Den, Santa Barbara, CA, U.S.A.The Book Den
AbeBooks seller since October 17, 1998
Condition: Used
£ 17.68
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Add to basketSeller Inventory # 9780674299337
- Title
- Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos
- Author
- Zadeh, Travis
- Publisher
- Harvard, 2025
- Publication year
- 2025
- Binding
- Soft cover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0674299337
- ISBN 13
- 9780674299337
“As Zadeh concludes, reformers and modernists have closed the rich and varied archive revealed in Wonders and Rarities…In this beautifully written and engaging text, Zadeh takes his readers back to the world of surprise and enchantment that preceded this closure.”—Malise Ruthven, Financial Times
“This book about a book, like the book it describes, is a rare and marvelous thing.” —Justin Marozzi, The Spectator
During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyāʾ Qazwīnī authored what became one of the most influential works of natural history in the world: Wonders and Rarities. Exploring the dazzling movements of the stars above, the strange minutiae of the minerals beneath the earth, and everything in between, Qazwīnī offered a captivating account of the cosmos. Wonders and Rarities inspired generations as it traveled through madrasas and courts, unveiling the magical powers of nature. But Qazwīnī’s compendium eventually came to stand as a strange, if beautiful, emblem of medieval ignorance.
Restoring Qazwīnī to his place as a herald of the rare and astonishing, Travis Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the history of Islamic philosophy, science, and literature. Wonder provided an enduring way to conceive of the world—at once constituting an affective reaction, an aesthetic stance, a performance of piety, and a cognitive state. Yet through the course of colonial modernity, Qazwīnī’s universe of marvels helped advance the notion that Muslims lived in a timeless world of superstition and enchantment, unaware of the western hemisphere or the earth’s rotation around the sun.
Recovering Qazwīnī’s ideas and his reception, Zadeh invites us into a forgotten world of thought, where wonder mastered the senses through the power of reason and the pleasure of contemplation.
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The Book Den
Santa Barbara, CA, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since October 17, 1998
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