The Brooklyn Rail

What is wonder, and where does it come from? What makes it compelling when it touches you? Octavio Paz wrote that strangeness begins with surprise and leads to questioning, suggesting that curiosity brings a subtle unease—a complex confluence of fascination and aversion. There is magnetism in the unfamiliar: it enchants and unsettles. Wonder derives from the Old English wundor, signifying something sublime or miraculous. It evokes astonishment, reverence, or even fear, linking the known and the unknown, the real and the imagined. Wonder embodies a longing to understand the world. It is a threshold at which we encounter something marvelous, and instead of turning away, we surrender. We yearn to know, connect, and grasp the ungraspable, if only for a moment.

This encounter is visceral at The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum, featuring illuminated manuscripts centered around the fifteenth-century Book of the Marvels of the World. Curated by Joshua O’Driscoll, Associate Curator of Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, the show brings together two of the only four surviving copies: one from the Morgan’s collection, the other from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Written by an anonymous author and illuminated in the 1460s by the French Master of the Geneva Boccaccio, the Book of Marvels opens a visionary portal into a realm of the peculiar and fantastical. These manuscripts illustrate how a predominantly affluent, Western Christian European audience, and the artists who interpreted their visions, sought to comprehend their world.

The Book of Marvels is an encyclopedia of distant lands and wonders, designed to educate and entertain. Its contents include a whimsical collection of real and mythical locations such as Sri Lanka and Amazonia. As I learned from the exhibition catalog, the structure of the Book of Marvels follows a geographical organization: alphabetically arranged chapters from Africa to Ululand (Norway) are followed by longer thematic sections covering the human body, animals, plants, portents, poisons, and more. Each of the two copies of the Book of Marvels is opened to a different spread. This encourages viewers to engage their imaginations and crave more of what is unseen (digitized copies are available online). In these open spreads, Sri Lanka is illustrated through stories of colossal snails, whose shells are so large that people are said to make homes within them. Arabia is depicted as a shimmering land abundant in jewels, with precious gems drawn from the abdomens of dragons, much like pearls from the depths of the sea.

The exhibition complements the two copies of the Book of Marvels with maps, Persian and Ottoman manuscripts, and the German Book of Nature (1475). This German work displays one of the exhibition's most striking images: a woodcut featuring a woman drinking from a fertility-curing spring beside another igniting a torch, alongside fantastical beings reportedly inhabiting Asia: one-footed Sciapods, headless Blemmyes with chest-mounted eyes, dog-headed Cynocephali, and one-eyed Cyclopes. Each book offers insight into historical constructions of "foreignness." These representations reflect European standards of beauty and civility, distorting perceptions of other cultures during the Age of Exploration and fueling brutal encounters. The exhibition reveals how the medieval imagination envisioned and misinterpreted cultural differences, weaving together fantasy, reality, fear, and desire.

If wonder is that threshold where fascination meets aversion, as Octavio Paz suggested, this exhibition immerses us directly into that complex space. What separates our modern certainties from the fantastical imaginings of medieval people? Less than we might think. As we stand at the abyss of our knowledge, do we not fill the darkness with creatures conjured from our deepest hopes and fears?

The Blemmyae, with eyes in their chests, the colossal snails of Sri Lanka, and today's “little green men” with cosmic black eyes all emerge from the same wellspring—an enticing mixture of wonder and fear that arises at the boundary of the known. These manuscripts reveal how people perceived the world and themselves, mirrored in its unfathomable limits. Their wonder, much like ours, was both a surrender and a reaching, a confrontation with the ungraspable that simultaneously terrified and enthralled them. The exhibition goes beyond merely reconstructing a medieval worldview; it opens up inherent contradictions. The concept of the marvelous was never impartial; it conveyed both wonder and caution. Wonder, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, is dual: one side may be welcoming, but the other is not. This duality persists in our encounters with the unknown today: we find ourselves drawn by curiosity and held back by apprehension, suspended between certainty and mystery.

It seems little has changed in the Western worldview of "otherness." The same linguistic sleight of hand that once positioned dog-headed Cynocephali at the edges of medieval maps now labels immigrants as “illegals” or "aliens,” which simultaneously evokes extraterrestrial beings and those deemed foreign to our society. I am no stranger to being “other” in this country, having immigrated from Mexico at ten years old, and familiar with stereotypes and prejudices. Today's political rhetoric about borders echoes the medieval cartographer's impulse to populate foreign territories with fantastical beings that embody our collective anxieties. The medieval gaze that transformed cultural differences into physical aberrations persists in modern discourse, reminding us that imagining the "other" reveals more about our fears and fascinations than about those we attempt to define.