Imagining Early Modern Wish-Lists and Their Environs

Debapriya Sarkar (author)

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Title	Imagining Early Modern Wish-Lists and Their Environs
Contributor	Debapriya Sarkar (author)
DOI	https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0130.1.15
Landing page	https://punctumbooks.com/titles/object-oriented-environs/
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Copyright	Sarkar, Debapriya
Publisher	punctum books
Published on	2016-02-12
Long abstract	What was an early modern wish-list? Was it an object of inquiry, an instrument of the imagination, or one of cognition? Why did these catalogues (incomplete in form, and projective by nature) fascinate early modern writers? I begin with these questions to explore the status of the wish-list as a “thing” that enabled thinkers to curate new ways of inter-acting with their environs, both real and imagined.1 Wish-lists became instruments through which writers attempted to make intelligible a world that was fundamentally in flux, one in which new geographies were being discovered through travels and a new cosmology was displacing both earth and man from the center of the universe. In this environment of uncertainty, the wish-list propelled naturalists and travelers to search for non-existent objects and propose new epistemological systems.
Page range	pp. 123–133
Print length	11 pages
Language	English (Original)

What was an early modern wish-list? Was it an object of inquiry, an instrument of the imagination, or one of cognition? Why did these catalogues (incomplete in form, and projective by nature) fascinate early modern writers? I begin with these questions to explore the status of the wish-list as a “thing” that enabled thinkers to curate new ways of inter-acting with their environs, both real and imagined.1 Wish-lists became instruments through which writers attempted to make intelligible a world that was fundamentally in flux, one in which new geographies were being discovered through travels and a new cosmology was displacing both earth and man from the center of the universe. In this environment of uncertainty, the wish-list propelled naturalists and travelers to search for non-existent objects and propose new epistemological systems.