Curiosity and Artifice in Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s Natural Philosophy

I examine the strategies through which Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, a professor at Madrid’s Jesuit Reales Estudios, promoted the role of curiosity in natural philosophy. I argue that Nieremberg responded to anti-curiosity criticism by restating how the two primary meanings of “curiosity” in early modern sources, “intellectual desire” and “diligence”/“care”, should relate to one another. By analyzing a set of works published in both Spanish and Latin between 1629 and 1635, I demonstrate that Nieremberg advocated a form of “curiosity” (in the sense of longing for knowledge) focused on what he called “nature’s artifice”, which constituted a specific facet of God’s “curiosity” (in the sense of attention or care in creation). In 1633, Nieremberg claimed that nature is nowhere more deserving of wonder than when it imitates art, actively challenging the way we understand the art–nature divide. I show that, by contrasting a superficial or external approach to nature with one that penetrates it in search of what is “artificial” about it, Nieremberg’s efforts at defining a virtuous and legitimate form of natural-philosophical curiosity involved re-negotiating the boundaries between natural philosophy and more ambivalent competing realms, such as aesthetics, rhetoric, and the occult sciences.