Creatures of wonder, cabinets of woe? The biophilic sublime in Renaissance printed Wunderkammer

There is perhaps no better emblem of Renaissance Europe’s entangled epistemologies of nature, empire and the search for knowledge than the cabinet of curiosity. Whether constructed as an ornate room, a miniature Eden or a printed book, the Wunderkammer collected and displayed fragments of the natural world as a theatre of awe. While scholarship has emphasised the cabinet’s complicity in colonial violence and taxonomic control, this article foregrounds its perceptual and affective characteristics. Drawing on biophilic design theory, we introduce the biophilic sublime as a bioculturally mediated response in which fascination with the more-than-human world’s complexity coexists with a sense of estrangement or distance. Through an analysis of early European bestiaries, lapidaries, proto-encyclopaedias and English herbals, this article traces a shift from mythic and cosmological enmeshments to empirical visual epistemologies that consistently reveal an enchantment with the curious “other.” We argue that this fascination reveals our species’ deep entwinement with other species and biodiverse contexts, even as it is troubled by biophobic impulses and ideological impacts. This mixture of biological and cultural inheritance, so visible in the Renaissance Wunderkammer, further reveals the ecological effects on Anthropocene landscapes while offering imaginative tools for reanimating wonder.