Books of secrets
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Wecker, who compiled his book De Secretis from Porta, Cardan, and several old writers, and printed it for the first time in 1582, and gave a third edition in 1592, must have been unacquainted with it; else he certainly would not have omitted it in the fourteenth book, where he mentions all the methods of secret writing. Neither would it have been unnoticed by Caneparius, whose book De Atramentis was printed at Venice, for the first time, in 1619."--A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins (1797) by Johann Beckmann |
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Books of secrets were compilations of technical and medicinal recipes and magic formulae that began to be printed in the sixteenth century and were published continuously down to the eighteenth century. They constituted one of the most popular genres in early modern scientific publishing. The books of secrets contained hundreds of medical recipes, household hints, and technical recipes on metallurgy, alchemy, dyeing, making perfume, oil, incense, and cosmetics. The books of secrets supplied a great deal of practical information to an emerging new, middle-class readership, leading some historians to link them with the emerging secularistic values of the early modern period and to see them as contributing to the making of an ‘age of how-to.’
Some books of secrets, such as Alexius Pedemontanus's famous Secreti (1555), contained mainly practical and technological information in the form of useful recipes. Others, such as Giambattista della Porta's Magia naturalis (Natural Magic, 1558) deployed practical recipes in an effort to demonstrate the principles of natural magic. Other books of secrets, such as Isabella Cortese's Secreti (1564), disseminated alchemical information to a wide readership. Recent research has suggested that the books of secrets may have played an important role in the emergence of experimental science by bringing practical technical information to the attention of experimental scientists.
See also
- Secret
- Medieval and Renaissance bestsellers
- Alexius Pedemontanus
- Johannes Jacob Wecker
- Levinus Lemnius
- Grand Albert
- Popular science
- Technical art history
Publications
- De Secretis Mulierum
- Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
- John K. Ferguson, Bibliographical Notes on Histories of Inventions and Books of Secrets. 2 vols. London: Holland Press, 1959.