The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The work of Alexius Pedemontanus De Secretis is no contemptible source from which materials may be drawn for the technological History of Inventions; and on this account it will perhaps afford pleasure to many if I here give an account of the author, according to such information as I have been able to obtain."--A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins (1797) by Johann Beckmann |
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The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont is a book of secrets by Alessio Piemontese.
The book was published in more than a hundred editions and was still being reprinted in the 1790s. The work was translated into Latin, German, English, Spanish, French, and Polish. The work unleashed a torrent of 'books of secrets' that continued to be published down through the eighteenth century.
Piemontese was the prototypical 'professor of secrets'. His description of his hunt for secrets in the preface to the Secreti helped to give rise to a legend of the wandering empiric who dedicated his life to the search for natural and technological secrets. The book contributed to the emergence of the concept of science as a hunt for the secrets of nature, which pervaded experimental science during the period of the Scientific Revolution.
Editions
- De' secreti del reuerendo donno Alessio Piemontese, Venice, 1555 (Italian)
- --- 1562 edition
- --- Les secrets de reverend Alexis Piémontois, Anvers, 1557 (French)
- --- The Secretes of the Reverende Maister Alexis of Piermont, 1558 (English, translated from the French version)
See also
