Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550–1600 (review)

In Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550–1600, Allison Kavey focuses on the position of books of secrets in the marketplace. Kavey looks at their social construction, examining who wrote, printed, and read them as well as examining what material was presented to readers. Kavey is particularly interested in the increasingly vibrant vernacular culture of Elizabethan England and largely focuses on books identified as "cheap print" and places this literature within popular print culture. She argues that "books of secrets did, in fact, make the manipulation of nature more accessible to a broad variety of people." Readers were "powerful agents in, rather than victims of, the natural world" (p. 8).

Another focus of this study is the construction of authority and its existence on so many levels. The authors, of course, were the first to have such a claim, but the appearance of medieval natural philosophers such as Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus in sixteenth-century treatises necessarily widens the definition of "author." Yet as Roger Chartier, Anthony Grafton, William Sherman, and a host of others who have contributed to the burgeoning field of the history of reading have informed us, readers had their place in constructing authority, and Kavey examines their role in books of secrets. Kavey looks at the longstanding tradition of well-known names appearing on title pages, the contents of natural philosophical texts, and how it brought learned and popular cultures together. She demonstrates how "open" this border was with the wide dissemination of books by Aristotle, Pliny, Magnus, and Bacon (p. 57).

One reason why such books could be circulated widely was because they were cheap. Kavey uses page count and typeface to determine that such texts cost between three and six pence; this realization changes the debate on how, for example, knowledge was conveyed when such editions were available in the vernacular at widely affordable prices. Indeed, one point made is "that books of secrets were part of a much broader print market . . . [and] reflect strategies that printers frequently employed to attract readers and sell books" (p. 67).

Perhaps the most promising and original contribution of the book is the gendering of secrets. The sixteenth century witnessed the publication of the first book of secrets intended for a female audience. Kavey attempts to capture that most elusive quarry, "the middling and poor women" who might read but not write (p. 97). Books of secrets for this audience centered predictably on the domestic sphere, discussing things such as cooking and the perfuming of gloves. She rightly observes there was a time-honored "female tradition of oral communication on matters of housewifery, husbandry, cookery, medicine, and gardening" (p. 100). Books of secrets took advantage of the mysterious or unusual information and made it seem almost like gossip with all the attendant expectations such an approach would have. In 1595 Gervase Markham claimed in the title of his book on horsemanship that it too was a book of "secrets," and Kavey uses this text as a stepping-stone to enter the world of masculine secrets. In exploring gender, Kavey has identified a genuinely important direction for further research in books of secrets.

All this said, Books of Secrets poses concerns. In a book such as this, it is inexplicable why Adrian Johns's seminal The Nature of the Book does not appear in either the notes or the bibliography. Ten years ago, Johns brilliantly studied and meticulously discussed the same issues that Kavey raises, and its absence is bewildering to say the least. Equally bewildering is the copyediting. The Stationers Register and the early modern publications of Roger Bacon, Robert Greene, Gervase Markham, and John Partridge are identified as secondary sources.