Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (review)

Science and the Secrets of Nature is the first major treatment of Renaissance books of secrets, and of the printers and “professors of secrets” who produced them. Books of secrets were essentially collections of recipes for the manufacture of dyes, pigments, soap, and homemade medicines, which might also contain lore on the occult powers of plants, how-to guides for medicinal talismans, and even lessons in parlor magic. The most influential model for the genre was the medieval Secreta Alberti. But it was the unprecedented commercial success of Alessio Piemontese’s De secreti del reverendo don Alessio Piemontese (1555) that loosed the floodgates of the “secrets” literature in sixteenth-century Italy.

The core of Eamon’s book lies in chapters 4–6, where biographical sketches of Italy’s most important “professors of secrets” give us a fascinating glimpse of the scientific empirics of the age. We hear of ciarlatani hawking patent medicines in St. Mark’s Square, of competitive apothecaries trying to set up their enemies with the authorities. We hear of academies of secrets in the household of the Medicis, in Naples, and in Venice. We hear of printers who, in an increasingly competitive business, have staked out a lucrative market in books of secrets. These chapters effectively illuminate a period that has generally been ignored by historians of science. One might still argue that Italian scientific culture was not very theoretically sophisticated, but at least on a cultural level it was thriving. Paracelsus had his rivals in Italy, and virtuosi and scientific academies existed in Italy long before their more famous counterparts in seventeenth-century England.

For all this, the book suffers from a kind of methodological schizophrenia. Eamon has sandwiched his cultural history of secrets between a long, decontextualized history of empiricism, based almost entirely on secondary literature. In these chapters he tries to show how the Italian tradition of secrets fits into the history of empiricism as a whole. He is especially concerned with its influence on the empiricism of Francis Bacon. Much of this broader analysis rings false. In trying to explain “the process by which European culture divested itself of the tradition of esotericism in natural philosophy” (p. 5), Eamon veers dangerously close to the old tale of “science versus superstition.” He speaks of the “Greek miracle” (p. 18), and tells how “the Greek mind was seduced by mystical philosophies imbued with astrology, sympathetic magic, and alchemy” (p. 23). Having already opposed Athens to Alexandria, he makes no attempt to link the secrets culture of sixteenth-century Italy to the contemporary humanist revival of Alexandrian science, which included new interest in mechanics, magical devices, Neoplatonic magic, and mathematics. Humanism, in fact, is rendered strangely invisible, even in his discussions of the Italian virtuosi.

Despite these reservations, the book remains a major addition to the cultural history of Renaissance science. In the secrets tradition Eamon has provided an excellent entry into a previously unseen world of sixteenth-century empiricist culture, and I for one will be looking forward to further explorations in this important chapter in the history of science.