Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600

Chapter Three: Structuring Secrets for Sale

59 chapter three Structuring Secrets for Sale “First therefore I wil declare of certaine herbes: Secondly of certaine Stones, and thirdly of certayne Beastes, and the virtues of them.”1 “Manie are the wonders and marvels of the world, and almost incredible, were it not that experience teacheth the contrarie:”2 The last chapter established the creation of authority as a fundamental part of books of secrets, since their appeal depended on readers believing that they contained the knowledge of great masters of the natural world whose wisdom was suddenly and for the first time available at a price they could afford. It also introduced the responsibility given to readers of secrets,using the model reader created in The Mirror of Alchimy to establish the importance of characteristics such as diligence and patience. This chapter will elaborate on the role of the reader of secrets in two ways. First, it will provide a detailed structural analysis of two general books of secrets, The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus and Cornucopiae, Or divers secrets. These books are ideally suited to the task because they presented complete models of the natural world,rather than focusing on a specific aspect of nature or a particular art. This means that their internal structure influenced the kinds of natural worlds that readers imagined themselves trying to change.Furthermore,the kinds of worlds they depicted were not always in perfect congruence with the text, which raises interesting questions about the ways that readers interacted with their books of secrets. Second, it will expand the definition of a good reader of secrets by establishing that both the structure and the text of these two books validated 60 / books of secrets and legitimized readers’experience.Thus,they both empowered readers and strengthened their position in relation to nature and added a new type of authority to those explored in the last chapter. The books of secrets that have attracted the most scholarly attention are compendia of natural knowledge that reflect the relationships among natural objects and offer the reader methods for manipulating nature or producing illusions. Two of these books in particular are notable for their accessibility to a broad audience and their different approaches to organizing very similar information about the natural world.The Secrets of Albertus Magnus and The Cornucopiae,Ordiverssecrets are remarkable because they contain elements of natural knowledge that had previously been printed only in Latin,a language that would have been inaccessible to the majority of readers,and because they would have been relatively affordable. Their page count and typeface locate their price between three and six pence,the price depending upon the price of paper and the viability of the print market.3 These books provide insight into the techniques used to contain and present natural knowledge to this segment of the print market,since they represent markedly different strategies for doing so. One of these strategies depends upon headings and tables of contents to categorize the information contained in the text.The addition of a structuring frameworkdoesnot,however,invalidatethepotentialforotherstructuralmodels embedded within the text.The Secrets of Albertus Magnus contains both an imposed and inherent structure,and the two offer readers very different ways to interact with the text and with nature itself. Cornucopiae, Or divers secrets does not have an external structure at all but is instead composed of repeating sections of interconnected natural objects whose relationships determine the ways that change can occur in nature.Rather than experiencing nature divided into artificial categories, a strategy that did not succeed even with the best efforts , readers of Cornucopiae would have encountered the natural world as it was constructed through the relationships between items, as well as gaining entrance to a natural world whose predictability, once apprehended, made it subject to human manipulation and desires. The Secrets of Albertus Magnus saw four English printings in the sixteenth century and features individual books on the virtues of herbs, stones, and beasts,and one devoted to miscellaneous wonders.Each book is divided from the others with clear headings in large type,so that readers would have found it difficult to miss the transition from one natural category to another.4 The 1599 edition produced by William Jaggard includes an additional book on the movements of planets and their effects on children, and it also features the most dramatic divisions among the sections of the text. Despite the effort devoted to assigning...