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

In this interesting and ambitious book, Allison Kavey attempts many things. She tries to define an elusive sixteenth-century literary genre (the "Book of Secrets"), describe its rise, its focus, its sometimes tortuous path to publication in the byzantine world of sixteenth-century English printing, its readership, which she analyzes by social class and gender, and its eventual replacement by other genres. All this in 160 pages of text, not including notes, bibliography, and index. Remarkably, she almost succeeds. However, some odd selections (and omission!) of sources, and some outright errors of fact, seriously diminish the usefulness of this volume.

One would expect Kavey to provide a functional definition of her genre of interest, but in fact she does not do so. She begins with a discussion of "books of knowledge, inexpensive perpetual almanacs that included information on astrology, physiognomy, and medical theory and advice" (1). Her discussion then swerves to a discussion of books of secrets without making any real distinction between the two genres, except perhaps that books of secrets were aimed towards a poorer class of readers.

Kavey devotes her second chapter to examining the mechanisms whereby printing was controlled in early modern England, including the powerful Stationers' Company of London. This is an excellent idea: the Stationers, holding a royal charter and backed by the power of the prerogative courts, held a near monopoly over printing in England. But Kavey's understanding of the Stationers is defective. She dates the incorporation of the Stationers to 1555. In fact, the Company was granted their charter by Queen Mary on 4 May 1557. More serious is Kavey's use of the Company registers, famously transcribed by Edward Arber in the nineteenth century, as a complete list of books published in England for the period. This is simply not the case. Books were entered to satisfy government censorship regulations and to secure some semblance of copyright protection before printing. It is not unusual for a book to be entered but never actually published. Moreover, many books were published without entry. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge could print books without registry entry, and royal warrants to print could be issued as well. Finally, there was a lush undergrowth of surreptitious printing, sometimes with false imprints or other steps taken to obscure a book's actual origins. Kavey seems unfamiliar with the far more comprehensive English Short Title Catalogue, available online through the British Library. Her discussion of "printing alliances" (29–30)—different printers working together to produce these books in a manner somehow different than they produced other works—is unconvincing. The Stationers' Company, whose origins can be traced to a number of late medieval gilds and the apprentice-journeyman-master training model therein implied, was, after all, a joint stock company as well. Its internal relations bordered on the incestuous for all of its productions. In this, the books of secrets were not unique.

Kavey's strongest work is her examination of the "authorities" cited in the books of secrets (chapter 2) and the appeal of books of secrets to literate women (chapter 4). It is amusing and informative to watch sixteenth-century authors and publishers take historical (if hazy) figures such as Roger Bacon and rework them into semi-mythical beings hob-nobbing with Hermes Trismegistus and Albertus Magnus. The sixteenth-century book trade was no stranger to re-packaging, re-branding, and re-printing to make a few shillings, and Kavey gives the reader a good sense of what must have been a slightly silly but obviously lucrative market. J. K. Rowling did much the same thing when she resurrected a putative fourteenth-century alchemist named Nicolas Flamel, whose name was attached to some early seventeenth-century treatises, and made him the crux of the first Harry Potter novel.

More thought-provoking is the chapter on marketing such material to women. Such books as The Widowes Treasure (1588) were...