9/18/2019 Books of secrets - Wikipedia

Books of secrets
Books of secrets were compilations of technical and medicinal recipes and magic formulae that began to be printed in the sixteenth century and were published continuously down to the eighteenth century . They constituted one of the most
popular genres in early modern scientific publishing. The books of secrets contained hundreds of medical recipes, household hints, and technical recipes on metallurgy , alchemy , dy eing, making perfume, oil, incense, and cosmetics. The books
of secrets supplied a great deal of practical information to an emerging new, middle-class readership, leading some historians to link them with the emerging secularistic v alues of the early modern period and to see them as contributing to the
making of an ‘age of how-to.’

Some books of secrets, such as Alessio Piemontese's famous Secreti (1555), contained mainly practical and technological information in the form of useful recipes. Others, such as Giambattista Della Porta's Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic,
1558) deploy ed practical recipes in an effort to demonstrate the principles of natural magic. Other books of secrets, such as Isabella Cortese's Secreti (1564), disseminated alchemical information to a wide readership. Recent research has
suggested that the books of secrets may hav e play ed an important role in the emergence of experimental science by bringing practical technical information to the attention of experimental scientists. [1 ]

Publications
William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Book s of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
John K. Ferguson, Bibliographical Notes on Histories of Inventions and Book s of Secrets. 2 vols. London: Holland Press, 1959.

References
1. W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Book s of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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