Science and Popular Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy: The "Professors of Secrets" and Their Books

Science and Popular Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy: The "Professors of Secrets" and TheirBooksAuthor(s): William EamonSource: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 471-485Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2541221 .

Accessed: 13/12/2013 12:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.123.35.41 on Fri, 13 Dec 2013 12:19:10 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=scj

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2541221?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Sixteenth Century Journal

Volume XVI, No. 4, 1985

Science and Popular Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy: The "Professors of Secrets"

and Their Books William Eamon*

New Mexico State University

The writings of Paolo Rossi and Edgar Zilsel on the social origins of science have fundamentally altered our understanding of the Scientific Revolution.1 For the first time in history, according to these scholars, natural philosophers began to take notice of the activities of the artisan's workshop, and the methodology of craftsmen provided a model for an entirely new, experimental approach to the study of nature that culminated in the philosophy of Francis Bacon. Although this thesis has been challenged,2 few would deny that the social framework of sixteenth and seventeenth century science was vastly different from that of the Middle Ages: instead of being concentrated solely within the universities, scientific activity shifted to princely courts, in- formal urban academies, and organized scientific societies.3 The social role of the scientist also changed, as patrons made more practical demands on his work, and as scientists increasingly justified their role in terms of social need.4 In short, science became a much more integral part of society in the early modern period than it had previously been; and a much broader spectrum of society entered the scientific picture, in the sense both that more kinds of people did science, and more people were affected by it.

*An earlier version of this paper was given at a session on "Artisans and Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy" at the American Historical Association annual meeting, San Fran- cisco, December 28, 1983. I wish to thank Professors John Martin and William Sewell for their comments on that version of the paper. I am also grateful to the Arts and Sciences Re- search Center, New Mexico State University, for supporting my research.

tPaolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. S. Atta- nasio (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Edgar Zilsel, "The Sociological Roots of Science," American Journal of Sociology, 47 (1941/42): 544-62.

2A. R. Hall, "The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution," in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. M. Claggett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 3-23.

3Stillman Drake, "Early Science and the Printed Book: The Spread of Science Beyond the University," Renaissance and Reformation, 6 (1970): 38-52; Bruce T. Moran, "German Prince-Practitioners: Aspects in the Development of Courtly Science, Technology and Pro- cedures in the Renaissance," Technology and Culture, 22 (1981): 253-74; and idem, "Princes, Machines and the Valuation of Precision in the 16th Century," Sudhoffs archiv, 61 (1977) 209-28. Still a useful study of the academies is Martha Ornstein, The Role oj Scientyic Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928).

4Robert S. Westman, "The Astronomer's Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Prelimi- nary Study," History of Science, 18 (1980): 105-47. In addition, see Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative study, (repr. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).



472 The Sixteenth CenturyJournal

We do not yet have a clear view of this "wider scientific picture" because the study of the social context of science is still relatively new. Certainly one important part of that picture, however, was the presence of a significantly larger and more socially diverse reading public.5 Although we do not know their names or their numbers, there is scarcely any doubt that more people could read, and more bought books, in the sixteenth century than ever before.6 To what extent were these new readers brought into our scientific picture, and how did scientific writers respond to their presence? In the following essay I should like to concentrate on just one detail of this large problem. It concerns a group of writings, known as "books of secrets," which were printed in many editions and were widely read in sixteenth century Europe.7 These curious works are interesting for several reasons. First, they comprise a new genre of scientific (or more exactly, technical) literature, created by the printing press in direct response to the new readership of the sixteenth century.8 Second, the authors of these works were not among the leading intellectuals of the day but came rather from the ranks of a "middle-level" intelligentsia composed of professional writers, physicians, and nonacademics who wrote specifically for that market. To some extent they served as mediators between elite and popular culture although the exchange, as we shall see presently, was distinctly one- sided; for these writers wanted to use the superior understanding of the scientist and scholar to reform the haphazard methods of the artisan and empiric. Finally, although to call these works "scientific" strains the definition of that word, I believe that we can detect in these writings the emergence of a new view of nature and of the scientific enterprise that appears in direct response to the new readership of the sixteenth century.

5Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Natalie Zemon Davis, "Printing and the People," in So- ciety and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 189-226. A fascinating case study of the impact of printing on popular culture is Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1980).

6A large literature on literacy in early modern Europe has appeared in recent years. In addition to the references in n. 5, see Miriam U. Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); and the cautionary note by Geoffrey Parker, "An Educational Revolution? The Growth of Literacy and Schooling In Early Modern Europe," Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 93 (1980): 210-20.

7There is very little literature on books of secrets; for bibliography, see John Ferguson, Bibliographical Notes on Histories of Inventions and Books of Secrets, 2 vols. (repr., Lon- don: Holland Press, 1959).

8This theme is developed at greater length in my "Arcana Disclosed: The Advent of Printing, the Books of Secrets Tradition and the Development of Experimental Science in the Sixteenth Century," History of Science, 22 (1984):111-50.



"Professors of Secrets" & Their Books 473

The term "book of secrets" is likely to bring to mind images of arcane lore or forbidden knowledge. To the modern reader expecting to encounter such mysterious, hidden wisdom, however, these books are bound to be disappoint- ing. What they typically revealed was only recipes, formulae, and "experiments," often of a fairly conventional sort, associated with one of the crafts, the household and garden, or medicine. Such "secrets" might include, for example, recipes for quenching waters used in hardening steel; instructions for making dyes, pigments, and drugs; directions for preserving fruits and for increasing the yield from the garden; and chemical preparations such as ajew- eller or tinsmith might use. When a sixteenth century writer claimed to have discovered a "secret," he often had this meaning in mind; and when a contemporary library catalog referred to a "book of secrets," it usually indicated a compilation of such recipes. In other words, books of secrets were technical "how-to" books rather than works of theoretical science, and the information they contained was secret only in the sense that it was likely to have been the property of specialized craftsmen who normally communicated their knowledge orally rather than in writing; or the recipes were the discoveries and inventions of experimenters who refused to publish them out of fear of having them cheapened. One of our authors, for example, tells us that he had jeal- ously guarded his secrets, even from his closest friends, because he feared that "they should no longer be called secrets, but public and common."9 He goes on to say that he was compelled to change his mind and publish them because his selfishness had once caused the death of an ailing artisan, whose life he might have saved with one of his precious remedies. One suspects, however, that the real reason for this author's change of heart was the realization that publication could be as good a servant to wealth and fame as secrecy.

The advent of printing contributed to the breakdown of such characteris- tically medieval attitudes.10 It opened up new opportunities to publish secrets for a profit; it gave writers an incentive to look for unpublished recipes; and it may even have encouraged craftsmen to reveal their secrets-for a price. Ital- ian printers, responding to popular demand, produced a flood of books of practical secrets in the second half of the sixteenth century.1" The ten works under consideration here went through a total of sixty-seven Italian editions between

9Alessio Piemontese, Secreti (see below, n. 12), "A' I Lettori." On this text see William Eamon, "The Secreti of Alexis of Piedmont, 1555," Res Publica Litterarum, 2 (1979): 43-55.

10Eisenstein, Printing Press, 543-66. In addition, see William Eamon, "From the Secrets of Nature to Public Knowledge: The Origins of the Ideology of Openness in Science," forthcoming in Minerva.

"Giovanni Ventura Rosetti, Plictho de larte de tentori (Venice, 1548), mentions having bought secrets from craftsmen in Florence and Genoa: "il costo mi riservo per mio segreto," 2.



474 The Sixteenth Century Journal

1555 and 1599.12 Not surprisingly, about three-fourths of these were published in Venice, whose printers had entered the popular book market early in the sixteenth century.13 Books of secrets were widely read all over Europe, however: over 240 editions and translations of these titles were published between 1555 and 1699, in languages that included French, English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Danish, and Polish. After 1700 the number of editions drops off sharply, but some were still being reprinted as late as 1788.

The substantial output of books in this genre did not fail to catch the at- tention of observers of Italian social and cultural life. Tommaso Garzoni, in his compendious Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1585), acknowl- edged the arrival on the Italian scene of a new group of writers whom he calls i professori dei' secreti, the "professors of secrets."914 Although Garzoni's description of these authors was not original, being based on a contemporary tract on "secrets" by Girolamo Cardano,15 it is extremely interesting that he should have seen them as forming one of the more than 400 distinct professioni that he reckoned made up the social world of sixteenth century Italy. Nor is it clear whether Garzoni meant anything more by this designation than "those who profess secrets," but he did in fact include them in a class of their own, distinct from, say, the herbolari, cabalisti, and lanefici, thus separating them from other intellectuals and practitioners. And he observed that there were some who devoted themselves to the search after rare secrets with such single-minded zeal that they often neglected their own daily needs. In Garzoni's mind at least, the search for secrets was an activity clearly distinct from other intellectual en- deavors and manual arts.

t2This paper is based on a reading and analysis of the publication history of ten Italian books of secrets published between 1555 and 1577. The texts are: Alessio Piemontese, Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio piemontese (Venice, 1555), (Alessio was a pseudonym for G. Ruscelli); Girolamo Ruscelli, Secreti nuovi (Venice, 1566); Giovanni Battista Zapata, Li maravigliosi secreti di medicina e chirurgia (Venice, 1577); Isabella Cortese, I secreti (Venice, 1561); Leonardo Fioravanti, Del compendio de i secreti rationali (Venice, 1564); Gabriele Falloppio, Secreti diversi e miracolosi (Venice, 1563); Pietro Bairo, Secreti medicinali (Venice, 1561); Giambattista della Porta, Magia naturalis (1558), expanded 1589; first Italian ed. Venice, 1560); Timotheo Rosello, Della summa de' secreti universali in ogni materia (Venice, 1561); and Giovanni Ventura Rosetti, Notandissimi secreti de l'arteprofumatoria (Venice, 1555). See table for publication history. These were not the earliest Italian books of secrets. In the 1530s a series of popular, single signature octavo books of secrets were published and also went through numerous editions. I intend to treat these in my forthcoming book on the books of secrets tradition in early modern Europe.

13See Paul F. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

14Tommaso Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Venice, 1585), 183-85.

15G. Cardano, De secretis, in Opera, II (Lyons, 1663): 537-50. 160n Falloppio, see Giuseppe Favaro, Gabrielle Falloppio Modenese (MDXXIII-

MDLXLL) (Modena, 1928).




Who were the "professors of secrets"? Garzoni mentions several by name, including Girolamo Ruscelli (who also wrote under the pseudonym of Alessio Piemontese), Leonardo Fioravanti, Gabriele Falloppio, Giambattista della Porta, and Isabella Cortese. These were certainly the most famous of our authors, judging by the number of editions of their writings, but to these we must add the names of Pietro Bairo, Giovanni Battista Zapata, Timotheo Rossello, and Giovanni Ventura Rosetti, who also published books of secrets, bringing the total to nine.

The professors of secrets were not, by any means, representatives of the Italian learned establishment. Only one of our authors-Falloppio, who taught anatomy at Padua,-was a university professor.16 Three other medical men are included in the group, but all were practitioners and not academics. Bairo, a distinguished physician whose practice was confined chiefly to upper-class patients, was at the time of his writing a physician to Charles II, duke of Savoy. 17 Zapata, on the other hand, practiced mainly among the poor in Rome; his reputation as an "empiric"9 was honored by two of his disciples, who published his secrets and dedicated the collection to their master.18 Fioravanti was a self-educated "empiric" who had served as a military surgeon in the Spanish fleet. A devoted Paracelsian, Fioravanti generated immense controversy, with his supposed marvelous cures and unconventional methods, and was called everything from a charlatan to a maker of miracles."9 Girolamo Ruscelli was a poligrafo employed by the famous Valgrisi publishing firm in Venice. A pro- lific author of some renown, his output consisted primarily of annotations and commentaries on the classics, handbooks of orthography, and editions of letters.20 Della Porta, a Neapolitan aristocrat, was the only one of our authors to earn an important reputation among contemporaries for his scientific work. His biographer, Giovanni Faber, tells us that della Porta was instructed in music, dance, riding, gymnastics, and other chivalric exercises essercitii cavallereschi), an education typical of the court nobility. He did not, apparently, obtain a university degree but nevertheless had a lively curiosity and devoted himself to the pursuit of science and the secrets of nature from a very early age. Indeed, he published the first edition of his Magia naturalis when he was only twenty-three and devoted much of the remainder of his life to expanding the findings of that book.21 The work drew praise from Kepler, Peiresc, and other

'7Secreti medicinali (n. 12), preface. See also Ferguson, Bibliographical Notes, II, 28.

18Li maravigliosi secreti di medicina e chirurgia, dedication. See also the brief notice in Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1811-1828), 52: 128-29, s.v. "Zapata."

'9The best biography of Fioravanti (though still inadequate) is that of Davide Gior- dano, Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese (Bologna: Licinio Capelli, 1920). See also Giuseppe A. Gentili, "Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese alla luce di ignorati documenti," Rivista di storia delle scienze, 42 (1951): 16-41.

20See Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 68. 21On della Porta's scientific work, see Luisa Muraro, Giambattista Della Porta mago e

scienziato (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978).




members of the European scientific community. Della Porta was also one of the earliest members, along with Galileo, of the famous Accademia dei Lincei, which was founded at Rome in 1603 by the youthful Prince Federico Cesi, marquis of Monticello.

Very little is known about the remaining three of our authors. Giovanni Ventura Rosetti was employed at the Venetian Arsenal as a provisionato, although his duties in that post are unclear. His job must have brought him into close contact with merchants and craftsmen, for he published a collection of recipes on perfumes and cosmetics and an important treatise on Italian dyeing techniques, which included numerous other recipes learned from practitioners.22 About Isabella Cortese, the only woman in the group, nothing is known outside of what she reveals in her Secreti, her only known work. Cortese dedicated her book to her brother (fratel carissimo), an archdeacon of Ragusa, and mentions having traveled in eastern Europe, where she practiced the arts of alchemy and perfumery. Although her social status is uncertain, her book bears the distinct mark of a woman of the Venetian nobility.23 I have not been able to identify Rossello, but his Secreti universali contains an unusually large selection of recipes relating to various craft processes, including distillation, metallurgy, alchemy, and dyeing, suggesting that he had considerable experience in the manual arts.

The predominance of physicians among the professors of secrets is easy to explain. Their training oriented them toward the natural sciences, and medical recipes were an important part of their professional practice. With the emergence of a booming market for popular vernacular literature, it was natural that medical practitioners should publish the remedies that were most successful for them. As Leonardo Fioravanti discovered, the book of secrets could be an effective medium for advertising his practice and some of his more exotic remedies, such as his siroppo magistrate and his elettuario angelico. That same book market opened up new opportunities for full-time employment for professional writers like Ruscelli, who could profit from their secondary interests in experimental science and medicine.24 Even bureaucrats like Rosetti could make their claim to fame by collecting and publishing "secrets," and at the same time take pride in doing a public service.

The authors of the books of secrets were, by and large, on the fringes of established culture, part of an urban intelligentsia of somewhat indeterminate

220n Rosetti, see Franco Brunello, The Art of Dyeing in the History of Mankind, trans. Bernard Hickey (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1973), 181-94. Rosetti's treatise on dyeing has been published in facsimile, with an English translation, by Sidney M. Edelstein and Hector C. Borghetty, The Plictho of Gioanventura Rosetti (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969).

23So asserted by Marco Ferrari, "Alcune vie di difusione in Italia di idee e di testi di Paracelso," in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinasci- mento (Florence: Olschki, 1982), 28.

240n the rise of the professional writer, see Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renais- sance Italy, 1420-1540 (New York: Scribner's, 1972), 60-61.




status, often self-taught, and more accustomed to the restless clamor of the piazza and workshop than to the solitude of the study. Their biographies and the publishing histories of their books suggest, superficially at least, a convergence of scientific and craft activity. In fact, there is substantial evidence that such in- terchanges actually took place. In a remarkable preface to his Secreti nuovi Girolamo Ruscelli describes a scientific academy that he helped organize in Naples, probably in the 1540s.25 The aim of the society, called the Accademia Segreta, was to "try out" or "prove" all the recipes and secrets that the group could discover from manuscripts, printed books, or from persons directly, and then publish those that had passed the experimental test. As Ruscelli put it:

Our intention was first to study and learn ourselves, there being no other study or discipline (and this is especially true in natural philosophy) than to make the most diligent inquiries and, as it were, a true anatomy of the things and operations of Nature itself.... In addition to our own pleasure and utility, we devoted ourselves equally to the benefit of the world in general and in par- ticular, by reducing to certainty and true knowledge so many most useful and important secrets of all kinds for all sorts of people, be they rich or poor, learned or ignorant, male or female, young or old. First, during all those years, we continually experimented on all the secrets that we could recover from books, whether printed or written, be they ancient or modern. And in doing such experiments, we adopted an order and method, one better than which cannot be found or imagined, as will be recounted next. Of all those secrets which we found to be true by doing three experiments on each in the manner that will be described later we, by the command of our Prince and Lord, chose some that are easier to do by everyone, of minor expense, and more useful to all kinds of people. I now send these to the printer for the benefit and the common pleasure of all beautiful minds that might take delight and interest in them.26

25The academy is described, and the preface translated, in William Eamon and Franqoise Paheau, "The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli: A Sixteenth Century Italian Scientific Society," Isis, 75 (1984): 327-42.

26Secreti nuovi, sig. 3v-4r: "L'intention nostra era stata primieramente di studiar & im- parar noi stessi, non essendo studio ne altro essercitio alcuno, che piui sia uero della Filosofia naturale, che questro di far diligentissima inquisitione, & come vna uera anatomia delle cose & dell'operationi dell Natura, in se stessa.... Et insieme con questa dilettatione & utilita nostra, noi aueuamo parimente caro di far beneficio almondo in generale & in particolare, con ridurre a certezza & a notitia uera tanti utilissimi & importantissimi secreti d'ogni sorte, & per ogni qualita di persona, cosi ricca, & pouera, dotta, & indotta, & maschio, & femina, gioueni 6 vecchi che essi sieno. Et per6 primieramente in tutti questi anni attendemmo di continuo a fare esperienze di tutte le sorti di secreti, che in libri a stampa, 6 a penna cosi antichi, come moderni potessimo ritrouare. Et nel far tale experienze abbiamo tenuto, & tenemmo un'ordine & un modo, che non si puo forse trouare, ne imaginare il migliore, come appresso si narrera. Et di tutti quei secreti & esperimenti, che abbiamo trouati esser ueri, con farne di ciascuno tre esperienze, nel modo, che si dira piui basso, noi per comandamento del




To accomplish this aim, Ruscelli's academy built, with substantial patronage from one of the local nobility, a meeting house equipped with a laboratory (lavoratorio) and hired several artisans to assist them in doing their experiments, including two apothecaries, two goldsmiths, two perfumers, and four herbal- ists and gardeners. Each of these workers, Ruscelli goes on to say, were ap- pointed to specific tasks in the laboratory according to their special skills. The twenty-seven academicians functioned mainly as overseers, but they were not averse to dirtying their own hands, for as Ruscelli states, "These higher people never failed to willingly lend a hand or to busy themselves where necessary."27 The Accademia Segreta, where artisans worked side by side with men of leisure and learning, is a remarkable example of the union of scholars and craftsmen that Rossi and Zilsel saw as being so important for the origins of modern science.

Although there are grounds to suspect that this academy may have been only a utopian vision,28 it was an ideal that was endorsed by the other professors of secrets. Della Porta, in fact, organized a similar academy at his home in Naples in the 1560s. The aims of this group (called the Academia Secretorium Naturae) seem to have been identical to those of Ruscelli's society, namely, to collect, test, and disseminate secrets: their experimental research was later published in della Porta's expanded, 1589 edition of the Magia naturalis.29 Although not much is known about the group's composition, della Porta employed at least one artisan in his academy, a certain distiller named Giovanni Battista Melfi, whom della Porta praises in one of his letters as a man of great skill.30

It is impossible to identify every source for the thousands of recipes that appear in the books of secrets. Some have precedents in medieval texts, but

nostro Principe, et Signore facemmo scelta d'una parte, cioe di quelli che sono piui facili da farsi da ciascheduno, di minore spesa, & piut da esser cari ad ogni sorte di persone generalmente, & cosi gli mando hora in luce a beneficio et dilettatione commune d'ogni bello ingegno che se ne diletti, & che sia per auergli cari."

27Ibid., 2r: ". . . non mancando ancor'essi soprastanti di metter le mani lietamente, & d'adoperarsi doue bisognaua."

28The tone of Ruscelli's preface strains credibility: the frequent references to the numbers three, seven, and twenty-seven (a "most highly mystical number" according to Ruscelli), for example, raise doubts about the existence of the society. The preface nevertheless makes an important statement of ideals concerning the organization and goals of scientific inquiry. Possibly the academy was an example of a utopian organization of the type later represented by Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis (1619), with its laboratorium in the center of the city, and by Salomon's House of Bacon's New Atlantis (1627).

29On the character of this group, see M. Gliozzi, "Sulla natura dell' 'Accademia de' Secreti' di Giovan Battista Porta," Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences 12 (1950): 536-41.

30Giuseppe Gabrieli, "Giovan Battista della Porta Linceo," Giornale critico dellafilosofia Italiana, 8, fasc. 5 (1927): 377, quoting a letter to Frederico Cesi, 2June 1612: "Intendo che il S.r Giampaulo Garimbello mio amico sia costi: e di Giovanni Battista Melfi anche il destillator della mia Academia V.S. m'avisi se sia in Roma, e se ha imparato da lui alcuna cosa."




many do not. Ruscelli wrote that the members of his academy examined books and manuscripts in their search for secrets, and it appears that many of the medical and household recipes came from privately owned manuscripts, workshop recipe books, or from the various compilations of medieval experimenta that physicians compiled for their own use.3" But the professors of secrets did not restrict themselves to the written word. They also learned recipes directly from unlettered people: from craftsmen, empirics, monks, and peasants. Alessio Piemontese, for example, claimed that he had traveled throughout the world for twenty-seven years in order to acquaint himself with all kinds of people: "As a result I have acquired a great many good secrets, not only from men of great knowledge and from great Lords, but also from poor women, artisans, peasants, and all sorts of people."32 Whether this claim was true or merely a calculated advertisement aimed at selling the book, it confirms a viewpoint shared by the other professors of secrets (and, perhaps, their audience), namely, that the people possessed a vast store of empirical knowledge that might be tapped and used for the benefit of society. Thus, Zapata claimed that poor people had simple remedies that they learned from experience, for which they spent only a few pennies yet received the same medicinal benefits as rich men who spent hundreds of ducats for their exotic cures.33 Even Falloppio, the university professor of anatomy, did not hesitate to publish the recipes of ordinary people, including one for oil of vitriol that he obtained from a Slav who sold aqua vitae in the piazza of San Marco in Venice.34 Della Porta encouraged the serious investigator to learn not only from ordinary folk but even from the brute animals: "For although they lack intelligence, they rely on the quickness of their senses, which far surpasses that of humans, and by their actions they teach us medicine, agriculture, architecture, economics, and almost all the arts and sciences." Hares, he continues by way of example, eat certain milky herbs which when digested produce a kind of cream: "Whence shepherds have learned to make cream of many such herbs pressed together."35 Fioravanti also placed a premium on the empirical skills of simple,

3'E.g., G. Giannini, ed., Una curiosa raccolta di segreti e di pratiche superstiziosefatta da un popolanofiorentino del secolo XIV (Castello, 1898). I discuss more of these in "Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science," forthcoming in Sudhoffs Archiv.

32Secreti, "A' I Lettori": ". . . & per certo moltissimi bei Secreti ho acquistati, non solamente da grandi huomini per dottrina, & da gran signori, ma ancora da pouere feminelle, d'artegiani, da contadini, & da ogni sorte di persone."

33Li maravigliosi seceti, 1-2.

34Secreti diversi e miracolosi, 6.

35Magia naturalis, (Naples, 1589), 11: "Nec minus ex animalibus: nam & si intellectu carent, sensibus adeo vigent, vt longe humanos superent, eorum actionibus Medicinam, Agriculturam, Architecturam, Oeconomiam, ac denique scientias, & artes fere omnes docent. . . Herbis lacteis vescuntur lepores, ob id coagulum habent in ventriculo, hinc didi- cere pastores lacteis herbis quampluribus lac coagulare."




unlettered folk. Shepherds and empirics, he claims, discovered the art of sur- gery; he describes how the shepherds make cheese; and he gives a rather curious method for curing an earache that he got from an old fisherman who, in turn, "learned it from experience."36

Another source of secrets was the craft tradition. The dyeing recipes in Rosetti's Plictho were manifestly products of the workshop, for Rosetti distinguished among dyeing practices in the various regions of Italy and mentions several master dyers by name.37 Alessio, Isabella Cortese, and Rosetti all give recipes for making perfumes that suggest some familiarity with the techniques of professional perfumers; and Alessio's careful description of metallurgical techniques and of casting bells and medals indicates an intimate knowledge of workshop practices. Della Porta visited the workshops of glassmakers and metallurgists in his search for the "experiments" that went into the Magia naturalis. He even describes an improved method for casting armor that he developed by watching armorers at work and experimenting on his own.38

Despite their emphasis on technique and hands-on experience, the range of these writers' interests in the crafts was actually quite limited. They were, on the whole, restricted to those arts which did not come into conflict with aristocratic sensibilities: alchemy, distillation, the making of perfumes and es- sences, wine making, cosmetics, painting, and a few of the metallurgical trades, but especially those pertaining to jewelry, the making of armor, and the casting of medals and other small objects. None of the "base" mechanical arts, such as carpentry or blacksmithing, interested the professors of secrets. Nor were they particularly concerned with using science to improve the state of the arts although they often claimed that their own "secrets" were better than those of craftsmen. With the notable exception of Rosetti, who wrote his work on dyeing to teach the art to the poor in order to relieve unemployment, none of these authors had any Baconian designs for social reform. On the con- trary, I think that their attitude toward the arts is best characterized by the term "virtuosity," an ideal that emerged with the gradual diffusion, through the middle ranks of society, of the image of the courtier.39 The mechanical arts still carried the stigma of being base-as occupations unfit for the gentleman-,

36Compendio de i secreti rationali, 47r. Fioravanti also describes grafting techniques he learned from gardeners.

37Rosetti, Plictho: "A tenger de vergino secondo maestro Agustino da Mantoa," 48; "A tenger in color Cremesino socondo maestro Raimondo Fiorentino," 50.

38Magia naturalis, 224. For della Porta's relationship with Italian artisans, see Giuseppe Campori, "Gio. Battista della Porta e il Cardinale Luigi d'Este," Atti e memorie della RR. Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Provincie Modenesi e Parmensi, 6 (1872): 165-90.

39The best study of the virtuosi, though it deals with the English movement, is Walter Houghton, "The English Virtuosi in the Seventeenth Century,"Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1942): 51-73, 190-219.




but this attitude was being challenged, both by the emergence of a new con- ception of the artist and by the wealth and political influence of commercial and manufacturing interests.40 Virtuosity was, in part, an attempt to accommo- date the courtly values represented in Castiglione's II Cortegiano with this new reality; to construct a new model of nobility that was more appropriate to urban classes who were not ennobled by birth, and who were engaged in busi- ness and the professions rather than war. The very qualities that determined nobility were undergoing a change in the Renaissance.41 The upwardly- mobile middle class found comfort in knowing that "true nobility" consisted of virtue and personal merit rather than birth, and that virtue was acquired, not inherited. One of the outward signs of this newly-acquired status was "virtuosity," which included collecting conceits, "secrets," and cabinets of curiosi- ties. Thus, the professors of secrets do not praise the mechanical arts, but neither do they condemn them. As long as the arts are pursued out of pleasure and used to fill idle moments, they are the marks of a gentleman; only when they are pursued to make a living do they become sordid. For the virtuosi, the mechanical arts were not so much economically useful as they were an avoca- tion that set one apart from the crowd.

The conflicting epistemological consequences of these attitudes are quite interesting. On the one hand, all of the professors of secrets insisted on the im- portance of first-hand experience as a guide to discovery. Indeed, they staked their reputations on their own lengthy, personal experience in the arts and medicine. Fioravanti stressed that experience "is the master of all things" and praised his own books on the grounds that they did not rest on the study of letters, "but solely on great practice and on experience in the things of the world."42 In spite of this Fioravanti and the other professors of secrets proudly declared-as if to lend credibility to their recipes-that many of their secrets were tried out and found successful in the courts and on noble patients.43 One of Falloppio's remedies was used by queen Johanna, mother of the emperor Charles V; and another cured Pope Paul III and earned for its inventor an ec- clesiastical benefice.44 Falloppio concluded (one assumes from experience) that different compositions were needed to heal persone nobili, in contrast to persone rustici, because treatment must respect the quality of the person.45 To the professors of secrets the emphasis on experience and experimental test was not in- compatible with upholding the traditional order.

40The new, uplifted status of the artisan is treated in Burke, Culture and Society in Ren-

aissance Italy, 63-71. 41See ibid., 235-44. 42Compendio de i secreti rationali, Dedication and Proemio.

43Ibid., 68, 126, 135. 44Secreti diversi e miracolosi, liv, 29v.

45Ibid., 53v.




Recipes, of course, are designed to be used and not merely read. Yet the recipes in the Italian books of secrets catered to a strikingly aristocratic concept of usefulness. Isabella Cortese wrote secrets "pertaining to every great lady," as she no doubt conceived of herself, while Rosello's Secreti universali was an- nounced to be "arranged for men and women of high genius," as well as for physicians, all sorts of industrious artisans and for "every person of virtuosity" (ogni persona virtuosa). Ruscelli printed his secrets "for the benefit and common pleasure of all beautiful minds that might take delight and interest in them." Here readers could find recipes for making sweet soaps, creams and "precious waters" for the face, pomanders and perfumed lamps for the bedchamber. From Fioravanti one could learn a technique for grafting fruit trees that none of the gardeners knew about; and della Porta's "natural magic" included magic tricks for the parlor, counterfeiting gemstones, and making fine steel for cutlery.

All of this seems to suggest an intended public of a fairly genteel sort, but we can be confident that the audience-those who actually read these books-was much more diverse.46 Published in large quantities and in relatively inexpensive editions by printers who specialized in popular literature, books of secrets must have appealed to a wide spectrum of urban readers.47 When virtuosity became a quality that anyone could acquire simply by reading a book, this further eroded the distinction between noble and common. There were, of course, other criteria for nobility-namely birth and wealth-, but even these were a little less certain than they had once been, as the courtesy books of the late sixteenth century show.48 The point is that by showing "how-to" gain some of the external signs of status, by reducing certain "qualities" to simple rules and formulae, books of secrets may have taken some of the mystique out of traditional class distinctions.

46The distinction between "public" and "audience" is made by Davis, "Printing and the People," 192-93.

47We do not have firm evidence for the prices of these books. However, since the amount of paper that went into the making of a book was the major determinant of its pro- duction cost, size of edition is an important clue for making reasonable estimates of prices. Calculating from Paul F. Grendler's table of the prices of Giolito books, 1549-91 (The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977], 13), I estimated that the average price per page of octavo books (all the books of secrets were octavos) was approximately .0679 soldi. Multiplying by number of pages, this gave prices ranging from about 5 soldi (for Rosetti's little Notandissimi secreti ) to almost two lire (for Ruscelli's hefty Secreti nuovi), the average price being approximately 1 lira. Compar- ing these with average wages of artisans in Venice in Brian Pullan, "Wage-Earners and the Venetian Economy, 1550-1630," in Pullan, ed., Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Methuen and Co., 1968), 146-74, it appears that any one of these books would have been within reach of master craftsmen, and that even wage laborers could afford the smaller ones (whose prices were equal to about a fourth to a half of a day's pay).

48J. W. Holme, "Italian Courtesy-Books of the Sixteenth Century," Modern Language Review, 5 (1910): 145-66.




In much the same way these works stripped nature of some of its mystery as well. Underlying the books of secrets tradition was an entirely new concep- tion of nature and of the aims of scientific inquiry. For the professors of secrets nature was permeated with secrets to which man had reasonable access. Sci- ence was not an hermeneutical exercise, an effort to harmonize experience with authority (as almost all medieval science was) but a venatio, or a hunt, a search for secrets that lay hidden in obscure arts and in the deepest recesses of nature itsel.49 The implication-thus jettisoning the scholastic tradition-is that nature is a great unknown and that science must begin anew. Fioravanti, like Paracelsus before him, wanted to make a clean break with the past, to "throw all the books of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna into the fire."50 The political import of this outlook was barely realized in the sixteenth century: Fioravanti, despite his radical stance against the medical establishment, accepted and proudly displayed on the title pages of his books the title of cavaliere. Later professors of secrets were more uncompromising in their attack on the traditional order, as the bizarre case of Constantino Saccardino suggests. Saccardino, a distiller, charlatan, and author of a book of Paracelsian medical secrets, was in the habit of saying, "Only fools believe that hell exists. Princes want us to believe it because they want to do as they please. But now, at last, all the common people have opened their eyes."'"I Saccardino, who led an un- successful lower-class conspiracy against the papal government, was hanged as an atheist in Bologna in 1622.52

Also implied in the epistemology of the books of secrets tradition is the view that knowledge is a kind of making and that making itself is a form of cognition that generates true knowledge. This outlook not only made the professors of secrets more sympathetic to the contributions of craftsmen, but it also lent itself admirably to organized experimental research because it was relatively easy to collect and try out recipes. Under these circumstances, more- over, magic could not occupy a commanding place, as it had in the past. Although the professors of secrets were fond of proclaiming that their recipes were mirabilissime, there is very little magic in the books of secrets. On the con- trary, books of secrets provided practical instructions, in the form of recipes, that anyone could manage. By reducing marvels to ordinary technical proce- dures, the professors of secrets stressed that the way to accomplish natural

490n the concept of science as venatio, see Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts, 42; and Rodolfo Mondolfo, "Lavoro manuale e lavoro intellettuale dall' antichita al Rinasci- mento," Alle origini della filosofia della cultura (Bologna, 1956), 148.

50Quoted in Ferrari, "Alcune vie di diffusione in Italia di idee e di testi di Paracelso" (n. 23), 29. Ferrari shows in this article that the books of secrets were one of the principal media through which radical Paracelsian ideas were transmitted in Italy.

51Carlo Ginzburg, "High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Six- teenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Past and Present, 73 (1976): 28-41, quoted at 35.

52Saccardino's case is discussed by Carlo Ginzburg and Marco Ferrari, "La colombara ha aperta gli occhi," Quaderni Storici, 38 (1978): 631-39.




magic was not through cunning, but merely to follow the rule. Finally, the professors of secrets emphasized experience as a guide to scientific discovery and experiment as the test of truth. By "experiment," of course, they did not mean systematic, controlled experimentation in the modern sense: they simply meant a trial or empirical verification of a recipe. Ruscelli, indeed, required that three tests be made before any recipe be accepted as true. Yet, while the experimental method employed here was obviously rather primitive, it is histori- cally quite significant; for it reveals a stage in the development of the concept of experiment that stands midway between the medieval concept of experimentum as ordinary experience and Galileo's revolutionary method of using an experiment to test an hypothesis.53

Recipes certainly do not explain phenomena; nor, in themselves, do they lead to understanding. Nevertheless, they are rudimentary statements of regu- larities in nature and did act as guides to making new experiments. Collected in one place and classified, as in the book of secrets, recipes can be put to the test by anyone. Once they are exposed to public scrutiny, they are no longer "secrets" and hence lose their arbitrary character; what was formerly attributed to special authority, magic, or the cunning of artisans now appears natural and rational. By revealing the secrets of some of the arts and by publicizing their own experiments rather than hiding them, the professors of secrets helped to expose the tyranny of cunning, bring the reign of secrets to an end, and usher in an age of public science.54

53For the history of the concept of experiment in the sixteenth century, see Charles B. Schmitt, "Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella's View with Galileo's in De motu," Studies in the Renaissance, 16 (1969): 80-138.

54The concept of "public science" is developed by John Ziman, Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).




Table

THE "PROFESSORS OF SECRETS" AND THEIR BOOKS

Title and Date Number Occupation of first edition of editions

Name and Dates (by order of appearance) 1555-1599

"Alessio Piemontese" Secreti del reverends donno 18 (Pseudonym for Alessio piemontese, Girolamo Ruscelli) Venice, 1555

Giovanni Ventura provisionato Notandissimi secreti de 2 Rosetti at Venetian larte profumatoria,

Arsenal Venice, 1555

Giambattista scientist Magia naturalis (1558; 3 Italian della Porta (1535-1615) expanded, 1589) first 15 Latin

Italian ed.,Venice, 1560

Isabella Cortese noblewoman? I secreti, Venice, 1561 7

Pietro Bairo physician Secreti medicinali, 4 (1468-1558) Venice, 1561

Timotheo Rossello unknown Della summa de' secreti 5 universali in ogni materia Venice, 1561

Gabriele Falloppio physician Secreti diversi et 9 (1523-1562) miracolosi, Venice, 1563

Leonardo Fioravanti military surgeon Del compendic de i secreti 9 1517-1558 rationali, Venice, 1564

Girolamo Ruscelli professional Secreti nuovi, 1 writer Venice, 1566 (1500-1566)

Giovanni Battista physician Li maravigliosi secreti di 9 Zapata (born c. 1520) medicina e chirurgia,

Venice, 1577

Total Italian editions 67



Documents

Science and Popular Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy: The "Professors of Secrets" and Their Books