Product Description

By explaining how to sire multicolored horses, produce nuts without shells, and create an egg the size of a human head, Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1559) conveys a fascination with tricks and illusions that makes it a work difficult for historians of science to take seriously. Yet, according to William Eamon, it is in the "how-to" books written by medieval alchemists, magicians, and artisans that modern science has its roots. These compilations of recipes on everything from parlor tricks through medical remedies to wool-dyeing fascinated medieval intellectuals because they promised access to esoteric "secrets of nature." In closely examining this rich but little-known source of literature, Eamon reveals that printing technology and popular culture had as great, if not stronger, an impact on early modern science as did the traditional academic disciplines. By explaining how to sire multicolored horses, produce nuts without shells, and create an egg the size of a human head, Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1559) conveys a fascination with tricks and illusions that makes it a work difficult for historians of science to take seriously. Yet, according to William Eamon, it is in the "how-to" books written by medieval alchemists, magicians, and artisans that modern science has its roots. These compilations of recipes on everything from parlor tricks through medical remedies to wool-dyeing fascinated medieval intellectuals because they promised access to esoteric "secrets of nature." In closely examining this rich but little-known source of literature, Eamon reveals that printing technology and popular culture had as great, if not stronger, an impact on early modern science as did the traditional academic disciplines.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1350208 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

Amazon.com Review
In this extraordinary interpretation of medieval European culture, William Eamon draws on history, theories of the sociology of communication, and literature to show how science derives from magic: the sequence of events that a magical or alchemical experiment involves unfolds in the same way as a scientific test, or even a recipe. The transmission of such knowledge through books, letters, and speech allowed science to grow and to transform the world, drawing Europe from the Dark Ages to the modern era. William Eamon's look at arcane and even forbidden texts will be of special interest to fans of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.

From Library Journal
Eamon (history, New Mexico State Univ.) convincingly argues that the medieval books of secrets were an integral part of popular science and evolved into the new scientific philosophy of the Renaissance. In these books, natural philosophers began to compile and publish their recipes of natural magic. Their secrets ranged from stain removal formulas and iron-tempering techniques to love potions and plague cures. The books, coupled with the rise of printing, created a boom in "popular" or nonacademic science. Eamon also chronicles the work of a few magicians to illustrate the evolving nature of what constituted a secret. The philosophy behind the secrets shifted from traditionally believed, divinely revealed, and occult phenomena to experimentally discovered natural effects and causes. This is a significant contributon to the history of science and medicine. However, some background knowledge of 16th - and 17th - century Europe is helpful. Recommended for all history of science collections.
- Eric D. Albright, Northwestern Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A scholarly survey of how the concept of ``secret'' assisted the development of experimental science from ancient times until the 17th century. The idea of delving into the hidden things of nature and harnessing--or even altering--its processes smacked, in centuries past, more of magic than of science. Eamon (History/New Mexico State Univ.) opens with a nuanced view of the medieval tradition of secrets, its Hellenistic origins, and its Islamic and Scholastic forms. He notes that the empirical approach was not regarded as ``science'' because, rather than being purely theoretical, it dealt with the unpredictable and the ``irrational.'' Eamon looks at attitudes toward science of, among others, St. Augustine, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. Eamon is much influenced by Elizabeth Eisenstein's work on the role of printing in exposing classical scientific ideas to scrutiny. He relates how craft knowledge, traditionally kept secret, was divulged by means of vernacular technical textbooks, which contained ``recipes'' and resembled modern how-to books. In 16th-century Italy, ``professors of secrets'' arose who traveled and published practical and ``alternative'' medical advice based on herbs and potions. We encounter colorful characters: Leonardo Fioravanti, a surgeon who, without antisepsis or anesthesia, took out a woman's spleen, ``though up to that time I had never taken out anything''; the great magus Giambattista Della Porta, who employed occult practices in a purely empirical manner, i.e., without the incantations. In the final section of his book, Eamon describes how this dissemination of knowledge led to the beginnings of the modern empirical attitude, which, he suggests, appealed more to the bourgeois values of the time than did the holistic theoretical concerns of earlier centuries. A feast of detailed scholarship, anecdote, and reflections- -touching on a crucial but neglected theme in the development of the western intellectual tradition. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

MEDIEVAL SCIENCE
For those who are interested in Medieval Science, here you can find a serious work of a widespread medieval genre.