Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

"This goes even further back because he traces the genre of the secrets of nature back to antiquity. It’s an incredible work. I teach with it every time I teach early modern science and the fact that it was published in 1994 and still stands up to current research is really impressive. One of the things that Eamon does is look at how a genre reflects knowledge, that is, he looks at the way that we shape our knowledge through forms of communication. He explores changes in media over time, from antiquity (when these secrets were given to initiates in a cave) to early modernity after the invention of print, which gives rise to a flourishing print market for these ‘how-to’ books. Looking at the media of knowledge, and the way that the media affects science, again, speaks to this turn away from the purely intellectual conception of the scientific revolution. It’s not just about how good your internal scientific ideas are, but how other phenomena related to wider social change can change knowledge—for example, conceptions of secrecy and publicity—and who has access to knowledge and how knowledge is pursued. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The really interesting thing about secrets—and there’s been a really vibrant research into the related genre of recipes in the past couple of decades—is that secrets are associated with mystical, occult, ancient lore. But at the same time, they’re very practical, everyday, how-to recipes for how to do things. So in the same flow of knowledge, you’ll get some really far-out recipes, but then also ‘how to take stains out of your clothing’. That was very popular. It meant, especially once print was able to popularize these recipes, that science became something that could be explored in everybody’s household, in your kitchen, as part of that more multivocal and hetero-social view of how experimentalism emerged in early modern science. This is a key book because it takes this very ancient genre, and very convincingly gives a history of its flow, of its changes over time, and shows how through changes in media such as print, a lot more people were able to get involved and to experiment in early modernity, thus contributing to this cultural shift towards experimentalism more broadly."