Secrets And Knowledge In Medicine And Science 1500 1800

Secrets played a central role in transformations in medical and scientific knowledge in early modern Europe. As a new fascination with novelty began to take hold from the late fifteenth century, Europeans thirsted for previously unknown details about the natural world: new plants, animals, and other objects from nature, new recipes for medical and alchemical procedures, new knowledge about the human body, and new facts about the way nature worked. These 'secrets' became popular items of commerce and trade, as the quest for new and exclusive bits of information met the vibrant early modern marketplace. Whether disclosed widely in print or kept more circumspect in manuscripts, secrets helped drive an expanding interest in acquiring knowledge throughout early modern Europe. Bringing together international scholars, this volume provides a pan-European and interdisciplinary overview on the topic. Each essay offers significant new interpretations of the role played by secrets in their area of specialization. Chapters address key themes in early modern history and the history of medicine, science and technology including: the possession, circulation and exchange of secret knowledge across Europe; alchemical secrets and laboratory processes; patronage and the upper-class market for secrets; medical secrets and the emerging market for proprietary medicines; secrets and cosmetics; secrets and the body and finally gender and secrets.

This book addresses magical ideas and practices in early modern Norway. It examines a large corpus of Norwegian manuscripts from 1650-1850 commonly called Black Books which contained a mixture of recipes on medicine, magic, and art. Ane Ohrvik assesses the Black Books from the vantage point of those who wrote the manuscripts and thus offers an original study of how early modern magical practitioners presented their ideas and saw their practices. The book show how the writers viewed magic and medicine both as practical and sacred art and as knowledge worth protecting through encoding the text. The study of the Black Books illuminates how ordinary people in Norway conceptualized magic as valuable and useful knowledge worth of collecting and saving despite the ongoing witchcraft prosecutions targeting the very same ideas and practices as the books promoted. Medicine, Magic and Art in Early Modern Norway is essential for those looking to advance their studies in magical beliefs and practices in early modern Europe as well as those interested in witchcraft studies, book history, and the history of knowledge.

Across early modern Europe, men and women from all ranks gathered medical, culinary, and food preservation recipes from family and friends, experts and practitioners, and a wide array of printed materials. Recipes were tested, assessed, and modified by teams of householders, including masters and servants, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons. This much-sought know-how was written into notebooks of various shapes and sizes forming “treasuries for health,” each personalized to suit the whims and needs of individual communities. In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Elaine Leong situates recipe knowledge and practices among larger questions of gender and cultural history, the history of the printed word, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The production of recipes and recipe books, she argues, were at the heart of quotidian investigations of the natural world or “household science”. She shows how English homes acted as vibrant spaces for knowledge making and transmission, and explores how recipe trials allowed householders to gain deeper understandings of sickness and health, of the human body, and of natural and human-built processes. By recovering this story, Leong extends the parameters of natural inquiry and productively widens the cast of historical characters participating in and contributing to early modern science.

This volume offers the user a guide to the neglected field of how-to books. How do I make soap? How do I dye textiles? What ingredients do I need for a effective remedy? How can one find and mine mineral resources, how does one make pewter cups or a good meal? Practical information of this kind, on distillation, medicine, dyeing, cosmetics, glassmaking, ceramics, metallurgy and many other subjects, flooded the book market in the first centuries of printing. As varied as these subjects are the research questions that we might ask: How do you learn practical skills from a book? Why were these books so popular, who used them and how, and can they even be considered to be a clearly defined genre? The aim of this volume, which emerged from a conference at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, is to find out which patterns characterise the genre of how-to books or “Rezepte-Büchlein”. It also aims to contribute to the clarification of terms for a genre, that operates under labels such as “Books of Secrets” and "recipe books" or, in German-speaking countries, "Kunst- und Wunderbuch" or “nützlich büchlein”. Some key issues addressed in the book include the traces of book use, the media shift from manuscript to print, the interaction between text and image, and the praxeological dimension of practical books. Self-help literature not only made it possible for interested laypersons to obtain information from all possible fields of knowledge, largely independent of institutional and educational environments; as "tracts for action" they differed from other genres in that they were consistently oriented towards implementation.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

What sort of information did people in early modern England seek? In The Practical Renaissance Donna Seger explores the diffusion and reception of prescriptive publications over the 16th and 17th centuries. Published in an age of dynamic religious and political change, these texts demonstrate the universal desire for health and wealth, a fortified body and an orderly household. Showing how classical and continental information had been "Englished" over time, this book shows how new publications supplanted these traditional ideas with more empirical and authoritative knowledge. Published in an age of dynamic religious and political change, these texts, which include plague tracts, husbandry handbooks, printed recipe books, and navigation manuals, demonstrate the universal desire for health and wealth, a fortified body and an orderly household. Divided into three parts, the opening chapters explore factors which affected the diffusion of practical knowledge via prescriptive texts. Part two focuses on the interaction between new discoveries and traditional authority, and the final section considers debates in the 'medical marketplace', the term 'knowledge-mongerer' and the commodification of knowledge at this time. A thorough exploration into the popular and pragmatic expressions of the period, The Practical Renaissance offers a new window into the movement in which knowledge and information became power.

This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.