Article ID: CBB517627491

Enacting Recipes: Giovan Battista Della Porta and Francis Bacon on Technologies, Experiments, and Processes of Nature (2020)

unapi

Abstract The relationship between Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum and Giovan Battista Della Porta's Magia naturalis has previously been discussed in terms of sources and borrowings in the literature. More recently, it has been suggested that one can read these two works as belonging to a common genre: as collections of recipes or books of secrets. Taking this as a framework, in this paper I address another type of similarity between these two works, one that can be detected by looking at the methods of reading, research, and enacting and recording recipes one can find in Bacon and Della Porta. I show that essential to the two approaches was the complex interplay of practices associated with enacting recipes, and that these influenced the ways in which Della Porta and Bacon recorded their experiments. Creative manipulation of the recipes transformed them into something new. In the case of Della Porta's second edition of the Magia naturalis, this new format is something I call ?technologies,? that is, ways of recording the enacting of recipes with the intention to ensure repeatability and predictability of results. In the case of Bacon, the enactment aims at something different: to display and ?bring to light? the hidden motions and processes of nature.

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Authors & Contributors
Rusu, Doina-Cristina
Pastorino, Cesare
Jalobeanu, Dana
Snively, Samantha
Bragagnolo, Manuela
Verardi, Donato
Concepts
Experiments and experimentation
Formulas, recipes, etc...
Natural philosophy
Experimental method
Scientific apparatus and instruments
Knowledge and learning
Time Periods
17th century
16th century
Renaissance
18th century
Places
England
Italy
Kassel (Germany)
Naples (Italy)
Europe
Institutions
Marburg. Universität
Royal Society of London
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