In the Know

Simon Schaffer

• Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture by William Eamon
  Princeton, 490 pp, £38.50, July 1994, ISBN 0 691 03402 8
• The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela Smith
  Princeton, 308 pp, £30.00, July 1994, ISBN 0 691 05691 9

Like some garrulous character in a story by Italo Calvino, an Italian physician tells of his meeting at a 16th-century siege with a Spaniard who had just lost his nose in a barrack-room brawl. ‘The nose fell in the sand, and I saw it because we were together. So holding it in my hand, all full of sand, I pissed on it, and having washed it with urine I attached it to him and sewed it on very firmly.’ After eight days, the nose remained firmly in place, the Spaniard ‘healthy and free, and all Naples marvelled at it’, as well they might. Such stories might seem far away from modern science, but according to William Eamon they hold vital clues to the course and meaning of the Scientific Revolution. The quick-witted medical improviser was Leonardo Fioravanti, an eminent ‘professor of secrets’, one of a number of Renaissance writers who traded on their reputation as masters of tricks, clues and recipes long lost to, or hidden from, common knowledge and now at last revealed to an amazed public. They foresaw laboratories and workshops, gardens and libraries, where old lore and new skills could be pursued in common.