Corpus of texts

Since recipes are almost everywhere in early modern Europe, our project could have started with very different sets of textual corpuses. But for the past three years we have investigated a specific selection of texts belonging to the “Baconian tradition”. We have dealt with the following categories of texts:

1. Books of recipes and commonplace books integrating ‘secrets; and recipes coming from the second edition of Giovanni Battista della Porta’s Magia naturalis.
   1. The notebooks of Hugh Plat (hosted by the British Library). Lawyer, philosopher and entrepreneur, with an interest in developing technologies and selling patents (in the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century). Hugh Platt is one of the key actors in the reception of Della Porta’s Magia naturalis (Mukherjee 2010, 2011) in England. Jalobeanu attempts to show that he was also a vehicle of transmission of ideas and recipes from Della Porta to Bacon and the Baconians of the seventeenth century. 
   2. The manuscripts of Henry Power. Natural philosopher, mathematician and experimenter, thorough Baconian and supporter of a certain brand of experimental philosophy. Henry Power left extensive manuscript records hosted by the British Library which were never subject to a thorough investigation. We have read through some of them and Grigore Vida and Dana Jalobeanu have transcribed two of the most important: a list of Power’s extensive collection of books and a commonplace book in which recipes and experiments from Della Porta are put together with experiments recorded by Francis Bacon, Kenelm Digby and other seventeenth century philosophers.
2. The second cluster of texts relate to the reception, publication (of successive editions), translation and circulation of Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum in seventeenth century Europe. Jalobeanu has identified the ways in which the posthumous Sylva Sylvarum relates other Baconian manuscripts, especially those discovered at the end of the twentieth century in Paris and published in volume XIII of the Oxford Francis Bacon.
3. A special attention was devoted to the “scientific” readers (and editors) of the two books, to the correspondence and manuscript work (and marginalia) they generated. We have perused the correspondences of Samuel Hartlib, Henry Oldenburg and Robert Boyle; and we have read several of John Evelyn’s manuscripts (see Matei 2022).
4. Another series of texts is represented by the Accademia dei Lincei’s recipes on fossilia, especially Francesco Stelluti (and Federico Cesi)’s Trattato del Legno Fossile Minerale (1637) and Fabio Collona’s De Glossopetris Dissertatio (1616), and their reception by Baconian-informed readers, such as Robert Hooke (see Liciu 2023).