Recipes, ‘technologies’, experiments: Enactment and the emergence of modern science

PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0251

This PCE Research Grant, devoted to the investigation of the transformation of the recipe format in the seventeenth century, was hosted by the ICUB-Humanities, University of Bucharest. In between 2021 and 2023, Dana Jalobeanu and her team, investigated various forms of recordings – of ‘recipes’, trials, experiments and ‘secrets’ – looking at how knowledge was embodied (an encoded) in these recordings. The investigation focused on the process of disambiguation through which tacit knowledge embodied in the recipes was gradually spelled out, tried, tested, reformulated and transformed.

We have called this process “enactment”; and, in the past three years, we have investigated and brought to light various strategies of enactment. Some of these strategies end in experiments and experimental reports properly speaking; in some cases, involving sophisticated instruments of detection and measurement (Jalobeanu 2021, 2023). In some other cases, as we have shown, enacting recipes does not lead to scientific experimentation, but to what we have called ‘technologies’ (Jalobeanu 2016, 2020). In the past three years we have shown how this has happen in several case-studies (Jalobeanu and Matei 2022, Matei 2022). (More on “technologies” here).

Our greatest achievement was to uncover and place on the map of the early modern studies an almost forgotten philosopher, Henry Power (1621-1668). The author of a single and widely-quoted book, Power is, however, insufficiently understood, mainly because his large archive (of notebooks, draft treatises, commonplace books, correspondence) has never been thoroughly investigated. We have read some of these manuscripts (hosted by the British Library) and we have managed to transcribe, so far, two of them.

In several of our talks we have explored the inter-relationship between Power’s manuscript works and his published Experimental philosophy. We have organized a panel on Henry Power in the online seminar Princeton Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (see here the recording). We have proposed a special issue on Henry Power to the Annals of science. The proposal was accepted and the volume will be submitted by the end of 2024.