(This is our second blog entry in The Recipes Project’s virtual conversation, “What is a Recipe?” For a bit of background or to read the first article, on a 19th Century recipe manuscript from Lancaster, PA, click here.)
Magia Naturalis, or Natural Magick, written by Giambattista della Porta was first published in 1558 in Naples when the author was fifteen years old. Della Porta was an Italian scholar and playwright known for his expertise and knowledge of a wide variety of subjects, and for having contributed many advances to the fields of agriculture, optics, pharmacology, hydraulics and more.
The edition held at The Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia is the first English translation published in 1658, 100 years after its initial publication. It contains some of the additions added by della Porta in subsequent editions, most notably, the first published description of the convex lens and camera obscura. Though he did not invent these, his work in perfecting and describing them, and their inclusion in Natural Magick, contributed to the dissemination of this knowledge.
But, you may be asking by now, what does this have to do with recipes? A quick look at almost any page in volume reveals the answer.
The entries on this page are immediately recognizable as bread recipes. There are hundreds of entries on how to prepare foods, including how to preserve cucumbers in brine (pickles!), how to sweeten bitter almonds with honey, and how to prepare various wine and spirits.
Additionally, there are many recipes that resemble medical recipe books of the era, such as the examples, which outline remedies for different issues with the eye.
And a suggested method for mediating the effects of the plague.
From here though, things start to get a little strange. Here is della Porta’s recipe for “counterfeit infirmities,” and the reasons why you may want to perform an illness.
And if counterfeit sickness wasn’t enough, then perhaps you’d like to know della Porta’s advice on how to counterfeit precious stones?
Or perhaps you need a way to freshen your armpits?
Or to dye hair red?
Or if one is feeling particularly nefarious, there are recipes for a “sleeping apple” or even a method for causing women to shed their clothing by burning rabbit fat (not recommended).
Natural Magick, consists of twenty books, or sections, each focusing on a particular area of scientific interest or physical manipulation. Like many books from this period, it does not separate these fields of inquiry into discreet sciences, instead seeing various manipulations of the physical world as belonging to the same world of thought and methodology. The subjects explored vary widely, from animal husbandry, house-keeping, alchemy, counterfeiting precious stones, physical experiments, distillation, tempering steel, wind instruments, invisible writing, hunting (described in a now humorous way as to “catch living creatures with your hands, and to destroy them”), to “How to adorn Women, and make the Beautiful.”
Empiricism, the foundation of modern scientific methods, would soon supplant this breed of natural philosophy heavily based in the teaching of figures such as Pliny the Elder and Aristotle. Indeed, much of this seems silly to the modern reader. However, the book was actually quite popular in its time, having five Latin editions within a decade of its publishing, and being translated into five languages within the next century, rare for books of its time.