EXPERIMENTS IN EARLY MODERN NATURAL HISTORY AND NATURAL MAGIC
EXPERIMENTS IN EARLY MODERN NATURAL HISTORY AND NATURAL MAGIC

“Instruments and Arts of Inquiry: Natural History, Natural Magic and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”, eds. Dana Jalobeanu and Cesare Pastorino, Journal of Early Modern Studies, Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2014), ISSN: 2285-6382 (

Summary/Abstract: This special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies aims at contributing to what is considered to be an unstudied field – the emergence of experimentalism in natural history, natural philosophy, and natural magic. The editors present two books for the intersection of natural history and natural magic: Giambattista della Porta’s Magia naturalis and Francis Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum. The first was read by contemporaries as “a treatise on natural ‘white’ magic, a compendium of wonderful‘objects’ and instruments” or as “a source book of experiments, recipes and ideas” (p.9). The second, while inspired from the first, re-interpreted the experiments borrowed from it and placed them in what the editors consider to be a “very different theoretical and methodological context” (p. 10).

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