The Secrets
Key Text: The Secrets of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piemont, containing excellent remedies against diverse diseases, wounds, and other accidents, with the maner to make Distillations, Parfumes, Confitures, Dying, Colours, Fusions, and Meltings. A worke well approved, verie necessarie for everie man. Newly corrected and amended, and also somewhat inlarged in certaine places, which wanted in the first edition.
Translated out of French into English by William Ward. Imprinted at London by Peter Short, for Thomas Wight (1595).
If you were living in early modern Europe, it was very likely that you would come across some version of Alessio Piemontese’s Secrets throughout your life. You might use one of his recipes for preserving food through the winter, treating common ailments at home, making soap and ink, speeding childbirth or inducing menstruation. If you were interested in alchemy, Piemontese could even offer you accessible ways of making the philosopher’s stone.
Piemontese’s books were best-sellers for centuries, read by ‘people of all sorts’ (as he termed them), from Portugal to Poland. The Secrets were first published in Venice in 1555, in Italian, promising to unveil the ‘secrets of nature’ to its readers. In just a few years, the text had been translated into several other vernaculars as well as Latin, re-edited, and augmented, becoming a live body of knowledge.
De' secreti del reuerendo donno Alessio Piemontese, prima parte, diuisa in sei libri (Venice, 1555). Public Domain.
The 1595 English edition is one of the best examples of the dynamic way in which practical knowledge in the form of recipes was constantly reworked in the early modern period. The Secrets promised the reader ‘newly corrected and amended’ material, ‘somewhat enlarged in certain places’. Unsurprisingly, booksellers marketed the edition as ‘very necessary for every man’, since it was slightly longer than the editions that came before it. So, even if you already had a copy at home, you could always buy the newest version of the text and have access to even more recipes. (And we think twenty-first-century capitalism is ruthless!)
In the preface, Piemontese told readers how he came from a noble family, having studied ancient and modern languages and developed his ‘natural inclination for philosophy and the secrets of nature’. Piemontese also claimed to have travelled for fifty-seven years throughout Europe, collecting eclectic recipes from the most unlikely sources: even ‘poor little women’ had contributed to his collection. This kind of narrative was not unusual in recipe books; it was arguably typical of the genre to which Piemontese’s writings belonged: books of secrets, a subcategory of recipes literature.
That Piemontese’s life story reflected authorial tropes of the genre was not a coincidence. He was very likely an editorial creation, a pseudonymous ‘hunter of secrets’. His fascinating biography included a moral epiphany about the value of sharing secret knowledge, rather than hoarding it, following the death of a man whom Piemontese could have helped – if only he had shared the recipe for the remedy.
After their first edition in 1555, the best-selling Secrets soon developed a life of their own: translations proliferated, and publishers were quick to add new material to the collections. In a time before strict copyright laws, control over the text was virtually non-existent and so new versions of the Secrets started to appear. Parts two and three of the collection were published in Venice in the decades following the success of the first book, and, in a second part published in English in 1560, the translator William Ward wrote how he had added new recipes by the mysterious author, who had ‘kept in touch’, delivering on Piemontese’s promise of new material. Of course, this was a fabulation.
A few years later, in 1567, the Venetian writer Girolamo Ruscelli published his own collection of recipes for domestic use, which he described as a continuation of Piemontese’s work. To justify this bold claim, Ruscelli confessed that he was the person behind the creation of Piemontese and that the recipes came from his own experiences, many of which had been developed in his ‘academy of secrets’ with fellow enthusiasts of natural philosophy and the mysteries of nature. The tale surrounding Piemontese and his recipes only got more intriguing as time went by.
Authority – and even authorship – were fluid concepts in early modern Europe, unstable in their meaning. For readers, the more fantastic the story, the more fascinating the character of Piemontese became. For publishers and translators, pseudo-authorship allowed them a higher level of agency in rewriting and enlarging the books as they saw fit. The vagueness and mystery surrounding Piemontese and his recipes offered more liberty for creation and transformation, a void to be filled.
The Secrets of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piemont, trans. William Ward (London, 1595). Public Domain.
The 1595 English edition was a textual patchwork. It was an indirect translation, made from Italian into English via French, as a cultural and linguistic mediator. It combined material from the original text with additions made by Antwerp publisher Christophe Plantin in his Dutch and French versions, with elements from the Latin and Spanish translations, recipes from other Italian editions, and additional English material (and this is not an exhaustive list of the additions!).
To give you an idea of how much it expanded on the original text, let’s consider recipes about menstruation. In the 1555 Italian edition, the original text that launched the craze over Piemontese’s recipes, there were no entries about menstruation at all. As the decades went by, however, several were added, by various translators and publishers. Forty years later, in the 1595 version, there were more than sixty, covering period pain, how to induce menstruation, and how to stop excessive bleeding, among others.
Piemontese’s Secrets was an editorial phenomenon. Because of the miscellaneous nature of the texts, virtually anyone could find a recipe of interest, whether for treating hiccups in babies to deworming horses. Additionally, because of the text’s pseudonymous nature and scarce resources to prevent what we would today call ‘plagiarism’, there was plenty of room for translators and publishers to transform the text in any way they wished to, in the hope of making the book more attractive to new readers. One of the main modifications the text underwent was the multiplication of the content: an expansion of its practical knowledge in the form of accessible, easy-to-follow recipes.
The growing field of recipes studies has blossomed in the past few decades, doing much to recover the relevance and impact of Piemontese and his work. Yet, despite this, and despite the evident popularity of The Secrets across early modern Europe, Piemontese is still relatively unknown to most people interested in history. While Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton have become household names, Piemontese has been largely forgotten (even if both Bacon and Newton were avid readers of ‘secrets’).
Piemontese’s Secrets was a key text in the early modern period. History of science and medicine, history of the book and translation, gender history, technical and craft history, and material, cultural and social history are some of the fields for which Piemontese’s text is relevant. The 1595 English translation of this work presents the historian with extra layers to unpeel, incorporating hundreds of recipes from previous collections, stemming from different social and regional contexts. This is a toolbox from which historians can pick and choose what to unpack, much in the same way that sixteenth and seventeenth-century people would have used it to suit their own needs.
Dr Julia Martins recently completed her PhD in History at King’s College London.
You can discover more at: https://juliamartins.co.uk/
Selected Bibliography.
Zbigniew Bela, ‘The Authorship of the Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont (Venice, 1555)’, Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki, 2016 (61), pp. 41-64.
William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018).
14 July 2023.