This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing recipes, the four papers of this special issue address two major issues. First, they shed new light on the relationship between (...) Della Porta's Magia naturalis and Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum. Second, they show that in the recording of their experimental practices, Bacon and Della Porta depart from the traditional “recipe format” and discover new avenues of experimental research. (shrink)

Kenelm Digby was among the first authors in England to embrace Cartesianism. Yet Digby’s approach to the mind–body problem was irenic: in his massive Two treatises (Paris, 1644), the author advocates a corpuscular philosophy that is applied to physical bodies, whereas the intellectual capacities of human beings remain inexplicable through the powers of matter. The aim of the present article is to highlight the (rather reticent) relationship of Digby’s corpuscularism with doctrines of spirits in connection with the Renaissance Neoplatonic tradition. (...) Not uncommon in seventeenth-century natural philosophies, such “spirits” are notoriously evasive entities: half spirit, half matter acting as mediators between the realms of bodies and souls. This article suggests that Digby sought to preserve the inveterate ideas of a universal spiritus and a world soul and, in particular, that Kenelm Digby translated (rather than “overcame”) Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–1499) spiritus doctrines into the language of seventeenth-century corpuscularism. (shrink)