My most recent project is a book about the life and times of the Italian Renaissance surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-1588?), a surgeon and natural philosopher from Bologna. He belonged to the community of experimenters whom contemporaries called the ‘professors of secrets'. His scientific collaborators were not university professors, but pharmacists, distillers, glassmakers, lens grinders, physicians, friars, and empirical doctors. The plants of the New World fascinated him, and he interviewed an American Indian in King Philip II's court to learn more about them.
Fioravanti was an inventor, an entrepreneur, and a reformer. The underground community of natural philosophers of which he was a part is not well known. Historians of science have been too preoccupied with the ‘great men' of science to concern themselves much with marginal figures such as distillers, herbalists, empirics, and women. Yet these practitioners made up a substantial part of the Renaissance scientific community. They existed in every European country, plying their trades and selling their wares in the piazzas and marketplaces, and practicing in courts great and small. Over a century before the foundation of the Royal Society of London, they were collaborating in academies dedicated to the great hunt for the secrets of nature. They were engrossed in alchemy, natural history, and magic, the sciences they thought would bring them closer to their quarry. They believed passionately in what they called the ‘science of experience', and they made a singular contribution to modern science: the idea of the experiment. My book is an attempt to reconstruct, through the life of one of its most flamboyant representatives, the cultural world of the forgotten Renaissance experimenters.
Forthcoming in March 2010
(Random House/National Geographic Books)
