Alexius Pedemontanus

Alessio Piemontese, also known under his latinized name of Alexius Pedemontanus, was the pseudonym of a 16th century Italian physician, alchemist, and author of the immensely popular book, "The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont". His book ["De' secreti del reuerendo donno Alessio Piemontese, prima parte, diuisa in sei libri", In Venetia: per Sigismondo Bordogna, 1555.] was published in more than a hundred editions and was still being reprinted in the 1790s. The work was translated into Latin, German, English, Spanish, French, and Polish. The work unleashed a torrent of 'books of secrets' that continued to be published down through the eighteenth century. [W. Eamon, "Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).]

Alessio was the prototypical ‘professor of secrets.’ His description of his hunt for secrets in the preface to the "Secreti" helped to give rise to a legend of the wandering empiric who dedicated his life to the search for natural and technological secrets. The book contributed to the emergence of the concept of science as a hunt for the secrets of nature, which pervaded experimental science during the period of the Scientific Revolution. [W. Eamon, “Science as a Hunt,” "Physis" 31 (1994), 393-432.]

It is generally assumed that Alessio Piemontese was a pseudonym of Girolamo Ruscelli (Viterbo 1500 — Venice 1566), humanist and cartographer [Gaetano Melzi. Alessio Piemontese, in "Dizionario di opere anonime e pseudonime di scrittori italiani o come che sia aventi relazione all'Italia". Milano, L. di G. Pirola, 1848. vol. I (A-G), p. 32 [http://www.google.it/books?id=d7IYAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:0ItC1xdPCPk_yCNTiDnnUiM#PPA32,M1] .] . In a later work, Ruscelli reported that the "Secreti" contained the experimental results of an ‘Academy of Secrets’ that he and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in Naples in the 1540s. [G. Ruscelli, "Secreti nuovi" (Venice, 1567).] Ruscelli’s academy is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society. [W. Eamon and F. Paheau, “The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli: A Sixteenth Century Italian Scientific Society,” "Isis" 75 (1984): 327 42] The academy was later imitated by Giambattista Della Porta, who founded an ‘Accademia dei Secreti’ in Naples in the 1560s.

Publications

*"Opera nuova nella quale si contengono tre utilissimi ricettari", 1538
*"De secretis libri sex mira quadam rerum varietate referti ex Italico in Latinum sermonem nunc primum translati...", Venice, 1550
*"Mirabilis magnus naturae", D. O. M. A. TRACTATUS II. Opificia et artificia, sive artes Mechanicas et manuarias ad Remp. necessarias, utiles et voluptarias complectitur. Commonly known under the German name of "Kunstbuch".
*Girolamo Ruscelli, Translation of Ptolemy's "Geography".

References

External links

* [http://www.ilab.org/db/book2322_060042.html Girolamo Ruscelli's map of the North Atlantic.]
* [http://books.google.it/books?id=c14MAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA827&dq=%22alessio+piemontese%22&as_brr=1 "Alessio Piemontese", "The Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge", p. 842, Longman, Brown, Green , and Longmans , 1842]