The latest issue of Centaurus: The Journal of the European Society for the History of Science is now available online.

Special issue: The creative power of experimentation: Bacon and Della Porta

Guest editors: Doina‐Cristina Rusu and Dana Jalobeanu

This special issue investigates the specific methods of reading, selecting, enacting, and recording recipes, as well as the experimental practices in Giovan Battista Della Porta and Francis Bacon. Making use of a comparative approach, its aims are to reveal the ways in which both Della Porta and Bacon depart from the traditional “recipe format” that prevailed in early modern books of secrets and to discover new avenues of experimental research. 

• Doina‐Cristina Rusu and Dana Jalobeanu, ‘Giovan Battista Della Porta and Francis Bacon on the creative power of experimentation‘ [Open access]
• Doina‐Cristina Rusu, ‘Using instruments in the study of animate beings: Della Porta’s and Bacon’s experiments with plants‘ [Open access]
• Arianna Borrelli, ‘Giovan Battista Della Porta’s construction of pneumatic phenomena and his use of recipes as heuristic tools‘ [Open access]
• Dana Jalobeanu, ‘Enacting recipes: Giovan Battista Della Porta and Francis Bacon on technologies, experiments, and processes of nature‘
• Cesare Pastorino, ‘Beyond recipes: The Baconian natural and experimental histories as an epistemic genre‘ [Open access]

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/16000498/2020/62/3