Spiritual Technologies: Cider-Making and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England
- Autores: Dana Jalobeanu, Oana Matei
- Localización: Nuncius: annali di storia della scienza, ISSN 0394-7394, Vol. 37, Nº. Extra 2, 2022 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Plants in Early Modern Knowledge), págs. 315-345
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Cider making does not strike one as much of a philosophical enterprise. However, in England, in the second part of the seventeenth-century, many natural philosophers were actively involved in it. This paper investigates the philosophical premises and methodological underpinning of this enterprise, showing that cider-making developed as a branch of applied Baconian science. We show that the grand-scale project of cider making shared a background theory of Baconian inspiration and was conceived in terms of Bacon’s rules and methods of experimenting and collaborative data-sharing. With this Baconian theoretical and methodological framework, naturalists involved in this enterprise selected and tried old recipes, experimented with new ones, and turned cider-making into an early modern technology. Central to this technology was the idea that, in the process of cider-making, the naturalist manipulates the living spirits of the vegetal world, enclosing them in a bottle.
