De’ secreti del reverendo donno Alessio piemontese

One of the most famous books of secrets was a work attributed to Alessio Piemontese,
I secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese (The Secrets of Alessio, 1555).
Alessio’s Secreti went through more than a hundred editions and was still being reprinted
in the 1790s. The humanist Girolamo Ruscelli (1500–1566), the real author of the Secreti,
reported that the work contained the experimental results of an Academy of Secrets that
he and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in Naples in the 1540s. Ruscelli’s
Academy of Secrets is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society.
The academy was later imitated by Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615), who founded
an Accademia dei Secreti in Naples in the 1560s.
Alessio Piemontese was the prototypical “professor of secrets.” The description of
Alessio’s hunt for secrets in the Preface to the Secreti gave rise to a legend of the
wandering empiric in search of technological and scientific secrets. Its enormous
popularity made the work play a key role contributing to the emergence of the conception
of science as a hunt for the secrets of nature. The concept of science as a hunt pervaded
experimental science during the Scientific Revolution.
In the books of secrets, experimental science shaded into natural magic. Giambattista
della Porta’s Magia naturalis (Natural Magic, 1558) deployed practical recipes in an
effort to demonstrate the principles of natural magic. Other books of secrets, such as
Isabella Cortese’s Secreti (1564), a compilation of alchemical recipes, disseminated
experimental techniques and practical information to a wide readership.
(William Eamon, in "Encyclopedia of the scientific revolution: from Copernicus to Newton"/editor Wilbur Applebaum