La Magia naturalis di Giovan Battista Della Porta: Lingua, cultura e scienza in Europa all'inizio dell'eta moderna.

Laura Balbiani. La Magia naturalis di Giovan Battista Della Porta: Lingua, cultura e scienza in Europa all'inizio dell'eta moderna.

(IRIS. Ricerche di cultura europea, 17.) Bern and Berlin: Peter Lang, 2001. 244 pp. index. append. table. Bibl. $43.95. ISBN: 3-906767-22-1.

Winner of the international "Luigi De Franco" prize in 2001, this book offers an unusual take on the multi-faceted and much-studied Neapolitan proto-scientist by a scholar whose discipline narrowly defined is German linguistics. There is nothing narrow about Balbiani's aim, however, which is no less than to perform an integrated textual analysis of the 1558 Magia naturalis sive de miraculis rerum naturalium and its Italian and German translations, combining the methods of philology, textual linguistics, and sociolinguistics with cultural history and history of science, calculating the semiotic weights of emerging vernacular technical terms for the purpose of reconstructing through its choice of words the world of early modern European science. Although the 1558 Magia in four books caused an international stir, it might seem a slender subject in as much as it was superseded by the even more famous expansion into twenty books published in 1589. But Balbiani sees the work of the twenty-three-year-old Della Porta as both plan for the 1589 Magia and foundation of the lifelong investigation which produced seventeen other volumes on physiognomy, cryptography, mnemonics, botany, chiromancy, astronomy, hydraulics, optics, ballistics, alchemy, mathematics. Balbiani's analyses emphasize the language of alchemy, optics, and botany.

The first of her five chapters presents the 1558 Magia as a European text, the Latin original an immediate best-seller in scientific circles, soon translated into Italian, Dutch, and French in the 1560s and into German in 1612. The subjects Della Porta takes up here are those that would always engage him, already treated according to the principles and approaches, especially the insistence on combining traditional knowledge with hands-on experiment, that are considered characteristic of his method and explanatory of his position in the history of science as a transitional figure between medieval natural philosophy and modern science. Examining the anonymous Italian and German versions in relation to each other and to the Latin original, Balbiani handily discards the common supposition that Della Porta was his own first translator by adducing Italian misreadings of Latin passages rendered correctly in German, clarifying ambiguities and attesting the search for common technical terms in the evolution of Europea n scientific discourse.

Balbiani locates the context shaping the text in Della Porta's unofficial style of education, outside the university, but including the reading that steeped him in traditional paradigms and in the auctores he quotes or uses without naming, like Cornelius Agrippa and possibly Cardano, and in the investigative spirit of his learned family that nurtured diversity of interests and freedom to experiment. Likewise determining was the immediate ambience which would constitute both his first audience and his lifelong community, the Neapolitan intellectual circles frequented at various times by leading philosophers and naturalists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The genesis and reception of this first work for Balbiani carry the seeds of an international and constantly renewed audience from the appearance of the 1558 Magia, dedicated to Philip II of Spain (and Naples), through the recent century in which Della Porta figured in Foucault's and Eco's frames of reference.

A chapter on strategies of scientific communication includes discussion of the theoretical linguistic bases of texts and of the modern hermeneutics that interrogates them sociologically and anthropologically. Balbiani identifies the object of communication in the Magia as the art of the magus, and its constant point of reference as the realm of the natural marvelous. Knowledge was nor to be disseminated indiscriminately but in terms chosen to maintain epistemic secrecy while communicating to the aspiring seer the spectacle of nature's marvels and the manner of demonstrating them. Interesting questions arise here concerning Della Porta's theatricality and the innate contradiction between confidentiality among adepts and acolytes and the mass medium of print, vernacular print, at that.

In a concluding chapter Balbiani undertakes to show language and culture evolving together, and produces a wealth of illustrative examples. Specific comparisons concretely confirm that Della Porta inhabited two linguistically separate worlds, one theoretical and philosophical, compact of Latin and erudite coinages, the other a milieu of laboratory and crafts generating idiomatic terms in different vernaculars. Examination of exemplary word by exemplary word details the trials in standardizing scientific terms, the translation of components of Latin words, the use of lexical pairs for precision, especially in German, the formation of "Europeanisms." Thus Balbiani opens one view after another of early modern scientific language in fieri.

The revealing linguistic comparisons between German and Italian renderings of the Latin are presented individually in the format of a well-designed template juxtaposing translations and ordering lexical information. The first of three appendices explains the method and offers the template as a model for future linguistic research toward a collaborative dictionary of scientific terms. A bibliography and index complete the volume. If not quite able in 244 pages to reconstruct the entire linguistic world of early modern science, Balbiani's original interdisciplinary work rebuilds a substantial portion of it and makes an illuminating addition to Della Porta scholarship.