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[1] 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.[2]
Piemontese 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.[3]
It is generally assumed that Alessio Piemontese was a pseudonym of Girolamo Ruscelli (Viterbo 1500 - Venice 1566), humanist and cartographer.[4] 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.[5] Ruscelli's academy is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society.[6] The academy was later imitated by Giambattista Della Porta, who founded an ‘Accademia dei Secreti’ in Naples in the 1560s.
--- 1562 edition
--- Les secrets de reverend Alexis Piémontois, Anvers, 1557 (French)
--- The Secretes of the Reverende Maister Alexis of Piermont, 1558 (English, translated from the French version)
--- Kunstbuch Des Wolerfarnen Herren Alexii Pedemontani/ von mancherleyen nutzlichen unnd bewerten Secreten oder Künsten, 1616 (German)
--- Aleksego Pedemontana Tajemnice - included as a part of Herbarz to iest ziół tutecznych postronnych y zamorskich opisanie: co za moc maią a iako ich używać tak tu przestrzeżeniu zdrowia ludzkiego iako ku uzdrowieniu rozmaitych chorób: Teraz nowo wedle herbarzow dzisieyszego wieku y inych zacnych medyków poprawiony, 1568 (Polish)