Chapter Giovan Battista Della Porta and the Invention of Experimental Magic: Collaborative Empiricism and the Dialectic of Disclosure and Secrecy

This chapter explores Giovan Battista Della Porta’s Magia naturalis as a pivotal site for the development of experimental approaches to natural philosophy in Renaissance Naples. Focusing on the expanded twenty-book edition (Magiae naturalis libri XX), it examines how Della Porta combined a Peripatetic framework with empirical inquiry to investigate medicine, alchemy, optics, and mechanics, positioning the magus as both coordinator and guarantor of collective knowledge. The study highlights th...