2020 Essays

Ingenious Materials: Salts as Material Metaphor

Oosterhoff, Richard

Like blood and gold, salt was a material that brimmed with meaning in late medieval and early modern Europe. As a material metaphor, salt became a way to think about the innate generativity and fertility of nature for authors such as Bernard Palissy or Joseph Du Chesne. Yet I show that the analogy between human wit and nature’s creative power remained absent from Ms. Fr. 640. Here then is the puzzle. If any material in this manuscript book of recipes were a material metaphor, surely it would be salts. Yet ingenuity does not overtly define the manifold roles of salts in Ms. Fr. 640. This striking difference with other books of secrets gives us an analytical thread to pull. How do we get from the experience of salts, as it surfaces in many recipes of the manuscript, to the elaborate ingenuity of salt in contemporary authors such as Palissy or Du Chesne? By contrasting Ms. Fr. 640 with books of secrets that make more of salts, we can probe more finely into how the experience of materials relates to textual tradition in shaping this genre.