Spiritual Technologies

Abstract

Cider making does not strike one as much of a philosophical enterprise. However, in England, in the second part of the seventeenth-century, many natural philosophers were actively involved in it. This paper investigates the philosophical premises and methodological underpinning of this enterprise, showing that cider-making developed as a branch of applied Baconian science. We show that the grand-scale project of cider making shared a background theory of Baconian inspiration and was conceived in terms of Bacon’s rules and methods of experimenting and collaborative data-sharing. With this Baconian theoretical and methodological framework, naturalists involved in this enterprise selected and tried old recipes, experimented with new ones, and turned cider-making into an early modern technology. Central to this technology was the idea that, in the process of cider-making, the naturalist manipulates the living spirits of the vegetal world, enclosing them in a bottle.