"Incipit tertia decima que est de artificio zuchari" – the chapter on confectionery art in Quirico de Augustis’ Lumen apothecariorum from 1492 and its role in research on the origins of confectionery

The article is a commentary on the Chapter 13 of Lumen apothecariorum, written in 1492 by Quirico de Augustis, a Piedmontese physician and apothecary, who lived at the turn of the 16th century. This chapter was published in Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. Prace Historyczne, vol. 149 (2022), no. 2. At the beginning, the author analyses the content of this chapter, entitled De artificio zuchari (On sugar craft), and characterises the typology of 31 recipes for sweets. Next, he presents the ingredients of sweets manufactured on the basis of these recipes, methods recommended for sugar processing, and the tools used for this purpose. In the next section the author focuses on probable sources of Quirico de Augustis’ inspiration and the impact of his recipes for sweets on other collections of recipes in the 16th century. The final section is devoted to the discussion of the importance of this source in the studies on the early Renaissance Italian and European confectionery. The author emphasises the fact that the first person to specifically address the area of confectionery production and to collect the recipes for different types of sweets in a separate chapter was Quirico de Augustis (in his work entitled Lumen apothecariorum) and not Paulo Suardo (in his work entitled Thesaurus apothecariorum, published in Milan in 1496). Thanks to its numerous editions, translations and citations, Chapter 13 of Quirico de Augustis’ Lumen apothecariorum exerted a great impact on the European confectionery in modern times. The evidence of this impact can be noticed in the fact that all 31 recipes from the chapter De artificio zuchari were included in the Polish version Sekrety Aleksego Pedemontana (The Secrets of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piedmont), published by Marcin Siennik in Cracow in 1568.