Using experiments to draw philosophical lessons has a long tradition in physiology, in optics, and particularly in chymistry where its practitioners addressed the epistemic status of experimental results already in the fourteenth century. The Early Modern emphasis on experiment by Bacon and his fellow protagonists could and did build on existing traditions, mostly without mentioning them, however. The aim of my contribution is to point to those traditions in the history of knowledge of magnetism and electricity. Starting with the thirteenth-century work of Peregrine as an exemplary case of a combination of philosophical magnetic knowledge and experimental approach, I shall focus on the sixteenth century, with authors such as Cardano, della Porta, and Garzoni who drew from most various resources, including own experiments, to widen their knowledge of magnets and of the peculiar effects of rubbed amber. When Gilbert, in his 1600 monumental De Magnete, provided both synthesis, essential abstractions, and philosophical explanations, he drew not only on existing knowledge, but also on existing approaches of how to enlarge it. In my talk, I shall try to work out essential points of those traditions, and to evaluate Gilbert’s claims of novelty against that background. More generally, this will shed light on the character of the programmatic statements of experimental philosophy.