Scholars who study craft books and books of secrets in the Middle Ages can engage on internal debates about the modes of transmission or interpretations of numerous facets of these important treatises, but they can all agree on two relatively firm facts. First, in the past, technical knowledge was more an art (techne) than a science (scientia); that is, it was about doing rather than necessarily knowing for knowing's sake. To put it another way, it was decidedly not philosophia naturalis, with its emphasis on causes but rather ars practica, with an emphasis on doing and making. Second, practitioners of these arts tended to disseminate knowledge from one generation to the next more or less directly through the apprenticeship system rather than through written texts. What this means, on both counts, is that in the Middle Ages and early modem period textbooks in the modem sense were generally unavailable, irrelevant, and simply not needed. The craft treatises, which survive then, can only represent a small fraction of the vast craft tradition, and that they were ever written down at all should give us pause to consider by whom and for what purpose. Considering the craft of gunnery and its preserved treatises also adds another layer of interpretive difficulty: the study of the rise of gunnery overlaps chronologically with the Scientific Revolution and its historiography in a peculiar manner. For the Scientific Revolution, a traditional narrative exists of the increasing rationalization, quantification, and geometrization of nature. For the military use of gunpowder weaponry, the narrative argues that the gunners, seeking ever-more-accurate bombardment of fortifications, turned to exacting understandings of ballistic trajectories to accomplish this task. The conflation of these two narratives is that the gunners became "scientific," that is, using science in the modem sense, and by some extension, quantitative natural philosophy in the historical sense. Focusing on the contemporary manuals, this conflation is found to be quite unfounded for gunnery before at least the later seventeenth century. The vast majority of gunners' manuals, treatises, notebooks, and manuals before the eighteenth century have much more in common with cookbooks than they do with the Principia of Newton or even The Two New Sciences of Galileo. Gunnery manuals, in particular, preserve collections of the description of a variety of substances, processes, and mixtures that provided aides memoire to the users and perhaps didactic tools for the preservation and transmission of such knowledge. This study analyzes a number of gunners manuals and notebooks for their content, range of coverage, and material knowledge, and then looks in-depth at a number of firework recipes across a number of manuals to understand the gunners' interests, background knowledge, and goals. The material demonstrates their great felicity with material properties and substances, and at the same time a remarkable disinterest in philosophical frameworks in which these materials might have meaning (notably, alchemical connections are entirely absent, and even Scholastic terminology does not appear).

Fireworks in the early modern world paradoxically wedded a local experience of ephemeral sensations with an impulse to create patterns of perpetual motion. Exploring the custom of fireworks in China alongside their pictorial representations and decorative applications in a transcultural context during the long eighteenth century, this article draws connections among various artifacts that enacted pyrotechnic spectacles and elicited synesthetic immersions of light, sound, motion, hue, and temperature. It opens up a broader discussion regarding the conceits and sensations of pyrotechnics and pyropolitics, while also responding to recent accounts of early modern European pyrotechnic arts and sciences.[1] I argue that fireworks not only engaged in redefinitions of art and power, but also that the lifelike simulation of pyrotechnic effects in objects such as automaton clocks transformed conceptions and strategies of ornamentation. When activated alongside other movable accessories on mechanical clocks, firework ornaments highlighted a sense of synchronic time and fueled the vigor of temporal imminence. They acted out a spectacle of power that was manifested in an illusory unity of variations governed by the workings of an automatic system.[2] As mechanical clocks became the most salient objects and technologies of Sino-European exchange, flourishing especially during the High Qing era (1661-1796), such effects generated a sense of spatiotemporal profusion. This idea was demonstrated in the time-honored themes, syncretic compositions, and spectacular abundance of artifacts commissioned and collected at the Qing court and intended to resound with the panoptic ordering of imperial power.

In 2001 The Arms and Armour Society sponsored a translation of Das Feuerwerkbuch. (FWB) This manuscript contains the earliest (Western) references to gunpowder. The editorial comment of the translation contained the unsubstantiated assertion that, since certain processes were not specifically mentioned in the text, they were not carried out and that consequently the nitrate of medieval gunpowder was calcium based. This has been shown to be incorrect but the concept seems to have taken root among some historians unable to understand the clear technical evidence in the manuscript.ii Although the processes described in the FWB were evidently capable of delivering substantially pure potassium nitrate, there remains a possibility that some calcium (or magnesium) nitrate could remain as a minor impurity sufficient to affect the quality of the gunpowder. This present paper gives evidence that such contamination was sometimes (but not always) present but was neutralised during the manufacturing process.

Combustion – especially the burning of fossil fuels – is central to the problematic of human geologic agency and to any meaningful political or cultural response to the current planetary predicament. But a consideration of the politics of combustion raises the issue of another kind of fire: the explosive combustion that is at the core of state or military arsenals and the crux of most forms of insurrectionary force. While fire has been part of our planet’s history for hundreds of millions of years, there is no natural equivalent to the high-speed combustive chain reaction that is the blast of gunpowder. This paper traces the ‘thermopolitics’ of firearms that began with the discovery of explosive powders in 9th century China, but which builds on a much longer history of experimentation with and application of chambered fire. While the fire of the artisan brought enchanting and beautiful objects into the world, escalating military use of gunpowder installed new powers of destructiveness into the very core of modern social life. Moving from a biopolitical to a thermopolitical perspective, it is argued that the shocking demands of functioning in proximity to the explosion turns the social organization and cultural sensibilities of modernity into a kind of infernal machinery. In our own era, the internal combustion engine has inherited something of the ‘infernal’ power of the militarized explosion, and ramped it up to the scale of global environmental change. This raises questions not only about to get the runaway forces of planetary fire under control, but about what other uses – more gratuitous and glorious – might yet be made of the explosive firepower we have brought into the world.

This thesis re-appraises how the creation and inclusion of niter theories and salt principles played into the reformation of early modern scientific philosophies, suggesting that the adoption of these theories by major figures of the period calls for closer attention by historians of science. In particular, it raises the question of why and how such a humble, earthly mineral took on a supernatural role and became a staple in some of the leading scientific philosophies of the early modern era. I show that salt, or more specifically saltpeter, would not have assumed this identity without the growing importance and popularity accorded to gunpowder weapons beginning in the Renaissance. It was the hermetic alchemist, Paracelsus, who first developed a metaphysical notion of saltpeter and incorporated it into his natural cosmology. Historians of science, such as Allen Debus, Walter Pagel, and Henry Guerlac, have discussed Paraclesus’ first claim to treatment of niter theories and their association with the observed effects of gunpowder. However, I argue that additional evidence, found in Paracelsus’ writings, is needed to further demonstrate this historical connection and to identify differences in the understanding of Paracelsus’ conception and employment of salt as one of three principles of matter, alongside sulfur and mercury, together forming his celebrated tria prima. An examination of the parallel rise of gunpowder weapons and the utilization of saltpeter as their principle source of power showcases the philosophical links between science and emerging technologies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The transition of saltpeter from a primary component in a technological instrument to a conceptual manifestation of the fundamental structure of reality reflects an epistemological transfer of concepts from craft knowledge to metaphysical and philosophical beliefs. Such narratives may help us understand the development of early modern natural philosophers’ beliefs about causality, agency, and creation.