Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts & Sciences in European History (review)

With this monograph Simon Werrett offers an exhaustive account of the evolution of the pyrotechnical arts and sciences in Europe; more precisely, he delineates changes in the practical application and theorization of illuminations and fireworks. He moves from the fourteenth century, when gunners “constructed a new genre of spectacle for princely patrons, called artificial fireworks or feux d’artifice—artificial because they were art and fireworks because they mobilized gunpowder to produce a series of remarkable fiery effects, motions and imitations of nature that gunners used to appeal to princes” (15), to the long eighteenth century, when, after a protracted and disputatious process of “hybridization,” a fusion of the mechanical and liberal arts became complete, and men of letters and natural philosophers deployed illuminations and fireworks to “transform the sciences as they moved European audiences to a fascination with spectacle . . . while the vogue for science would shape pyrotechnics into new forms and novel uses” (169).

Werrett’s focus on fireworks is path-breaking; his first two chapters give the reader a thorough, nuanced introduction to the history of fireworks prior to the point when “pyrotechnic knowledge [became] more philosophical” and “natural philosophy more pyrotechnic” (59). Nevertheless, Werrett’s primary argument that “there was no simple relation of science and artisanry in early modern Europe, no once-and-for-all movement of craft techniques into science, and no privileged Scientific Revolution in which this all took place. . . . Rather, pyrotechnic and philosophical techniques arose and circulated between many communities of practitioners who exploited one another’s credit in collaboration or in competition to advance the status of their practices” (7) is, absent the stress on pyrotechnics, now rather a commonplace finding in scholarship on early modern European science. Indeed, Werrett himself submits that his work is, to a degree, yet further confirmation of the “Zilsel thesis,” whereby “natural philosophers exploited the techniques and skills of artisans to reform traditional scholasticism into a more practical, utilitarian form of inquiry” (4).

Werrett’s efforts underline what many historians of science have long argued, that natural philosophy, or the “new sciences” in their eighteenth-century garb, was less about theoretical innovation in natural philosophy than in the refinement and dissemination of earlier, seminal findings through spectacle and patronage mechanisms—or rather through patronage and the accompanying need for successful, often grandiose, spectacle. Learned academies, where pyrotechnics and other examples of “demonstration culture” were typically arranged, had become the focal point for achieving professional advancement and a measure of social status for natural philosophers.

Science required a supportive, cultivated audience. With royal courts and associated elites no longer the exclusive sources of socio-professional legitimation, the “middle classes” competed with the nobility and royal courts as patrons, if more indirectly. It is the tenaciousness, supported by a wealth of evidence (there appear to be no gaps in his extensive source base), by which Werrett insists that pyrotechnics represented “a vibrant culture of multiple interactions and exchanges” (241) between the arts and sciences or a specific “geography of arts and science” (5), and which, suffice it to say, is nothing short of “new ways to think about the history of science and art in European history” (247). It makes his work a consistently interesting, even innovative, addition to the existing literature on the invention of “science” in early modern Europe.

If patronage is crucial to understanding the diffusion of natural philosophy in the “Enlightenment,” then the institutionalization of spectacle is where Werrett’s findings are made evident. Chapters 2 and 3 consist of a comparative study of the use, indeed, usefulness, of fireworks in St. Petersburg, London, and Paris. The Russian case is the most instructive, for if the Royal Society of London engaged in actual inventions, in Russia it was “the rhetorical notion of invention” (112) that enabled the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences to survive. Nowhere else in Europe were relations between the Imperial Court, the elite, and the artisans, architects, poets, and natural philosophers, among others, who engaged in the...