Igniting Early Modern Science through Pyrotechnics

In the early professional history of the history of science, an idealist perspective regarding the Scientific Revolution, most masterfully developed by Alexandre Koyré, held sway. However, in the 1940s, a group of Marxist-oriented European scholars proposed an alternate view whereby the motive force for scientific innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was located in the interaction between artisans and scholars. The most prominent of these Europeans was the Austrian émigré Edgar Zilsel. Although the hegemony of the idealist historical perspective has long since been challenged, no coherent alternative narrative reflecting the Zilsel perspective has emerged. While not attempting anything so ambitious, this fascinating book (Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. vii+359. $45) utilizes the development of pyrotechny in the early modern period as a case that affirms the Zilsel thesis that crafts made a significant contribution to the creation of a “new science” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. 236).

Moreover, Simon Werrett carries his narrative of the interaction of the pyrotechnic craftsmen and natural philosophers (and the impact of pyrotechnics on experimental science) from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In particular, Werrett considers comparatively the role of pyrotechny in three different eighteenth-century sites: Saint Petersburg, Paris, and London. In so doing, he highlights a second theme of the book, the importance of what might be termed “sociocultural geography” (my neologism). By this I mean that Werrett investigates regional states of affairs with respect to the relations and interactions of artisans, artists, and savants and their impact on the deployment and the scientific import of pyrotechny for each site.

The first part of the book focuses on the role of “gunners,” the fabricators of gunpowder and firearms in the development of fireworks for spectacles to accompany church and courtly festivals. The use of fireworks followed quite rapidly on the introduction of gunpowder itself into Europe. Firework spectacles get vivid treatment both in text and illustrations but Werrett is more interested in detailing how the gunners extended the domain of their craft toward the socially and intellectually more lofty realms of the sciences and the humanities. Some of this followed naturally on the kinds of spectacular items produced in firework displays—particularly celestial ones such as stars and meteors. Alchemy was one such realm, whose idiom the gunners themselves employed to explain the nature and effects of pyrotechny. More particularly, Werrett argues that, in order to “raise the status of their labors during this period” (p. 35), gunners appealed to various domains of the liberal arts and the new humanism: geometry, philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as to a distinguished classical origin (the activities of Archimedes). These attributions appeared in treatises on pyrotechny.

This is an extremely interesting section. However, this reader was frustrated by a certain casualness in the accounting of who wrote what and for what purpose. Many of the cited authors, such as Vannoccio Biringuccio and Niccolò Tartaglia were not primarily gunners, although the former published one of the first treatises on “pirotechnia” and the latter wrote on gunnery. There are some treatises by authors who were clearly gunners (such as John Babington, author of a Pyrotechnia of 1633) but we learn little about who he or other gunners were or how they were trained and organized. This is probably not surprising for such artisans, but more attention to the contexts in which authors who were not gunners wrote in elevated language on pyrotechny would have gone a long way to elucidating Werrett’s version of the Zilsel thesis.

Werrett demonstrates convincingly that pyrotechny became a resource for early-seventeenth-century formulators of the new natural philosophical enterprise, such as Tommaso Campanella and Francis Bacon and, at the end of that century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. However, there appears to be a limitation in pyrotechny’s exemplification of the Zilsel thesis: no scientific “advance” (to use a Whiggish term) seems to have been directly brought about through pyrotechnical activities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The remainder of the book...