Ars Belli: Deutsche taktische und kriegstechnische Bilderhandschriften und Traktate im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (review)

For those working on early modern military technology, Ranier Leng has produced an indispensable work. Comparisons might even be made to George Sarton, Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, or Paul Kristeller, though it would be too much to say that Leng demonstrates quite their command of the sources. Nevertheless, on the topic of illustrated German manuscripts on military tactics and technology, he has provided researchers with immediate access to descriptions and analyses of their content, commentary on the connections between surviving copies and traditions, and a vast bibliography. Books such as the Feuerwerkbuch and Conrad Kyeser's Bellifortis are instantly recognizable to those studying this period, and we may know that before these works (or redactions or compendia along the same lines) saw print they were widely copied in manuscript, beginning in the 1530s. But we have had to wait for Leng's work to understand the distribution, breadth, cross-fertilization, and survival of this genre.

Ars Belli considers these treatises from a number of angles, privileging authors and types over the technical content of early modern military writing. While the first volume includes thirty-four full-color plates, each with two to four sharp technical illustrations that prove how literally awesome these manuscripts were and are, Leng is not primarily interested in technical information. Rather, he is interested in how the entire corpus of such picture-books came into existence, flourished, and ultimately was subsumed into the print universe. He is also interested in the nineteenth-century historiography of military technology, in the different ways technologies have been perceived though different lenses (mechanical, chemical, nationalistic, or civil versus military), and in the roots and legacy of early modern kriegtechnische knowledge.

The thoroughly researched text (there are 1,840 footnotes and a fifty-three-page bibliography) does touch on technical matters at times, but ultimately this is an external, bibliographic history. Leng does not explain how these manuscript and later printed sources were used by military men. Many of the works were written by practicing military engineers, who all seem to have been of low-to-middling status, but missing from Leng's pages are the commanders, dukes, and kings who made the fusion of technology and their armies happen. Leng has, however, primed the pump nicely for others to tackle the much more difficult task of investigating the reception and use of these manuscript traditions.

Where these volumes excel, therefore, is in connecting this important subject matter to other debates about the history of technology in the middle ages. At times rather cursory, Leng nevertheless takes the important step of connecting the seemingly specialized field of Renaissance Kriegtechnik to far-reaching movements: the "mechanical arts" in early Scholasticism, medieval encyclopedia, alchemical practices and traditions, classical modes of social and military knowledge, Renaissance humanism, and, at least hesitatingly, the genre of illuminated manuscripts and book production. (More could be done on this last topic, especially in noting how the number and quality of illustrations declined as manuscripts saw print.) But fully three-quarters of the first volume is devoted to investigating connections between various traditions in the field, three of which Leng distinguishes as particularly important: Kyeser's Bellifortis, master gunners' books (Büchsenmeisterbücher), and the early-fifteenth-century Feuerwerkbuch.

By the later fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, books devoted strictly to the technology of warfare—which was, of course, undergoing a considerable change at the time, thanks to the introduction of gunpowder, and even more generally becoming more and more reliant on machinery—intersected with books in the other traditions. They were epitomized and elaborated, and ultimately fed into the field of military tactics. And this fusion, then, is what brought us to our modern conception of military organization and strategy. Without the fusion of men and machines, planning and power, strategy and scientia ("knowledge...