How gunpowder technology exploded heroes, heroics, and war stories from 1400 to 1700, and how German writers tried to glue them back together

The first full edition and English translation of the RA I.34 Firework Book. Produced from the early fifteenth century onwards, Firework Books are, broadly speaking, manuals on how to use gunpowder, witnessing a major development in warfare. Surviving in a corpus of some 65, each text has different content and components, but core elements are present throughout. An important example is a manuscript in the collection of the Royal Armouries (RA I.34), written in Early New High German, and (unlike many other manuscripts) still in what appears to be its original format and binding; it also, unusually, contains a number of illustrations. This volume provides the first full edition and English translation of the material, with a detailed analysis of its content and context. It positions the Firework Books at a crucial stage in the development of gunpowder artillery, offering an unparalleled insight into fifteenth-century gunpowder technology at a critical juncture of military and technological change at the end of the Middle Ages.

This book discusses the role Western military books and their translations played in 17th-century Russia. By tracing how these translations were produced, distributed and read, the study argues that foreign military treatises significantly shaped intellectual culture of the Russian elite. It also presents Tsar Peter the Great in a new light – not only as a military and political leader but as a devoted book reader and passionate student of military science.

A global account of histories of war, from Antiquity to the present day, this thoughtful book shows how the varied modes of representation record political, cultural and social developments as well as military events. Covers all forms of discussion and commemoration from statuary to scholarship, films to novels. Important not only to those interested in the history of war but also to those concerned with culture and history in general. This erudite volume on the theory and practice of military history will interest a wide readership including both professional historians of war and those concerned with its broader philosophical dimension. The author - a well established authority in European history - has provided an informed, rigorous analysis of a difficult topic. It will delight those who seek enlightenment of the historian's craft, military or otherwise.

This book is a transnational history of European weapons law that utilizes the law and primary sources to trace the development from early portable firearms to modern-day weapons. Challenging many conventional assumptions, this book establishes that weapons control in the current sense is a new phenomenon. Control with possession only became dominant between 1918 and 1939, thereby establishing a high degree of uniformity for the first time. Weapons law is old in Western Europe, but only as a palette of possible solutions. Possession control triumphed as a tool against Communist and Fascist attacks on democracy and remained as an instrument against crime and accidents. It is argued that previously the laws on possession furthered rather than hindered ownership. For centuries, governments sought security by encouraging trusted men to arm themselves, rather than disarming the suspect. Legislators used a range of carrying restrictions, sometimes many but mostly few, as a tool against armed crime. The author examines attitudes and policies towards power, law, violence, social hierarchy, national defence, and civic freedom. This volume offers historians and social scientists a new perspective on the long-term development of Western European states and societies, and it will be of value to undergraduate and postgraduate students of history, sociology, and politics.

This volume draws together an international team of scholars to explore the experience and significance of early modern European continental warfare from an interdisciplinary perspective. Individual essays add to the lively fields of War and Society and the New Military History by combining the history of war with political and diplomatic history, the history of religion, social history, economic history, the history of ideas, the history of emotions, environmental history, art history, musicology, and the history of science and medicine. The contributors address how warfare was entwined with European learning, culture, and the arts, but also examine the ties between warfare and ideas or ideologies, and offer new ways of thinking about the costs and consequences of war. In addition to its interdisciplinarity, the volume is distinctive in including chapters focused not only on Western and Central Europe but also the often-ignored European peripheries, such as the Baltics and the Russian frontier, Scandinavia, and the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands of Southeastern Europe. As a whole, the volume offers readers interesting alternatives and threads for reconsidering the place and meaning of warfare within the larger history of early modern continental Europe. This book will be valuable for general readers, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars interested in military, early modern, and European history.

A History of Artillery traces the development of artillery through the ages, providing a thorough study of these weapons. From its earliest recorded use in battle over a millennium ago, up to the recent Gulf War, Balkan, and Afghanistan conflicts, artillery has often been the deciding factor in battle. Black shows that artillery sits within the general history of a war as a means that varied greatly between armies and navies, and also across time.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Women Warriors throughout Time and Space takes the many, long-standing dimensions of military history, including the various modalities of warfare across cultures and periods, and integrates them with the more recent and very substantial contributions of social history, women’s history, black history, feminist theory, LGBTQ community, and other perspectives. By providing an extensive annotated bibliography of the new findings, the work provides the reader with an exciting compilation of new knowledge placed within a longstanding military historical framework, one which provides a broader study and understanding of warfare into which to put the very recent, disparate findings culled from many disciplines. The book reaffirms that women have long been deeply embedded in the practice of warfare, not simply as victims or minor curiosities, but as important actors—tactically, strategically, in combat, and directing warfare from afar—just as their male counterparts. The concomitant amalgam also shows that certain types and patterns of warfare such as the defense of castles and fortresses, commanding a ship or a fleet, revolutionary warfare, and today’s drone and cyber-forms of warfare have been more conducive to female activity than other forms of warfare, even as women are also present in a wider variety of other broader temporal and geographical dimensions of the history of warfare. Hiding in Plain Sight is the only extensive annotated bibliography currently available which provides such a holistic overview of recent scholarship by grounding that scholarship in the existing military canon and history.