A Bestseller Among Artillery Handbooks of the 16th Century

Abstract

One of the important artillery manuals of the 15th century is the Feuerwerkbuch. The treatise was one of the first European didactic technical texts, intended for both artillerymen and their employers. After circulating in manuscript copies for over a hundred years, the text was first printed in 1529. By 1619 it had been published thirteen times in total, making it exceptional among military manuals published in Central Europe at that time. The content of the work has been studied by various medievalists and codicologists to date, but they were not usually concerned with later transformations of the publication. The aim of this paper is to characterise the changes in this work between the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War and to trace its publication history and its publication relationship to other educational texts.