Gunpowder transformed warfare in late medieval and early modern Europe. It surely must have transformed cultural understandings of warfare as well. Starting from this hypothesis, Patrick Brugh investigates the ways in which gunpowder technology challenged Germans to reimagine warfare in fiction, military manuals, and printed images. Brugh discovers and analyzes disparate understandings of gunpowder and the role it should play in warfare while at the same time showing the reader how gunpowder weaponry became a cause célèbre among military theorists, poets, and novelists alike. The public at large shared this fascination with gunpowder, as evidenced by prominent depictions of gunpowder smoke in bestselling Flugblätter, which were illustrated broadsheets. Brugh's study argues that gunpowder killed the armored knight, not only as a target in battle but also as a heroic figure in German culture.
This book's great strength is its nimble use of diverse historical sources, from fifteenth-century war manuals, to sixteenth-century poems, to artistic depictions of battles from the Thirty Years’ War. Brugh justifies his eclectic choice of sources by noting that early modern Germans accepted the Roman poet Horace's notion that all aesthetic representations, in whatever genre, are “meant to both please (delectare) and to teach (prodesse)” (11). Studying such a broad range of sources allows Brugh to uncover the aesthetic impact of gunpowder in Germany and to demonstrate how Germans recognized gunpowder's obvious military importance while also lamenting its ugliness.
The core of Brugh's analysis begins in chapter 2 with the emergence of gunpowder as a critical weapon and a subject of literary criticism in the years 1405–1420. Brugh shows how gunpowder distorted battlefield tactics by rendering the armor-clad knight irrelevant. Gunpowder also deformed literary depictions of warfare, with the previously reviled foot soldier now taking center stage. Chapters 3 and 4 construct a “genealogy” of Kriegsbücher, encyclopedic manuals about warfare, which the author convincingly argues constitute their own genre set apart from more formal war treatises (50–51). Sixteenth-century Kriegsbücher vacillated between disdain for gunpowder and acceptance of its power.
A century later, the reception of gunpowder had changed. Looking at Flugblätter from the Swedish phase of the Thirty Years’ War, Brugh contends in chapters 5 and 6 that “gunpowder never becomes an object of disdain in and of itself” (120) but rather served as “a multifaceted narrative device” (106). For example, gunpowder smoke in battle images signified who had won the battle. Brugh labels gunpowder “a flexible signifier” (120). Chapter 7, the book's longest, examines the novels of H. J. C. Grimmelshausen and Johann Michael Moscherosch in order to further illuminate the cultural impact of gunpowder in seventeenth-century Germany. Brugh agrees with Lynne Tatlock's argument, which states that gunpowder warfare resulted in “the phenomenon of the ‘disappearing hero’” (166). As Brugh puts it, “gunpowder warfare, in the works of Grimmelshausen and Moscherosch upends social order and distorts sign and meaning” (160).
The book concludes with a brief eighth chapter on the emergence of the pistol-wielding cavalier as a replacement for the knight in depictions of warfare. Throughout the book, Brugh pays close attention to paradox. For example, in chapter 2, he observes that gunpowder weapons, which empowered the common man, necessitated “the writing down of scientific knowledge” (42) in manuals that the common man probably could not read.
Considering the title of Brugh's book, readers may be disappointed by the book's relative inattention to the theme of masculinity. Several chapters include no discussion of masculinity apart from introductory and concluding assertions that gunpowder transformed German conceptions of masculinity. Particularly frustrating for Reformation historians will be the repeated, unsubstantiated claim that Erasmus and Martin Luther condemned gunpowder for “gendered” reasons (49, 95). Brugh also mischaracterizes the Military Revolution debate as one about “whether or not military developments of a purely technological nature, specifically gunpowder, had an impact on European society at large” (49). The military revolution debate assumes that military technology transformed society and government and instead asks how, when, and which innovations proved most transformative.
Gunpower, Masculinity, and Warfare in German Texts will prove a noteworthy read for any scholar interested in the artistic, instructional, and literary depictions of gunpowder in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. And although Brugh's sensitivity to literary theory suggests that the work will speak more to students of literature than students of history, military historians can learn a great deal from Brugh about the aesthetic impact of gunpowder weaponry in early modern Germany.
