Technology and Culture

While artillery is seen as a technique with major consequences—key to the military revolution, the rise of the Modern State, and the European overseas expansion—the very nature of this technical change, its chronology, and its components still largely remain to be established (even after the pioneering works of B. S. Hall, Ph. Contamine, or B. Buchanan). Historiographic cathedrals are erected on sand. Hence the major interest of Brice Cossart's book, based on a thesis defended in 2016, which undertakes to answer the question of the mode of training and the nature of the knowledge of the artillerymen of the Hispanic monarchy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Such a formulation of the question doesn't restrict its ambition. Apart from the scale of the archival examinations that support it, the book is placed at the meeting point of important historiographical fields, which the author not only knows well but to which he makes significant contributions.

His first step is to quantify the needs of the monarchy in gunners, thus revealing to what extent the expansion of a sailing navy, in particular with [End Page 1251] the "Atlantic turn," created a pressing requirement for competent gunners. He then establishes what is a "gunner" of the monarchy, which involves not only a quick but innovative study of the administration of artillery within the state apparatus, but also a sociological study combining Sevillian statistical data (based on some 400 artillery school student files and the Carrera de Indias crew registers) and the study of the careers of a few individuals. Coming generally from modest backgrounds, artillerymen had most often exercised another profession beforehand (soldier, sailor, or craftsman). The gunner's certificate, opening up new professional prospects, thus presupposed the acquisition of new technical skills. Quantitative and qualitative considerations led to the generalization of artillery schools (combining an imitation of the Italian model and local contingencies). Cossart's in-depth study of the Seville school makes it possible to identify the content of the lessons (practical, but also theoretical) and their mode of validation (especially the importance of the oral examination).

Having thus established who the gunners were and what they were taught, the author proceeds to question the very notion of "knowledge" when applied to artillery. The author's thesis is that the generalization and institutionalization of artillery teaching fostered the emergence of a field of knowledge specific to artillery. Dichotomies like craftsman/scholar, technique/science, and applied/theoretical knowledge are then less significant (if at all) than interfaces such as the oral examination (which introduces abstraction and formalization into a training that could have been supposed as oriented mainly towards practice) and the treatise (which finds its economic and political justification in gunners' training needs, but which is also read, annotated, and commented on).

The study of the training of the artillerymen of the Hispanic monarchy therefore leads to quite stimulating reflections on the reduction to art and technical dissemination. Its only limit—but can we blame the author?—is the lack of points of comparison to appreciate the exemplary nature of the Spanish case. How were constituted, at the same time, the field of knowledge on artillery in other states, either those with artillery schools (the Ph.D. thesis of S. Walton, The Art of Gunnery in Renaissance England, gives us an outline for England, but what about, for example, of Venice?), or those without (such as France)? Has the expansion of the navy generated elsewhere this institutionalization of gunners' training? Has the oral examination had comparable effects of formalization in other fields (navy or engineering, for example)? And what was the importance for the development of the science of artillery (the same? a different one?) of other circles, such as high-military aristocracy or engineers? Here...