Abstract
This entry discusses the historical legacy in innovations of ballistics as they relate to warfare in Europe between 1300 and 1700. It primarily deals with the problems of smoothbore gunpowder weapons (both artillery and small arms) and the ways in which commanders and artillerists adjusted their strategies and tactics to account for the limitations of accuracy and unreliability of these weapons. Also discussed are modern comparative studies of early modern gunpowder small arms and early modern scientific and mathematical studies of the trajectory of gunpowder weapons.
References
Primary Literature
Anonymous. Feuerwerkbuch. Munich. Bayerische Staatsbibiliothek. Cod. germ. 600. Ca. 1400–1420
Fronsperger, Leonhard. 1573. Kriegsbuch. Vol. 3. Frankfurt: Feyerabend.
Galilei, Galileo. 1638. Discorsi E Dimonstrazioni Matematiche: intorno à due nuoue scineze Attenenti alla Mecanica & i Movimenti Locali. Leiden: Elsevirius.
Secondary Literature
Ekholm, Karin. 2010. Tartaglia’s ragioni: A maestro d’abaco’s mixed approach to the bombardier’s problem. The British Journal for the History of Science 43 (2): 181–207.
Hall, Bert. 1997. Weapons and warfare in renaissance Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
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Brugh, P. (2018). Ballistics in Renaissance Science. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_902-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_902-1
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