Apropos of a post about “feuerbooks” (early modern artillery handbooks) at UPenn’s Kislak Center, I mentioned on Facebook that the Lilly has its own manuscript of das Feuerbuch (“the Fire Book”), a manual of explosives written by the German artillery master Franz Helm (ca. 1500–1567), and apparently copied a number of times in manuscript form long after Helm’s death. (Then, as now, who doesn’t like explode-y things? The Lilly’s Feuerbuch dates from ca. 1606.) As in the other copies, the Lilly’s Feuerbuch contains a wild illustration of the so-called “Rocket Cat,” (so-dubbed by the internet) but that is by no means the only unlikely form of explosive weaponry to be found in the book, which also includes barrel bombs, what look like lacrosse sticks with slings for throwing bombs, and a bonkers contraption (that Wile E. Coyote would love) that shoots rockets in all directions at once. Helm’s was not the only (or the first) book of fire, however. (UPenn has multiple Feuerbuchs, about which see the linked-to post, as well as the comments section for a picture of a “rocket-powered rabbit on a skateboard.”) The medieval and early modern fire book (liber ignium) was a genre J.R. Partington discusses in some detail in his A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (1999)–this is where my roommate heard about it–going back to the medieval fire books of Marcus Graecus and the ca. 1420 Feuerwerkbook which UPenn’s Kislak Center posted about yesterday. If I had to speculate why there are multiple copies of Franz Helm’s fire book, it would seem that Helm was trying to sell his munitions expertise to various lords and saw distributing a fire book as a convenient form of advertising. (It also doesn’t hurt that the illustrations in Helm’s fire book are so sensational.)

Lilly Library | LMC 1760