2020 Essays

Buckram Sausage and Gunpowder Weapons

Fong, Sau-yi

Embedded within an untitled entry that focuses on mortiers (“mortars,” here meaning “petards”), fol. 23r–23v includes text and image instructions to make a “buckram sausage,” a sausage-shaped fabric tube filled with gunpowder used as a fuse for short-range artillery. While Ms. Fr. 640 contains more than twenty entries related to gunpowder technology, the buckram sausage passages are among the very few instances of highly specific textual and visual instructions on the materials, techniques, and procedures of weapon production. Using hands-on reconstruction and research into the artisanal production of weapons in early modern Europe, this essay also explores the possible uses of the buckram sausage on the battlefield and examines how the author-practitioner engages with contemporaneous military technology in his writing. Finally, this essay calls attention to the importance of wartime contingencies and commonplace techniques in understanding the translation between practical and textual knowledge with regard to early modern military technology.