Renaissance Weapons
New technologies in general and gunpowder weapons in particular have a constantly debated role in the development of warfare, and it is to this debate that Bert S. Hall contributes his much-needed study,Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe. Hall explores the incorporation of new weapons into military tactics from the age of the longbow in the late thirteenth century to the introduction of the pistol in the sixteenth.The book focuses, however, on the frontier of possibilities and limitations that the development of gunpowder weapons offered to European army commanders. As a contribution both to military history and to the history of technology, this book provides a valuable perspective. That perspective could be summed up (albeit reductively) in the phrase interdependent evolution.Both the "military revolution" and the "gunpowder revolution," to which the former is often allied, find a detractor in Hall's study of key battle narratives and their relation to gradual technological development in weaponry.