Ambix最新文献

While fire played an obvious role in the work of early modern European metalworkers, glassworkers, earthenware potters, and other "high-heat artisans," this article examines how "low-heat artisans" engaged with fire in their workshop practice. It focuses on painters, bleachers, launderers, and dyers, and it looks for traces of their fire-related practices in manuscript and printed how-to texts, particularly craft manuals and books of artisanal recipes and secrets. By examining not only the various fire technologies and tools these artisans used but what they could do with fire, this article shows what we gain when we read for procedural and performative language rather than merely people, places, and concrete things. This study concludes that the use of low-heat fire among artisans was extensive and subtly varied; there are reasons to consider the sun a critical low-heat fire technology; and light, as a byproduct of fire, was just as carefully exploited or mitigated in low-heat artisanal work as was heat.

When Rudolph Glauber (1604-1670) announced a new chymical furnace in the late 1640s, he emphasised its ability to reach very high temperatures - without the aid of bellows - thanks to a cleverly engineered structure. This pyrotechnically innovative furnace marks a clear shift in early modern furnace design. In this article, we argue that Glauber's furnace was more than an isolated technological advance. Rather, his structural approach to furnace design emerged from a complex history of heat engineering, pressures of fuel scarcity, and ideas about the circulation of wind, air, heat, and smoke. By looking at his apparatus alongside pyrotechnical developments in the domestic sphere, we argue that the furnace was never merely a fire in a box, but rather forms an assemblage with the surrounding architecture and beyond. This broader view of the furnace allows us to further probe and historicise the early modern pyroscape and to reassess the role of chymistry within it.

This article describes a programme of experimental reconstruction, involving the building and firing of a series of charcoal-fired assay furnaces, and the findings generated by this activity. The furnace builds drew from designs described and illustrated in nineteenth-century technical manuals for assayers and two sixteenth-century texts: De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola and A Treatise on Ores and Assaying by Lazarus Ercker. Comparing the resulting "chimeric" structures' performance generated insights into how such solid-fuel assay furnaces behaved in practice, what roles specific structural elements described in different primary sources played in their overall function, and the fire management skills needed to operate them. Consequently, it was possible to identify how the designs materialised technological choices that prioritised either responsiveness or long-term operation. The experimental reconstructions also led to a reappraisal of the nature and wider relevance of a selection of the primary sources used in the project.

In the study of early modern glassmaking, scholarship has traditionally focused on the production of raw glass and the transmission of glassmaking recipes and knowledge. This article extends that focus by examining the subsequent transformation of raw glass into finished objects, using enamelling as a central case study. We argue that enamelling was a distinct, skill-intensive practice requiring specialised knowledge separate from that of glass production. Combining historical source analysis with experimental reconstructions, the study investigates how fire management critically influenced enamel quality. By applying a range of firing techniques to reconstructed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century enamels, we demonstrate that variability in heat application significantly affected the final outcome. Our experiments suggest that historical enamellers developed a deep, practice-based understanding of several key factors: (i) controlling heat for optimal adhesion and colour development; (ii) manipulating flame intensity and furnace atmosphere to enhance bonding; and (iii) employing layering techniques to improve durability. These findings invite a rethinking of fire not merely as a tool, but as an active and variable ingredient in the enamelling process.

In this article we reflect on the reconstruction and operation of a lung-powered, portable melting furnace used by ancient Amerindian goldsmiths. Variations of this kind of furnace were operated by different metallurgical traditions in the northern Andes and Mesoamerica to transform refined metals and alloys like tumbaga (copper and gold) into metalworks such as ornamental artefacts. The social and technological shifts that began in the sixteenth century, particularly following European contact, led to a progressive decline of the ancient Amerindian melting procedures associated with these metallurgical furnaces. Our research utilises performative and reconstructive methods to offer a reparative approach to this lost fire-and-wind technology, taking the Quimbaya furnace as a working model. By assessing the historical and archaeological evidence as well as more intangible experiential insights from our reconstruction, we intend to understand the functioning of such furnaces, and to suggest embodied and social meanings of the arts of fire among ancient communities in the tropical valleys of the Andes.

In medieval Latin alchemy, "the work" (magisterium) in the laboratory paralleled the work of nature - yet while nature took over "a thousand years" in the mine, the artifex in the laboratory would only need "a month, or a shorter, or longer time." The amount of time needed was dependent on the degree of heat of the fire. A higher degree of heat (calor ignis forti) would speed up the process, while baking the given preparation over a slow, gentle fire (suaviter) prolonged it. This paper argues that for medieval Latin alchemists, the accomplishment of the magisterium depended on finding the precise moment to take away the product from the fire, by regulating the intensity of fire and observing natural signs. While ancient alchemy saw success linked to an astrological "favourable moment" chosen for the beginning of the work, medieval Latin alchemy brings a more naturalistic focus on figuring out what I call the "Goldilocks moment": the exact moment of ripeness at the end of the work, beyond which the action of fire would naturally become destructive. The paper examines this practical philosophy of fire and its relationship with time in material transformation in Petrus Bonus' Pretiosa margarita novella.

This paper describes a programme of practice research that combines historical technology (small charcoal-fired furnaces) with contemporary digital making methodologies (digital CNC milling). The intention was to create small spherical granules of precious metal suitable for granulation, an ancient metalworking technique. The authors begin by providing an overview of granulation's historical background and the different traditional methods used to create granules. They give an account of the equipment used in the physical experiments and describe the rationale behind specific design decisions. In particular, they reflect on the nature and properties of producing a reducing atmosphere inside the firing chamber of the furnace, and the relevance of this to the granulation process. They detail the digital making methodologies that were used to create setters made from graphite to encourage the formation of perfectly spherical granules, and how these relate to recent developments of the technique by contemporary makers. The project is a case study that demonstrates how practical reflexive experimentation can broaden our understanding of unrecorded but crucial skills such as fire management and that practising such skills in conjunction with digital methods of making can offer new insights into past technologies and processes.

The introduction to this double special issue lays out our core questions: how was fire understood within premodern cultures of knowledge and practice? What could fire do, and what could humans do with fire? The introduction details our hands-on exploration of these issues through a range of fire technologies at an interdisciplinary workshop on "Fire Arts, Pasts and Futures" at Texas A&M University. It outlines the issues and new questions raised by this practical work, and shows how these are addressed in the contributions to this issue. These case studies explore the practices of premodern artisans, alchemists, metalworkers, natural philosophers, and chemical practitioners, ranging from low-heat technologies such as distillation to high-heat smelting furnaces, and from ancient metallurgy to modern-day jewellery practice. Collectively, we argue, the articles contribute to three main areas of historical scholarship: the place of fire in changing cosmologies and matter theories, debates about the agencies of art vs. nature, and methodological reflections on using performative methods as part of an interdisciplinary exploration of past material worlds.

This paper considers the circumstances of an article written by John Davy, brother of Sir Humphry Davy, in which he presented the first chemical analysis of snakestones. Davy encountered snakestones in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he was posted as a medical officer of the British army in the early nineteenth century. The equipment that Davy took to Ceylon demonstrated his intent to find and analyse unfamiliar local materials, thus carrying out a dual role as a "surgeon-naturalist." By comparing Davy's original notes on snakestones with his final published work, aspects of Davy's personality, and parallels between Davy's notetaking style and that of his brother, come to light. Davy's chemical analysis of snakestones was ground-breaking in the history of this purported alexipharmic. However, the significance of his publication was largely undercut by dismissive remarks contained in a note, "Additional Observations, by the Secretary," appended to its publication.