| Abstract | Paper -a:
Military manuals are an indispensable source to understand the climates of violence and the war teaching in the Middle Ages.
Among all of them, Le Livre des Fais d'Armes et de chevalerie by Christine de Pizan is remarkable for being a key tool driving the evolution of these climates. Through this book we aim to understand the perceptions of war and the military reform projects of Christine de Pizan and the French monarchy. The study of its readers will allow us to know how the manual was diffused and how changed the climate of violence of France on the last decades of the Hundred Year's War.
Paper -b:
Little work has been done on how artillery developed in the 15th century into the recognizable cannon form - one which was so successful that it remained essentially the same for over 300 years. New research, using a combination of object studies, experimental archaeology and documentary evidence, is now enabling us to 'see' how some of the changes took place. This paper will outline the way that the medieval cannon, a formidable but not fully realised weapon became a dominant force on the battlefield, on fortifications, and aboard ship.
Paper -c:
A century and more of research on gunpowder has consistently framed its development as heading towards the "correct" recipe. In this review of the ranges of gunpowder and their uses form the late 14th through the 17th century, as well as modern thermo-chemical understanding the decomposition during burning will show that the idea of a "ideal" mixture is not a medieval conception. Rather, we should understand two simultaneous things: chemically, a wide range of mixtures provide nearly the same performance, and conceptually that wide range of mixtures also provided a differentiation for poorly understood processes.
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