Scientific research and instrumentation are crucial for military action today but they have not always been so. This collection investigates 500 years of the relationship between warfare, research, and instruments - both physical and intellectual - to understand this interaction. With U.S., English and French examples, contributors provide examples from army and naval history to show how governments and individuals made warfare scientific, developing instruments, stations, and organizations that furthered the cause. Some developments directly aided war efforts; others were parts of 'normal...

This volume brings together a series of papers at Kalamazoo as well as some contributed papers inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lynn White Jr.'s, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford University Press, 1962), a slim study which catalyzed the study of technology in the Middle Ages in the English-speaking world. While the initial reviews and decades-long fortune of the volume have been varied, it is still in print and remains a touchstone of an idea and a time. The contributors to the volume, therefore, both investigate the book itself and its fate, and look at...