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Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder. By David Cressy. New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xii+237. $29.95.
The subject announced by the title is broad, but this book is narrowly focused. It is a well-researched social history of the aggressive search for, and collection by saltpetermen of, the excrement-rich black earth which formed the basis of their production of saltpeter (potassium nitrate) in the England of the early sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It is not, except fleet- ingly, a history of the science or technology of saltpeter, nor can it be, as the author claims, an exploration of "the lost history of saltpeter," for this sub- ject is one of ongoing lively interest and robust controversy.
The current search for an understanding of saltpeter, the main ingredi- ent of gunpowder in terms of proportion and significance, was signaled by Joseph Needham's study of this subject in his major series Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, pt. 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic ( 1986), and by Bert S. Hall's critical introduction to J. R. Partington's A Tlis- tory of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (1960) in the subsequent American edi- tion...