Fire Technologies of the Low-Heat Artisan in Early Modern Europe

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.