Prometheus Tamed: Fire, Security, and Modernities, 1400 to 1900 by Cornel Zwierlein (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Prometheus Tamed: Fire, Security, and Modernities, 1400 to 1900 by Cornel Zwierlein Edward Tenner (bio) Prometheus Tamed: Fire, Security, and Modernities, 1400 to 1900 By Cornel Zwierlein. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Pp. 547. To scholars and lay people alike, the Enlightenment may mean many things—rejection of revealed religion, celebration of science and reason, and advocacy of human rights. In Prometheus Tamed, Conrad Zwierlein presents a radical reinterpretation of Central European thought and institutions in the transition from the premodern era to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Zwierlein, the key to the Enlightenment as a social and political movement lies not in philosophical theory but in a new urgency in the quest for material security. A survey of keywords in German-language periodicals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals a striking amount of attention to fires—a retrospectively obvious point given the tolls on life and property of the conflagrations that so often ravaged early modern cities. In the two decades from 1680 to 1700, Zwierlein finds a decisive turn from an old to a new framework for dealing with fires. Well into the eighteenth century, many pious Christians continued to see fires and other natural hazards as divine punishment for the sins of the community, recalling Sodom and Gomorrah and other Biblical chastisements. The rise of deism—which denied the intervention of the Creator in nature and human affairs—was among the sins said to bring down the wrath of heaven. Governments were already abandoning this religious interpretation of urban fires in the seventeenth century and moving toward an acceptance of their inevitability. Science and experience could reduce the number of fires and contain their damage, and the destruction caused by fires could be mitigated. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz summarized the new attitude when he wrote in 1680 of two kinds of security: "real-assecurationen," which prevented fires, and "verbal-assecurationen," arrangements like insurance policies that provided financial relief from fire losses. Fire policy marked the arrival of a new kind of public policy in the West, a role for the [End Page 925] state and private organizations in providing security—ultimately not only against fire and flood damage but against illness. Fire insurance and firefighting technology were first steps toward a new vision of society. The author's research in both original (including archival) sources and current theoretical issues is nothing short of prodigious, especially in the theory and practice of fire insurance in the early modern German-speaking world. This book will be indispensable for scholars of early modern administrative and urban history and the history of what the author calls the "normal secure society," as well as of innovations in fire prevention and suppression technology. It even contributes to art history in its interpretation of the changing iconography of urban fires. (Some of the most striking images were created by the inventor of the modern fire hose, Jan van der Heyden, an artist-entrepreneur and veritable seventeenth-century Dutch Leonardo, who also improved firefighting pumps and devised street lighting.) There are points at which the legendary thoroughness of the Habilitationsschrift genre may intimidate nonspecialists. The early history of insurance shows that our present idea of insurance arose centuries after the first maritime contracts in Italy, for example the requirement of paying the premium in advance. The discussion of jurists' efforts to squeeze insurance contracts within the framework of Roman law is important for understanding Leibniz's innovations, but details could have been presented in a separate paper for specialists. Conversely, the author does not do justice to some of the better-known figures in the technology and discourse of fire. Benjamin Franklin receives too little attention, despite his contributions to safety technology (lightning rods, improved stoves), fire brigades, and fire insurance, which exemplified the ideas of security that Leibniz had advanced. Voltaire's poem "On the Lisbon Disaster," which mocked Leibniz's optimism in light of that city's devastation by earthquake and fire in 1755, does not appear in the bibliography of published primary sources despite its contemporary impact. The physical book is also a case study in what Thomas Hughes called the reverse salient. Digital printing on demand makes possible a...