Product Description

An illuminating look at the monumental inventions of the Middle Ages, by the authors of Life in a Medieval Castle.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54858 in Books
• Published on: 1995-02-15
• Released on: 1995-01-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.com Review
Historians, write Frances and Joseph Gies, have long tended to view the Middle Ages as a period of intellectual and scientific stagnation, a long era of backwardness, ignorance, and inertia. Many scholars of the Renaissance era, however, thought otherwise; the mathematician Jerome Cardan, for one, held that three medieval inventions--the magnetic compass, the printing press, and gunpowder--were of such significance that "the whole of antiquity has nothing equal to show."

In their lively history of medieval technology, the Gies team writes of such advances as the heavy plow, the Gothic flying buttress, linen undergarments, water pumps, and the lateen sail. During the medieval millennium, they suggest, a great technological and social revolution occurred "with the disappearance of mass slavery, the shift to water- and wind-power, the introduction of the open-field system of agriculture, and the importation, adaptation, or invention of an array of devices, from the wheelbarrow to double-entry bookkeeping." Many of those inventions or adaptations, brought into Europe from China and the Middle East, have scarcely been improved on today.

The medieval technological revolution, the authors conclude, came at a cost: much of Europe was deforested to make room for cropland and to fire kilns and furnaces, and mechanization made obsolete many handicraft skills. Yet, they add, the workers and inventors of the Middle Ages "all transformed the world, on balance very much to the world's advantage." --Gregory McNamee

From Library Journal
Moving chronologically through a millennium (500-1500 A.D.), the authors (who have written numerous books on medieval life, including Life in a Medieval City , LJ 2/1/70) show that the term "Dark Ages" is a misnomer by deftly tracing the period's "main technological elements, . . . their known or probable sources, and their principal impacts." In addition to the technological developments highlighted in the book's title, the authors cover such topics as the textile industry and shipbuilding/rigging, plus obligatory topics like printing, engineering, and gunpowder. Throughout, they nimbly weave medieval cultural history into the discussion. Informative, readable, enjoyable, and well written, this work is directed to general readers. Highly recommended for all collections.
- Michael D. Cramer, Virginia Polytechnic & State Univ. Libs . , Blacksburg
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The flame of human ingenuity burned with surprising intensity during the medieval centuries. Already well known for their extensive research into medieval history and social life, the Gieses here explode the myth of the Dark Ages, showing that the Fall of Rome did not plunge Europe into stagnation and lethargy. Rather, the archaeological and historical record reveals that medieval Europeans borrowed discoveries from other lands (such as the compass, Hindu-Arabic numbers, gunpowder, and paper) and developed their own indigenous technologies (such as those in wind and water mills), so making continual progress in the use of natural resources. In the fields, peasants used a new harness (from China) to put the horse to work in place of the ox; in the forge, the blacksmith developed case-hardened tools for the carpenter; on the open seas, the sailor manipulated the new lanteen sail to guide ships constructed with radical new hull designs. While most of the technological development was anonymous and practical, medieval advances in fields such as astronomy and navigation led directly toward the feats of Copernicus and Columbus. Contemporary readers--prone to take computers and smart bombs for granted--will learn much from this chronicle of monks writing on lime-treated parchments and of knights fighting with newly devised stirrups. Bryce Christensen

Customer Reviews

An excellent review of medieval technology
Reacting to the perception that the medieval period was one of technological stagnation, Frances and Joseph Gies have written a fascinating review of innovation in that period. Starting with a review of ancient technology, the authors then go into innovations made during the so-called Dark ages. After that, the pace quickens, as the authors report on the later Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance.

I was impressed that the authors gave full credit for innovations that migrated from Asia to Europe, even attempting to discover the path that the innovation took. Overall this is an excellent review of medieval technology.

Capable Synthesis of Recent Scholarship (circa mid 1990's)
Correction to the Amazon listing: this book is authored by Frances and Joseph Gies, not just Joseph. It says so on the cover of the book.

Husband and wife team of (amateur?) scholars, synthesize recent scholarship (from mid 60's on) on the middle ages for your reading pleasure.

As the title hints at and the subtitle: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages, spells out, the focus is the manner in which technology and invention transformed society in the area soon to be known as "the West".

The broadest service this book provides is to cue the reader in to the massive scholarship on the subject that exists outside the English speaking world of academia. The French in particular have made many developments in this field of study, but their work seems to be only occasionally translated.

The Gies' are careful footnoters and their method is fairly rigorous. Because they rely on the scholarship that is anywhere from 10 to 200 years old, there are bound to be statements that are inaccurate. This does not effect the merit of the book.

This book provides and excellent introduction to the scholarship on the history of the middle ages, specficically as it relates to technology. However, the bibliography points the interested reader to a fuller picture of the available scholarship, and therfore Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, is useful in that sense as well.

Probably not for strictly "general" readers, nor for scholars/academics, this book is best for the motivated lay reader.

From Roman Stagnation to Renaissance Dynamism
This book by the husband and wife team of Joseph and Frances Gies is a labor of love, and it shows. It provides an overview of the history of technology from pre-classical times to the Renaissance. It is a secondary source textbook, which guides the reader to whatever primary source material may interest him. I can keep this text on my shelf at home, and if I wish to seek out some more detailed account of a contentious point by historians such as Edward Gibbon, Henri Pirenne, Lynn White, or Joseph Needham, the Gies' book will direct me to these more extensive works at my public library.

I was led to this book by the argument over whether there ever was a "fall of Rome" of the sort described by Gibbon. Rodney Stark, for example, denies it in his "The Victory of Reason." Bryan Ward-Perkins, on the other hand, insists there really was a catastrophic collapse in the levels of population, literacy, and economic activity in the 5th Century Western Roman Empire. I am convinced by Ward-Perkin's evidence, yet I must agree with Stark that the Frankish "dark ages" were far more productive of inventions than was the entire world of classical civilization from 500BC to 500AD. The Franks invented (or at least perfected) the horse collar, the wheeled moldboard plow, three-field crop rotation, the stirrup, and the water wheel. The only original thing the Romans invented was concrete.

The Gies' provided me with a way of putting these seemingly paradoxical facts into a consistent whole. The structures of high culture which would support populous urban centers and a literate Senatorial Roman class disappeared after the 5th Century. But the abolition of slavery and the efforts among lower class farmers to survive the chaos of the 6th and 7th Centuries motivated them to produce an astonishing amount of technological inventions. The Romans had no need for waterwheels, for example, since they had an almost limitless supply of slaves. The 6th Century Franks had to be more clever than that.

This may explain the inventiveness of the Franks compared to the Romans. But what about the Muslims? The Muslims served more as transmitters of technology from East to West than as innovators in their own right. Why did they fall so far behind the West after their brilliant start during the 8th to 10th Centuries?

I am grateful to the Gies' for showing me the continuities of technological development through the entire Middle Ages from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance. This has enriched my understanding of the discontinuities emphasized by Gibbon and Ward-Perkins. But much more needs to be done to explain the modern dominance of the West among world cultures. (Non-Western cultures have participated in this dominance only to the extent that they have successfully "Westernized.") Rodney Stark tried to explain this dominance of the West by reference to the alleged virtues of the Christian religion. I argued in my review of his book that his effort failed. But one needs a book like the "Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel" to even address these issues. That is why I am grateful to the Gies' for having created their book.