Reviews

Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn Townsend White Jr.

liebscher's review

informative lighthearted fast-paced

3.5

competencefantasy's review

3.0

This text spent most of its time detailing arguments between archaeologists about the dating of different things that might indicate people had certain types of plows, cranks etc. If I was getting ready to make an academic argument in the archaeology of stuff I never knew was this important, I would find this book ridiculously valuable. However, I was kind of trying to read this for fun, and I wish the argument had been more centered on the ways technology and social change were connected, rather than retroactively trying to assign winners to an arms race about stirrups.

Also this book has convinced me that if my advisor lived in the middle ages, she would have built automatons... and been even more miserable than she is now.

tresdem's review

3.0

An interesting look at technology developing through the middle ages and what impact it had. A very academic look and can be exceedingly dry. It's clearly written for the guy's contemporaries who would understand offhand references and entire sentences in French or Latin. I am not the intended audience in other words. Still, it gave me something to think about so in that it's accomplished.

chelsea_rae's review

I honestly do not know how to rate this. at first I couldn't tell whether it was a methodological/disciplinary difference that made some of White's conclusions seem absurd. It's not common for me to read strictly historical work (though this is fairly interdisciplinary, it feels like the archaeologists, literary critics, economists, and other scholars White draws on are all subsumed in his own historicist maneuverings), so I was really unprepared for the emphasis on extrinsic teleological causality that drives the book. It's a quick, easy read (and honestly his section on steam bellows made the entire thing worth it for me), but I felt skeptical and bemused for most of it.

I should note that if I sound dismissive, I'm coming from a perspective that the book itself enabled. White's broadest claim is that rather than a backwater "dark ages," the medieval period was defined by real technological advancement, and his book was one of the first that really argued for that field as one with scholarly potential. If his underlying argument seems obvious to us now, it's only because he and other scholars (incl. Marc Bloch) did the work in opening up that field to begin with.