Something about Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (MTSC) has caused it to endure despite its weaknesses. Fifty Years pays homage to MTSC by describing its legacy and building on its ideas. The book’s main text consists of an introduction and eight essays. The essays are divided into two parts: three general studies that place White’s work in context and five specific studies inspired by it. The c. 200 pages of the book are roughly evenly divided between these two parts, with the introduction counted in the first.
In the introduction, Walton describes the book’s genesis in a 2012 series of conference sessions in which “[i]t was hard to find people to speak” despite general support of the idea (1). Walton attributes both the difficulty of finding speakers and the value of the project to two factors: the fact that White’s academic children have grown up (and retired) and the cognitive dissonance provoked by a pioneering work that is well-known for having been disproved. With this beginning, it’s not surprising that Fifty Years’ publication in 2020 puts it closer to sixty years after MTSC than the promised fifty.
The first essay, B. B. Price’s “Does the history of technology stand on the shoulders of giants?” is, at 40 pages, the longest of the book. Price sets the stage for the rest of the volume by describing how subsequent scholars have “stood on the shoulders of giants,” specifically Lewis Mumford, Lynn White, and Jean Gimpel. White’s section summarizes the three theses presented in MTSC: that the stirrup led to a new way of fighting (mounted shock combat), that the heavy plough ushered in a new era of agriculture, and that a change in attitude led to substantial advances in mechanical power (43-47). Having introduced the three giants, Price foreshadows the second part of the book by exploring the ways others have used and extended their ideas in both research and teaching.
“Lynn White’s ‘Roots’ and Medieval Technology and Social Change: the view from outside medieval studies” by Elspeth Whitney takes a broader perspective on White’s reception. Focusing on “The historical roots of our ecologic crisis,” [1] Whitney describes a bridge between environmental history and medieval studies that does not seem to have been crossed. Although White’s work significantly impacted both sides of the bridge, neither environmental historians nor medievalists seem to have crossed it.
In “Determined disjunction: Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change then and now,” Steven A. Walton traces MTSC's reception through reviews and bibliographies, Amazon sales ranks and Google n-grams. He concludes that MTSC has earned “a formative place in the study of medieval technology” for “its pioneering syntheses” and “resists decades of attempts to dismiss it” (105). This paper supports the transition from the more general papers of the first part to specific studies of the second, going, in effect, from the past to the future of MTSC.
The second half of the book picks up where White left off in MTSC: with mechanical power. George Brooks’s essay, “Of cranks and crankshafts: Lynn White, Jr. and the curious question of mechanical power transmission,” takes up the question of when the crank was invented. New evidence for the crank in antiquity has emerged since White addressed it in MTSC, making this essay a direct extension of his work. With this new evidence comes the question of what advantage the crank could offer. Brooks cites J. G. Landels’ “very useful observation that the only real advantage of a crank over a windlass is speed” and notes cranks are generally difficult to make and worse at lifting heavy loads (127-128). However, they are worth using in certain applications, such as rotary grindstones and the hurdy-gurdy (129).
In “A Romanesque box hoist in Liège: A possible precursor of medieval tower-clock frames?” C. R. J. Currie examines a hoist dating to 1188 built into the roof of the church of St. Bartholomew at Liège (141). It is--as the previous paper leads us to suspect--based on a windlass rather than a crank. Currie speculates that this type of hoist may have been the antecedent to tower clocks.
Christie Peters extends the concept of mechanical power to agriculture in “Industrial milling and the prolific growth of the Cistercian order in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” In a sense, this argument takes a step back by showing that the Cistercians generally took advantage of what already existed--taking over mills rather than building new ones. The next essay, Constance H. Berman’s “Cistercian nuns and forest management in northern France,” extends the Cistercian thread by depicting them as managers. While neither is centered on new medieval technology or its spread, both complicate the narrative by showing how the Cistercians expanded by building on what was already in place.
The book concludes with Chantal Carmenisch’s “Cold, rain, and famine: Three subsistence crises in the Burgundian Low Countries during the fifteenth century,” which brings notions of medieval technology to today’s world by connecting to a major problem currently facing us: climate change. It extends Whitney’s essay on White’s reception among environmentalists by connecting medieval studies with environmental history.
All these essays were written, in one way or another, from the perspective of White’s shoulders. All but the last two papers begin with explicit homage to White; those two extend his ideas in more subtle ways. Overall, the book is a fascinating read that shows how far the ideas of MTSC have come over the past fifty-plus years.
--------
Notes.
1. Lynn White, Jr., “The historical roots of our ecologic crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203-1207. Reprinted in Lynn White, Jr., Machina ex deo: Essays in the dynamism of Western culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 75-94.