The medieval machine

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1. Mainan_TagonistApr 2025
   I wonder if GP is trying to be witty or simply has an axe to grind.

   The transmission of knowledge between civilizational blocks is fairly well documented (I recently read Jacques Le Goff on this particular topic), and what is owed to the Islamic civilization is no secret.

   For those interested in comparable technical developments in Europe around the same time, for the middle ages were not as dark as usually portrayed, I recommend reading Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine (whom Ken Follett relied on extensively for "The Pillars of the Earth") and David Landes' A Revolution in Time.

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2. tdeckMar 2018
   For a shorter read I recommend The Medieval Machine by Jean Gimpel. It's a bit old now but tells an interesting story, turns out there was a lot more industrial machinery in the 13th century than we tend to think.
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3. tjradcliffeJan 2015
   You have no idea.

   One of my favourite 70's quotes is from the quite brilliant book "The Medieval Machine" by the Anglo-French historian Jean Gimpel, published in 1976 (which really is a very good history of Medieval technology):

   "The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion. There will be no further industrial revolution in the cycles of our Western civilization."

   These words were written at the same time as Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Allen were all hard at work. This smug bastard was just one voice amongst many telling the world that we were in the grip of a permanent, inexorable "malaise" that could at best be accepted passively, which there was no point in fighting, which had to be simply taken as given, unstoppable, forever.

   At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1]. Gleeful murderers of hope were desperately trying to crush any spark of innovation, creativity or freedom. And it was happening the world over. A relentless, ruthless, assault on the Enlightenment, the rule of law, and the industrial revolution.

   They failed.

   A lot of it was funded, ultimately, by the Soviets, who generated an enormous amount of propaganda that was intended to make people believe these things. One of the notable things that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the stunning pall of silence that fell over the Left in the West. It was almost as if the lifeblood of the whole enterprise had been cut off.

   Part of that was simple empiricism: it was hard for Leftists to hold up their pathologically insane ideas as "better" when their poster-child had just endured a complete and spectacular collapse, including the freeing of a large number of vassal states, all because some shipyard workers in Poland had laid down tools a decade before.

   But part of it was also that funding for a bunch of stuff that Comintern paid for (mostly by indirect means, in the same way the US government funds stuff through NGOs today) vanished.

   Today, hyper-capitalist brands like Naomi Klein are attempting to resurrect some of the old zombie Soviet ideas, but it's a pretty pathetic effort, full of contradictions and gibberish. They won't have a lot of influence, at the end of the day, and it is my firm belief that we are entering into a century of progress that will make the 19th century look staid and the 20th century look stupid. Having lived through the '70's, this is a good thing to see.

   [1] We have done both, and more: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/astronomers-image-lowest...

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4. tjradcliffeSep 2014
   In fairness, most of the progress the article is talking about happened in the High or Late Middle Ages. The period from 800 to 1200 was considerably less fecund, so the "myth" isn't entirely false: the early Middle Ages were pretty barren, scientifically speaking.

   That said, one of the (many) things that makes us tend to underplay the scientific progress made even in the Late Middle Ages was the disconnect between science and technology. In modern science, from Newton's time onward, the two have been closely coupled (with technology leading the way to new science as often as the other way around).

   In the Middle Ages, technology developed more-or-less independently of science, often with quite astonishing results. An excellent book on the subject if Jean Gimpel's "The Medieval Machine", although the solemn declaration of the end of Western technological power makes the preface pretty hilarious reading, 35 years on: http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Machine-Industrial-Revolution...

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5. pgJun 2008
   "The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion."

   - Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, 1975

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