Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (Medieval Life)

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.

Fantastic book about how the middle ages were not a time of stagnation, but rather an age of innovation, filling the void of seemingly omnipresent Rome and preceding the West's extraordinary rise to magnificence. The greatest arguments brought forward in this book include the importance of the waterwheel, the first pervasive instrument that did not rely on human or animal power; the importance of craft as opposed within the era; the pragmatism of the West, while not spawning much of what they implemented, were able to find a use for technology to the best of their advantage; and finally that Christian Europe provided a timeline, contrary to the cyclical or dystopian nature of other religions, that allowed the people of that epoch to move forward with the intention in mind of stewarding the earth and aiding in the transformation of a garden into a city.This is an incredible read on all accounts, and I highly recommend it to anyone! Particularly if you are an engineer/architect and love Western history!

The Middle Ages is sometimes describes as Dark. People were attacked by various Germanic and Asian tribes and Bubonic plague. Child bearing and reading was difficult with many children dead. A woman could expect many older spiuses. However. The world improved with agricultural innovations, waterworks and other energy sources, the printing press, building of cathedrals and monasteries, changed in law and religion. The Middle Ages were a period of social, cultural, and other innovations. Life was difficult, but not frozen.

This is a fascinating examination of the literature on how technology and knowledge survived and developed throughout the periods we call the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. It is well footnoted and documented. The authors help us understand that the Dark Ages were not as dark as we may have learned in school and that the entire 1000 period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment involved clear stages of growth and development.At times the detail in the book can make it slow going, but over all it is well written and easier than many historical works to plough through.This book provides the most comprehensive look into European conditions and science from 500 - 1500 AD that I've seen. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in history.

This is a very good overview about the technology of middle ages. Too often we see only literature and philosophical works and have a little too positive opinion about the great ancient times and see that middle ages were "corrupted" and "spoiled" centuries that could not produce anything good. This book says otherwise: there were a lot of technological advancements and even if the ancient achievements were remarkable, these were based mostly on the slave labor used in large scale, not so much to the real advancements in technology.The only minus is that this is too much "dictionary"-like presentation about everything. The technology itself is so huge field that may be it would have been better to concentrate something more special, like architecture, clothing, food production etc...

Detailed and highly interesting. Anyone interested in the Middle Ages or in the evolution of technology and knowledge would enjoy this work.

Comprehensive and full of entertaining ideas on the origins of tech stuff

Good read

I wasn't entirely convinced by the arguments that medieval technology, especially in the first stages, was good but the historical narrative and historical facts are quite reasonable. The authors dismissed roman technology very quickly based solemnly on the argument of Romans were a slave society with little incentives to improve technologies.Eu não fui convencido pelos argumentos de que a tecnologia medieval, especialmente nos períodos inicais, era boa mas a narrativa e os fatos históricos são bons. Os autores desdenham da tecnologia romana precipitadamente baseado no argument de que os romanos eram uma sociedade escravista com baixos incentivos para melhoria da tecnologia.