Customer Reviews

Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages

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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.

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.

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.

This book was assigned for a college course I took. I found the book to be well researched, organized, and written, with enough detail in the various subjects to keep the narrative flowing. Highly recommended.

As other reviewers mentioned, Franes Gies is also an author of this book.

The historical material is very interesting, and succeeds in the authors' aim to inform the layperson about recent (i.e. the last 30-50 years) developments in the history of medieval technology. According to the bookjacket's inside flap, they aim to dispel two "time-honored myths": that European civilization stagnated during the middle ages, and that later European technological and political ascendency was solely due to European ingenuity. In reality, technological and scientific advances took place in Europe throughout the middle ages, building gradually toward the achievements of the renaissance. These advances were due to a combination of European inventiveness with borrowing and inspiration from China, India and the Islamic world.

This book disappointed me because I was unable to understand many of the vague descriptions of the technology. Too often the authors either expect the reader to have background knowledge of the mechanisms and procedures that they describe; or else they only intend to impart a vague understanding of the way the mechanisms operated. I would expect that most readers of this book are interested in the details of the medieval technology. In addition, in a book that covers so many kinds of technology, such as architecture, shipping, textile manufacture, weaponry, etc., the authors ought to know that no reader will be familiar with every single kind of technology described.

Illustrations can help a reader to understand the textual descriptions, but hardly any of the illustrations are technical drawings. They are mostly reproductions of artworks or photographs of objects. These are labeled only by captioning, not by labeling parts of the objects depicted.

For example, a reproduction of a manuscript drawing/diagram of the water system of Canterbury, is printed upside-down, which makes the caption completely inaccurate. (Perhaps this has been corrected since the 1994 hardback edition.) In addition this illustration is reproduced too small for most of the labeling in the original to be legible.

A glossary and timelines could also have been helpful for readers.

The book is structured in chronological order, with each chapter covering several centuries. Each chapter is divided into sections about different kinds of technology. The sections are not listed in the table of contents, so if you are interested in a particular kind of technology, you must resort to skimming the chapters and the index.

If you like historical trivia, you will love this book. It is full of little nuggets, such as the origin of the word "coach" and the pros and cons of different kinds of waterwheels.

I enjoyed reading most of this book, but I was frustrated by its shortcomings. You will probably feel the same way if you want to understand the exact workings of the technology described.

Wonderful, totally entertaining history that opens your mind to the connections between technology and society while dispelling the myths we have of the "Dark Ages".

This book is filled with interesting facts. If you are looking a very shallow introduction to medieval technology, this book can help you as a way to read a more advance study.

As allways, the Gies present a very organized book, dividing the inventions and technology according to the low or high middle ages, and making subdivisions for a better understanding of the different technologies (in clothing, in traveling, in science, in sailing, etc.)

All that being said, the book is a little boring at times. Some of the inventions are shown in drawings, but this is not the case in most examples, and to imagine the machine by description only turns the book into a complicated reading, a reading that bores you from time to time.

Conventional wisdom once told us that there wasn't any technology in the Middle Ages. But Frances and Joseph Gies make a strong argument, with many examples, that technological developments from 500 to 1500 AD transformed Europe, and enabled both the Renaissance and the European conquest of the rest of the world.

At the fall of the Roman Empire, about 500 AD, Europe was little more than an illiterate, rural backwater. Except for a few items left behind by the Romans, virtually all of mankind's significant technology was in the hands and minds of the Chinese, Indians and Arabs. European towns north of Rome were small and dirty, and produced little except subsistence level farming.

However by 1500, the end of the Middle Ages, Europeans had thrown back a major Muslim invasion, lived in large cities and fortified castles, carried on an active trade with China, India and Arabia, had developed full-rigged ships and navigation instruments capable of crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and developed weapons that would soon enable them to conquer almost every other civilization on Earth. Admittedly much of the new technology originated in China and Arabia, but the Europeans refined it, improved upon it, and put it to practical uses such that by 1100 AD Europe surpassed its eastern neighbors in sea faring, agriculture, armaments and day-to-day business practices. Even mundane skills like bookkeeping, credit, and insurance proved important in that they created the means to finance undertakings far beyond the capabilities of any one merchant family or sea captain.

That said, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel is a book that will appeal mostly to those who have an interest in the subject. It largely ignores the wars and plagues of the Middle Ages and concentrates instead on technological development and the lives of common people. The first two chapters (there are only seven chapters in 300 pages of text) are mostly background information on the beginning of the Middle Ages and the migration of technology from Arabia and China into Europe, and can be a little tedious to read. The text picks up in the third chapter when the authors begin to describe peasant life in the medieval villages, and these descriptions are at least as interesting as the technology improvements. Each chapter builds on its predecessor and we learn why women carried the ubiquitous spinster around all day; of the prestige of being the village blacksmith or master mason; of the impact of the first printed books; and how the appeal of a trading economy spurred changes that improved everyone's life. Well, almost everyone's.

Because the text addresses both people and technology, it is not necessarily riviting for every reader. You have to wade through descriptions of technology and engineering to get to the good stuff about the people--or read through stuff about medieval villagers to get to the good parts about technology, depending on your point of view. But Frances and Joseph Gies know their stuff and this is a great decription of the impact of developing technology. Between them they have authored or co-authored more than twenty books on European and American history, and are among our foremost scholars on Europe in the Middle Ages.

I originally purchased this book for research on Medieval metallurgy as relates to swords and armor. It completely changed my view of the "Dark" ages an how creative the European culture was during that time. It seems it was the Romans that were stuck in a rut! The idea of borrowing technologic concepts from other cultures, especially China, indirectly had never occurred to me and was fascinating. I found the book eminently readable and it changed my attitude about a lot. I definately got more than I expected for the modest price.

My middle school son is learning about medieval times and is quite interested in technology and invention, so I thought this would be a good introduction to the topic both for him and me. I ended up reading the book and referring him to areas of particular interest as the reading was a bit over his head in spots, but I found it an interesting topic and an enjoyable read.