List Price: $15.99 Details

Save: $2.37 (15%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime & FREE Returns

FREE delivery: Friday, April 16 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Details

Fastest delivery: Wednesday, April 14
Order within 4 hrs and 20 mins Details

Only 13 left in stock (more on the way).
As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app.

Secure transaction

Ships from	Amazon.com
Sold by	Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon or get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery: Friday, April 16 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Details

Fastest delivery: Thursday, April 15
Order within 4 hrs and 20 mins Details

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Rich Media Direct

Fulfilled by Amazon

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers on Amazon

$13.55
& FREE Shipping on eligible orders. Details

Sold by: RDT Global

$13.62
+ Free Shipping

Sold by: Fifty Third Street Books

$14.46
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: indoobestsellers

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 3 images

Follow the Authors

Joseph Gies

Frances Gies

Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (Medieval Life) Paperback – January 6, 1995

by Joseph Gies (Author), Frances Gies (Author)

66 ratings

Part of: Medieval Life (8 Books)

See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$9.49

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$8.99

$5.00

$1.20

Paperback

"Please retry"

$13.62

$8.97

$2.00

Enhance your purchase

From bestselling historians Joseph and Frances Gies, whose books have been used by George R.R. Martin as source material for Game of Thrones, comes a classic book on innovation and technological change in medieval Europe

In this account of Europe’s rise to world leadership in technology, Frances and Joseph Gies show how early modern technology and experimental science were direct outgrowths of the decisive innovations of medieval Europe, in the tools and techniques of agriculture, craft industry, metallurgy, building construction, navigation, and war. The Gieses report that many of Europe’s most important inventions—the horse harness, the stirrup, the magnetic compass, cotton and silk cultivation and manufacture, papermaking, firearms, and “Arabic” numerals—had their origins outside Europe, in China, India, and the Middle East. Europe synthesized its own innovations—the three-field system, water power in industry, the full-rigged ship, the putting-out system—into a powerful new combination of technology, economics, and politics.

Print length

357 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Perennial
Publication date

January 6, 1995
Dimensions

5.31 x 0.83 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9780060925819
See all details

Frequently bought together

Total price: $47.60

One of these items ships sooner than the other. Show details

Buy the selected items together

This item:Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (Medieval Life) by Joseph Gies Paperback $13.62
Only 13 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00. Details
Life in a Medieval Castle (Medieval Life) by Joseph Gies Paperback $16.99
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00. Details
Life in a Medieval Village (Medieval Life) by Frances Gies Paperback $16.99
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00. Details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business: Make the most of your Amazon Business account with exclusive tools and savings. Login now
Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Historians, write Frances and Joseph Gies, have long tended to view the Middle Ages as a period of intellectual and scientific stagnation, a long era of backwardness, ignorance, and inertia. Many scholars of the Renaissance era, however, thought otherwise; the mathematician Jerome Cardan, for one, held that three medieval inventions--the magnetic compass, the printing press, and gunpowder--were of such significance that "the whole of antiquity has nothing equal to show."

In their lively history of medieval technology, the Gies team writes of such advances as the heavy plow, the Gothic flying buttress, linen undergarments, water pumps, and the lateen sail. During the medieval millennium, they suggest, a great technological and social revolution occurred "with the disappearance of mass slavery, the shift to water- and wind-power, the introduction of the open-field system of agriculture, and the importation, adaptation, or invention of an array of devices, from the wheelbarrow to double-entry bookkeeping." Many of those inventions or adaptations, brought into Europe from China and the Middle East, have scarcely been improved on today.

The medieval technological revolution, the authors conclude, came at a cost: much of Europe was deforested to make room for cropland and to fire kilns and furnaces, and mechanization made obsolete many handicraft skills. Yet, they add, the workers and inventors of the Middle Ages "all transformed the world, on balance very much to the world's advantage." --Gregory McNamee

Review

"The Gieses here explode the myth of the Dark Ages, showing that the Fall of Rome did not plunge Europe into stagnation and lethargy.""--Booklist"

Start reading Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Product details

ASIN : 0060925817
Publisher : Harper Perennial; 60th ed. edition (January 6, 1995)
Language : English
Paperback : 357 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780060925819
Item Weight : 11.1 ounces
Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.83 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #788,791 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,099 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #4,373 in Technology (Books)
- #6,138 in Great Britain History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
66 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		67%
4 star		23%
3 star		2%
2 star		4%
1 star		4%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Augustus Raymond

Fantastic book about how the middle ages were not a ...

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2017

Verified Purchase

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!

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

funner things

Life in the Middle Ages: A period of development

Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2020

Verified Purchase

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.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Fred W. Hallberg

From Roman Stagnation to Renaissance Dynamism

Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2006

Verified Purchase

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.

47 people found this helpful

Helpful

Theofrastus Nihilus

Nice overview

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2014

Verified Purchase

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...

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

RET

Outstanding primer on medieval technology!

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is an excellent study in the general progress of technology during the Middle Ages, debunking the centuries-old conventional wisdom that the period was somehow a step backwards or idling vis-a-vis the Romans. Proceeding chronologically from period to period, a convincing case is made by showing how particular developments built on each other step by step. If I had to find a quibble, it would be the very minor one that I expected a bit more on building technology, and that is very minor indeed.

For those who are not already expert in medieval technology, but are generally interested in either medieval history or technological history, this is a must-read.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Daniel R. Murphy

The Middle Ages come alive

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2013

Verified Purchase

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.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Erich Beck

Detailed and highly interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

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

T E Flondon

Old Tech

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

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

Mr. R. F. Roberts

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 10, 2015

Verified Purchase

Good read

See all reviews