The Medieval Machine

 
The Medieval Machine
The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

by Jean Gimpel

Penguin

1977
 

 

My introduction to the central idea of The Medieval Machine arrived via the television series Connections, which I loved when I was a kid. Connections talked about the productivity increase achieved by replacing human and animal power with waterwheels to mill grain, process cloth, saw wood, pump bellows, and hammer iron. Gimpel makes it all sound more interesting than I do, and it turns out, this is just the first chapter.

 
Gimpel also covers innovations in agriculture (using horses instead of oxen and 3-field instead of 2-field crop rotation), mining, and labor conditions. He notes the accidental over-use of wood and various forms of industrial pollution. And he talks about the rise of reason and science from around 1100 to around 1300, including the translation of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin. The pinnacle of Medieval science was the mechanical clock to replace the water clock. Invented to track the movements of the sun, moon, and planets, it accidentally produced uniform hours as a byproduct.

 
Gimpel notes that this period of growth and progress ended in the 1300s when famines, Black Death, and wars reduced the European population and turned both the Church and the general public toward mysticism (with anti-witch violence representing official mysticism using torture and murder to suppress popular mysticism.) Some of the perception of the Renaissance as such a contrast against the so-called 'Dark Ages' is because of the poor conditions in the 1300s, which were much worse than in the preceding 200-300 years.

 
I wish that, in his epilogue, Gimpel hadn't chosen to claim that 1975, when he finished his text, was at or near the 'end of an era' for the West that would be similar to the end of the Medieval industrial revolution. Let's start with the obvious reason first - computers. At the same time that Gimpel was claiming that the inventiveness of Western minds was spent and no new important inventions would be coming along to significantly change things for perhaps hundreds of years, computers were already transforming the operations of business, and home computers and the internet were only a few years away.

 
My second reason is that Gimpel's claim is based on the idea of historical cycles of what we'd currently call 'vibes.' Maybe it's my sociological training in grad school, or maybe I'm just 'vibe-blind,' but I'm deeply distrustful of predictions made on the basis of moods or cycles. 

 
Yes, anything that rises or falls must eventually peak, and either plateau or reverse. But societies aren't just one thing. Every society has its progressives and traditionalists, rationalists and mystics, authoritarians and liberals. Their numbers may change, and the balance of power, but they are all always present and always pushing for their preferred vision. They are all always winning in some respects and losing in others. I don't believe in the inevitable rise or decline of anything. The future will be determined by people competing to make their ideals win out, not by impersonal historical cycles. And whatever happens next won't be the end of anything, because there will always be another 'next' after that.