The Craft of Premodern European History of Technology: Past and Future Practice
The fiftieth anniversary of the Society for the History of Technology has provided an opportunity to cast a critical eye backward and forward. My own focus centers on medieval and early modern Europe from about 500 to 1650 and reflects the point of view of a historian—not an engineer or economist—whose approach has been shaped by intellectual, cultural, and social history and by the history of science as well as by the history of technology. This particular orientation is germane to a methodology that sees technology as embedded within a broader social and cultural context.
Traditionally, historians of technology focused on novelties or “inventions,” despite the circumstance that premodern peoples rarely if ever developed or used innovative technologies in isolation from those that had become customary. A contextual methodology recognizes that, more often than not, technologies of the past utilized machines, tools, and processes that had been handed down for generations. It does not ignore inventions but addresses them within the context of whatever other technological processes and devices were being utilized, and it includes a study of the relevant social, political, and material circumstances. A contextual methodology takes account of the understanding that technologies and technological processes have been developed and used in particular places and at the behest of specific individuals, groups, and institutions.
Such an approach necessarily begins at the level of local history. Although the historical survey or synthesis always has its place, a contextual approach requires that broad accounts be deeply informed by specialized investigations based on primary-source research, including archival research focused on particular locales and specific technological practices. In contrast, an approach shaped by an exclusive interest in invention often prefers large surveys over in-depth local studies, just as it also investigates novelties in preference to ordinary, everyday technological processes. Suffice it to say that David Edgerton’s discussion of the persistence and importance of traditional technologies can just as well be applied to the twelfth century and to the fifteenth as to the twentieth.1
Conceptual Foundations and Developments
The creation of SHOT in 1958 marked a turning point for the history of technology, but an earlier event marked its intellectual foundation, namely the publication of the 1935 issue of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale devoted to “Les techniques, l’histoire et la vie,” edited and in part authored by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Bloch and Febvre’s interest in technology and technique was part of their broader program to reform the study of history, taking it beyond the (then) traditional focus on war, politics, diplomacy, and great men. Instead, they wanted to create a history of ordinary people and daily life, and to create stronger analytical frameworks for social and economic history. As is well known, the Annales program transformed the study of history in permanent and indelible ways.2
In the 1935 special issue of the Annales, Febvre made a programmatic statement about methodology. His tripartite approach called, first, for the study of techniques themselves, their development across time and space, and their grounding in the general social, economic, and political conditions in which they were used and transmitted. Second, Febvre believed that historians should study the “progress” of techniques, including both incremental and precipitous changes or “revolutions” that create radically new situations. A key problem concerned the complex reciprocal relationships of theory and practice, by which he meant the role of science in the history of technical accomplishments and the role of technical accomplishments in the history of science. Third was the relationship of techniques to other activities, both individual and collective, including art, religion, politics, and warfare. Historians, Febvre believed, should be fundamentally concerned with explaining how techniques and “what one can call general history” have influenced one another.3
Certain aspects of the program outlined by Febvre no longer bear scrutiny. One is his belief that the history of techniques should be written by technicians. To be sure, technical skill is necessary in experimental recreations of historical devices and processes, an approach that has provided important information.4 In addition, practical technical experience can be extremely useful in studying particular technologies—weavers will tend to grasp the history of weaving more completely than non-weavers.5 Nevertheless, the craft of history itself remains paramount to the discipline, including investigation of the relationships of particular technologies to broader historical issues. A second aspect of Febvre’s program that at least requires modification is his call for a study of the relationships between science and technology, an injunction that assumes a sharp dichotomy between the two fields that no longer prevails. On the one hand, historians of science have changed their conceptual framework since the 1930s and now routinely study technical practices in the laboratory and elsewhere. On the other, historians of technology are as concerned with the knowledge base of the technologies that they study as they are with materials and techniques. A strict division between the “history of science” and the “history of technology” is far more problematic now than it was then.6
Nevertheless, Febvre’s emphasis on the relationship of techniques to other aspects of history remains an important principle, its value demonstrated in a classic article on the water mill in the same issue of the Annales. Marc Bloch’s “The Advent and Triumph of the Watermill in Medieval Europe” aimed to establish the origins of the mill and its development from antiquity until the eleventh century. Bloch discussed early stone-roller and mortar-and-pestle mills and then later mills requiring a revolving millstone powered by men or animals, invented in the Mediterranean basin in the third or second century BCE. Investigating evidence for the water mill in ancient times, he hypothesized that it was a development from the noria, a wheel used to scoop water and lift it into canals or other receptacles. For Bloch, effective progress in transforming the idea of the water mill to a practical reality was something which could only take place under the pressure of social forces. Those forces emerged when seigneurial lords began to use waterpowered mills as instruments to obtain and maintain monopolies on grinding grain. Bloch pointed to the hand mill, often hidden away inside the houses of peasants, as the peasant’s defense against such monopolies.7
Bloch’s discussion of the water mill represented one phase of his long-standing interest in agricultural and technological history. He had already completed his classic work on the character of medieval French agriculture; first delivered as lectures in Oslo, Norway, these were published as a book in 1931. He rejected the legal and institutional orientation of the agricultural historiography of his day, widening his focus beyond this traditional subject matter. One aspect of his research entailed a study of patterns of settlement and field cultivation, and it is to Bloch we attribute the first understanding that plowing in long strips (open-field farming) is characteristic of the use of the heavy plow in the north, while square fields were found closer to the Mediterranean and are associated with the much older “scratch” plow.8
Bloch’s influence was highly significant for the historiography of technology in more recent times. Most notably, Lynn White jr. dedicated his own massively influential 1962 book, Medieval Technology and Social Change, to Bloch. The dedication undoubtedly served as homage to Bloch’s heroism as a resistance fighter who was killed by a German firing squad in 1944, but also as an acknowledgement of the influence of Bloch the historian. White, who began his professional life as a medieval historian and eventually served as a SHOT president, made use of various approaches developed by Bloch and the Annales, including, for example, linguistic analysis as an investigative tool for the study of technological developments. He extended Bloch’s classic discussion of French agriculture. He also retained and indeed expanded the initial Annales interest in innovation and invention, focusing on the profound importance of new devices developed in the medieval centuries—perhaps most notably the introduction of the stirrup, which, he argued, brought about feudalism. In addition, he argued that an agricultural revolution occurred by means of inventions such as the heavy plow, new harnessing systems for draft animals, and the change from two-field to three-field crop rotation.9
White’s emphasis on invention and technological revolution was shared by numerous other historians and popular writers in the two decades following publication of his book. In addition to the agricultural revolution, scholars and writers expounded a medieval industrial revolution,10 a commercial revolution,11 a “green” revolution (referring to the adoption of new crops across the Mediterranean from Iran to al-Andalus in the West),12 and a revolution in time.13 For a somewhat later period, other scholars proposed further revolutions, such as the “military revolution,”14 and the “print revolution.”15
A parallel to the focus on revolutions was a tendency to study inventions in isolation from their surroundings, including the traditional technologies with which they coexisted and/or from which they emerged. Historians of technology and economic historians often framed technological history exclusively in terms of important inventions—the heavy plow, new harnessing systems, and new kinds of crop rotation; or new systems of irrigation; or the adoption of water mills; or the mechanical clock, gunpowder artillery, the printing press, and the telescope, to name just a few.16
More recently, scholars have questioned whether such technological changes should be called revolutionary. In the first place, the traditional view of the ancient world as technologically static has been decisively challenged.17 In turn, a more technologically dynamic ancient world has modified a view of the Middle Ages characterized by technological revolutions. Concerning the medieval/early modern period per se, extensive empirical investigations have produced complex pictures of the role of particular technologies in economic and social life. This scholarship has entailed not only a serious review of the literature, but also exhaustive studies of primary sources and artifacts for particular locales and specific technologies such as windmills, or types of draft animals, or papermaking.18 The heavy plow has been shown to have been a gradual development from late antiquity, rather than an invention that appeared suddenly in the Middle Ages.19 Similarly, heavy, water-driven mills have been shown to be gradual and variable, depending on a number of factors, including location.20 Gunpowder artillery was a centuries-long development which occurred in the context of other forms of weaponry, both traditional and innovative.21 Scholars have also argued that there was far more continuity between manuscript and print culture than would justify the term “print revolution.”22
The History of Technology and the Origins of SHOT
Just as Bloch’s work had a direct influence on Lynn White jr., White’s writings in turn influenced numerous other historians of technology as well as the perceptions of the general public. Two other authors who wrote influential books well before the creation of SHOT in 1958 also influenced the history of medieval and Renaissance European technology. Both became energetic supporters of the new society. They were the economic historian Abbott Payson Usher and the wide-ranging critic Lewis Mumford.
Usher, who spent most of his working life teaching at Harvard, wrote a book on the industrial history of England, published in 1920, and then turned to the study of technology in order to understand better the relationships between economic growth and technical innovation. The result was A History of Mechanical Inventions, published in 1929. This book, as Arthur Molella puts it, “covered in exquisite detail an extraordinary range of basic technologies,” including great attention to machines important to the medieval period, such as waterwheels, windmills, and clocks. In addition, Usher included a chapter on Leonardo da Vinci that emphasized his mechanical inventions at a time when this aspect of Leonardo’s work was little recognized. Molella lucidly analyzes the influence of Gestalt psychology on Usher’s holistic vision of human invention—a vision largely lost on most of Usher’s subsequent readers, who focused instead on his brilliant chapters explicating particular machines.23
While Usher was writing his History of Mechanical Inventions, his contemporary Lewis Mumford was at work on a similar subject conceived in a very different way. In an insightful essay, Rosalind Williams describes Mumford as primarily a “public intellectual” whose prolific output often included books that focused on technology and its relationships to human culture and psychology. But for specialists in the history of technology, Mumford’s most influential book was undoubtedly Technics and Civilization. First published in 1934, it achieved wide readership among the general public as well as being assigned time and again as required reading in introductory courses in the history of technology. Mumford followed his mentor Patrick Geddes in dividing Western civilization into phases, the first two being the paleotechnic, referring to an eighteenth-century industrial age based on coal and iron, and the neotechnic, referring to the modern age based on electricity and alloys. To Geddes’s paleotechnic and neotechnic, Mumford added a third “preparatory” phase, the eotechnic, characterized by wood and water, which he placed between 1100 and 1750. This was the time period, wrote Mumford, during which “all the key inventions were either invented or foreshadowed,” among them the clock, the printing press, and the blast furnace. Beyond that, a key characteristic of eotechnic culture, in Mumford’s view, was an expansion of the senses, “a more acute response to external stimuli.” While Mumford’s vast canvas of generalization now seems problematic, his central insight concerning the significance of the relationships of machines and tools to cultural, psychological, and symbolic life remains important. It shows, as Williams has noted, “an awareness of the importance in technics of symbolic representations of worldly reality.”24
Influenced by Mumford, among others, Melvin Kranzberg and the other founders of SHOT promoted a discipline conceived very broadly both in terms of methodology and chronology. They decided that its new journal should be concerned with technology and culture, not just technology per se. They believed that the history of technology should be explored, not in isolation from the individuals, society, and culture that produced and used technology, but in context—and indeed, as John Staudenmaier in particular has shown, the studies published in the journal became increasingly oriented to contextualism.25
As is well known, Kranzberg vigorously encouraged studies in the history of technology over the long sweep of time, including premodern times, and authors engaged with him during SHOT’s formative years—Lynn White jr., Abbott Payson Usher, and Lewis Mumford, as well as Eugene S. Ferguson, Cyril Stanley Smith, Robert P. Multhauf, and many others—made significant contributions to medieval and Renaissance historiography. Drawing on their own respective spheres of influence, each of these scholars pulled in others who were working on premodern technologies in diverse realms.26 While SHOT was certainly not the sole player, it formed a supportive matrix for one of the most important developments of the 1960s and 1970s in the scholarship of premodern technologies, namely the difficult and often unheralded work involved in the creation of facsimiles, critical editions, and translations of some of the large number of surviving manuscripts on crafts, engineering, and machines from the medieval and late medieval periods.27 Such projects, and others more recent, have made these fundamental sources far more readily available for further study than they were previously.28
Present Work and Future Prospects
The history of technology in medieval and late medieval Europe remains a flourishing field of study, or, more accurately, a thriving aggregate of fields. In the remainder of this essay, I describe some of the best current scholarship and then suggest that several related fields—archaeology, material culture studies, and the history of science—have undergone developments or are sustaining practices that make it a particularly propitious time for interdisciplinary dialogue between those disciplines and the European history of technology.
A striking characteristic of the newer scholarship is that it concerns either particular locales or particular technologies or both. All such studies are based on primary source research including archival investigation of contemporary records. Many scholars have traded the traditional emphasis on inventions as isolated phenomena for broader concerns about how particular technologies developed and were used. Examples include a rich and ongoing tradition of scholarship on medieval and early modern hydrology focused on many parts of Europe, including Italy, Holland, England, France, and the Iberian Peninsula.29 It also includes extensive work on textile technology, including silk;30 wide-ranging scholarship, mostly French and German, on mining and metallurgy, including numerous local studies;31 studies of specific industries such as glassmaking and papermaking in particular regions;32 and studies of engineering and construction in particular locales.33
Scholars continue to study attitudes toward craft knowledge and its transmission. Notable is S. R. Epstein’s challenge to the traditional view of the guilds as a force working against innovation, and his investigation of journeymen mobility or “tramping” as an important modality for the transmission of technologies.34 Others investigate proprietary attitudes toward craft knowledge (whether evidenced by patents or secrecy), as well as openness.35 Current research also approaches the many machine books of the period, not so much as lenses into contemporary technologies but as objects of study in their own right, deserving of scrutiny in terms of authorship and readership.36
Although there is no doubt that invention and innovation were important components of medieval and Renaissance cultures, they arose in the context of ongoing, everyday technologies and technological processes which heretofore were often neglected by historians. Indeed, many discussions of invention involved a process of scanning the secondary literature in the history of technology, and then pulling out particular inventions for discussion. In contrast, archival research focused on particular groups of documents typically does not yield large amounts of information about invention; more often it contains evidence concerning ongoing technological processes and practices. My own current research on engineering in Rome between 1560 and 1590 has produced much information about payments made to workers, about mundane municipal decisions concerning construction, and about discussions (and arguments) concerning financial matters. One reads of proposals for moving obelisks, repairing aqueducts and sewers, paving streets, and preventing floods of the Tiber River. More often than not, traditional techniques are suggested, or even a return to ancient techniques.37 Of course, Rome was a highly unusual, not to say unique, city in the sixteenth century, and yet I do not think the fruits of my archival work are unusual in the way that they inform a significant field of study—how a burgeoning city governed by two entities, the papal curia and the communal council, carried out ordinary and extraordinary technological tasks on a day-to-day basis.
Such historical work is quite different methodologically from the work of influential economic historians like Avner Greif and Joel Mokyr, who typically use historical data framed by modern economic theory and models to tell a progressive story about Western civilization.38 Their approach is profoundly different from that of historians who write contextual histories based on primary-source research, which includes careful attention to the conceptual categories of past societies. Economic historians who frame their studies with modern economic methodology are asking different kinds of questions from historians pursuing contextual studies, questions which shape their respective research in significant ways. Assuming that these methodological differences are recognized at the outset, dialogue between the two, as across disciplinary boundaries, is bound to be reciprocally beneficial.39
Besides economic history, several other disciplines have much to offer to the study of the early history of technology, in some cases because of developments within the disciplines themselves. Archaeology has always focused on material objects and specific sites, while possessing an extensive scientific toolkit for dating and studying those objects. In medieval archaeology, it has become routine to examine not just specific sites and objects, but their larger surroundings. Along with the emergence of landscape archaeology, this broadened purview has made the field more accessible and relevant to historians of technology. In underscoring this relevance, Kevin Greene points out that archaeologists can discover new things about everyday life by analyzing small objects—how they were made and what implications they have for understanding daily life in the past. The archaeological site provides much specific information that historians of technology might well fit into a larger picture through the additional investigation of textual sources and other material artifacts.40
The rise of material culture studies and growing interest in material culture in other disciplines is also significant for historians of premodern technology. One aspect of this interest involves burgeoning scholarship on the history of collecting.41 Other scholarship emphasizes the growing appreciation of objects in the European Renaissance, including luxury objects, the changing status of craftwork, and, in the sixteenth century, the growing confluence and conceptual overlap between artifactual and natural objects.42 In a very different field, literary scholars and art historians have investigated the influence of machines and mechanics on medieval and Renaissance culture, including literature and art.43
Finally, historians of science concentrating on medieval and early modern topics are increasingly focusing on practices, technologies, instrumentation, and modalities of investigating nature. They are, in other words, pursuing research that could as easily fit under the rubric of the history of technology, and the relationship of the two disciplines is thus different than it was at the time of the 1957 meeting in Ithaca, New York, between Henry Guerlac and Mel Kranzburg—whatever may have happened there. At that time, before publication of the writings of Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer, before social constructionism, science was more often than not conceived as primarily theoretical, following Alexandre Koyré. Although Edgar Zilsel wrote his seminal articles concerning the contributions of artisans to the “scientific revolution” in the early 1940s, his ideas were developed only much later and within intellectual frameworks very different from his own.44 The role of the artisan and of craftwork and instrumentation in the development of empirical and experimental methodologies is very much an ongoing issue.45 Many historians, myself included, identify themselves as both historians of science and historians of technology and travel seamlessly between the two professional orbits.
Conclusion
The history of medieval and early modern technology is being actively pursued on numerous fronts by historians from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. In the early years of SHOT, members of the society may have disagreed about how much attention should be paid to “culture” and how much to “technology,” but they never questioned the “history” part of the society’s mission. It is true that SHOT’s formation had much to do with developments in American engineering education and culture, as Bruce Seely has shown, but there seems never to have been any doubt that the “history” of technology should refer to any and all history, through all time periods and in every part of the world. While SHOT’s activities have never quite reached “the world” as a whole, at least not yet, there have been and continue to be efforts to extend the geographical range included in the organization’s effective (as opposed to theoretical) purview.46
At the same time, however, SHOT in recent decades has made a radically presentist turn. This is evident primarily in the program of the annual meetings—one of the most important public faces of any professional organization. Most recent annual meetings, with sixty or so sessions, include perhaps one or two that concern eighteenth-century topics, and perhaps one on a pre-eighteenth-century topic, with the great majority focusing on issues in the twentieth century. In recent years it has not been unusual for not a single paper to appear on the program on any topic before the eighteenth century. If the annual meetings are taken as a measure, SHOT has become the Society for the History of Modern Technology. This represents a radical if mostly silent change, a marginalization of the organization from the point of view of the mainstream of historical studies, and certainly from the point of view of medieval and early modern studies.47
The reasons for SHOT’s turn away from the study of the premodern history of technology are undoubtedly complex, but it is ironic that the early history of technology as a discipline was shaped by scholars such as Marc Bloch and Lynn White jr., who actually were medievalists.
The presentist turn represents a loss for the discipline as a whole, not least because it cuts the history of technology as a discipline off from its own history in the early twentieth century. It also makes the extensive ongoing work of historians of premodern technology far less available to historians focused on more recent history. The sophisticated contextual historiography that is being pursued by historians of earlier European history—often influenced at least indirectly by the Annales School—has much to offer historians of modern technologies who are often focused primarily on invention and innovation to the neglect of the context, including ordinary or traditional technologies within that context.
SHOT’s efforts to expand its global range would also be enriched by fully reintegrating medieval and early modern European studies into all of SHOT’s activities, including the annual meeting. The study of technology in medieval and early modern European history has resonance with the study of premodern technologies in China and in India, in Africa and in South America. Greater communication among historians of diverse periods and geographic areas would encourage thought on a variety of problems: the symbolic meaning of technologies in diverse cultures; the relationships of traditional and innovative technologies; the relevant contexts of specific technologies; and the variety of technological practices undertaken in diverse circumstances. Historians who are focused on early cultures and those working in the more recent past share methodological and other substantive interests; their work would be furthered by greater interchange among their respective subdisciplines.
In addition to a more inclusive chronological and global range, how might the direction of future research in the history of technology be shaped? I would urge that historians of technology take full advantage of the dissolution of traditional disciplinary boundaries that is occurring in many fields, and, in addition, that they profit from the growing general interest in material culture and practices. Communication among related fields, including history, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, material culture studies, art and architectural history, and the history of science promises to be particularly fruitful both in increasing knowledge of technological practices and structures, and in theoretical richness.
The history of technology is relevant to all historical times and places. Historians of premodern European technology, of modern North American and European technologies, of the technologies of Central and South America, of Africa, and of Asia, can only benefit by more sustained and ongoing communication across both geographic and chronological boundaries. Greater communication across fields would enrich the methodology of each, while enhancing sensitivity to diverse contexts. Such communication in all its forms—professional meetings as well as publication—goes to the heart of SHOT’s mission and deserves to be at the forefront of SHOT’s priorities as a professional organization.
1. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford, 2007).
2. Introductions to the Annales School include André Burguiére, The Annales School: An Intellectual History, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–1989 (Stanford, Calif., 1990); Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, Le Phénoméne nouvelle histoire: Grandeur et decadence de l’École des Annales, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1989); Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, Mass., 1997), 51– 64; and Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm, foreword by Fernand Braudel (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976). A second issue of the Annales dedicated to the history of techniques, edited by Yves Cohen and Dominique Pestre, appeared much more recently—Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 53 (1998).
3. Lucien Febvre, “Réflexions sur l’histoire des techniques,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 7 (November 1935): 531–35. For a discussion of this entire Annales issue, on which this part of my essay is based, see Pamela O. Long, “Classics Revisited: The Annales and the History of Technology: Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 7 (November 1935), Les techniques, l’histoire, et la vie,” Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 177–86.
4. Examples include a study of harnessing by G. Raepsaet, Attelages et techniques de transport dans le monde gréco-romaine (Brussels, 2002), and a study by W. T. S. Tarver, “The Traction Trebuchet: A Reconstruction of an Early Medieval Siege Engine,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 136–67.
5. See Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York, 1994), 17–24, which describes the discoveries made about ancient weaving by a modern weaver (and scholar) attempting to replicate an ancient cloth.
6. See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge, 1998), esp. 133–61; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, N.J., 1986); Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 2006); William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago, 2004); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, 1995); and Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam, 2007).
7. Marc Bloch, “Avénement et conquét du moulin à eau,” Annales 7: 538–63, which has been translated by J. E. Anderson as “The Advent and Triumph of the Watermill,” in Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (New York, 1969).
8. See Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, foreword by Bryce Lyon, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley, Calif., 1966), esp. 21–63. Lyon’s foreword provides a useful introduction and additional bibliography.
9. Lynn White jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962). For a succinct discussion of the state of the history of medieval technology and its major contributors from the 1930s, see Lynn White jr., “The Study of Medieval Technology, 1924–1974: Personal Reflections,” Technology and Culture 16 (1975): 519–30, and also “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 15 (1940): 141–59, both reprinted in Lynn White jr., Medieval Religion and Technology (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), xi–xxiv and 1–22, respectively. For an assessment of White’s career, see especially Bert S. Hall, “Lynn Townsend White, jr. (1907–1987),” Technology and Culture 30 (1989): 194–213. A full review of the critiques of Medieval Technology and Social Change is beyond the scope of this essay. However, for the thesis about the relationship of the stirrup and feudalism (which has been decisively rejected), see Kelly DeVries, Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough, Ontario, 1992), 95–110, and, especially, Bernard Bachrach, “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup, and Feudalism,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1970): 49–75. More recent critiques of the book as a whole, as well as of particular aspects, include Bert Hall, “Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change after Thirty Years,” and Richard Holt, “Medieval Technology and the Historians: The Evidence for the Mill,” both in Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, ed. Robert Fox (Amsterdam, 1996), 85–101 and 103–21, respectively.
10. Especially Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York, 1976).
11. Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge, 1976).
12. Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Technologies, 700–1100 (Cambridge, 1983).
13. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
14. Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560–1660 (Belfast, 1956); Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West (Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1996); and David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1995).
15. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979).
16. In addition to the references in notes 9–14 above, see Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford, 1990), and, for the telescope, Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago, 2006).
17. See especially Kevin Greene, “Perspectives on Roman Technology,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 9 (1990): 209–19; Kevin Greene, “Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World: M. I. Finley Re-considered,” Economic History Review 53 (2000): 29–59; Örjan Wikander, Exploitation of Water-Power or Technological Stagnation? A Reappraisal of the Productive Forces in the Roman Empire (Lund, 1984); and the studies in John Peter Oleson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (Oxford, 2008).
18. For example, Grenville Astill and John Langdon, eds., Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe (Leiden, 1997); Richard Holt, The Mills of Medieval England (Oxford, 1988); Adam Lucas, Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology (Leiden, 2006), esp. 201–31; John Langdon, Horses, Oxen, and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066 to 1500 (Cambridge, 1986); Leonard N. Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761–1805 (Baltimore, 2000); and Steven A. Walton, ed., Wind and Water in the Middle Ages: Fluid Technologies from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Tempe, Ariz., 2006).
19. Georges Raepsaet, “The Development of Farming Implements between the Seine and the Rhine from the Second to the Twelfth Centuries,” in Medieval Farming and Technology, 40–68.
20. Lucas, Wind, Water, Work; Adam Lucas, “Industrial Milling in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: A Survey of the Evidence for an Industrial Revolution in Medieval Europe,” Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 1–30; Holt, Mills of Medieval England; and John Langdon, Mills in the Medieval Economy: England, 1300–1540 (Oxford, 2004).
21. Bert S. Hall, “The Military Revolution Revisited”, Technology and Culture 31 (1990): 500–7, and Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, 1997).
22. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 2000), esp. 1–57; and see also Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, and Adrian Johns, “AHR Forum: How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 84–128, and http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.1/ah0102000084.html (accessed 13 December 2009).
23. Abbott Payson Usher, An Introduction to the Industrial History of England (Boston, 1920); Abbott Payson Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Arthur P. Molella, “The Long Durée of Abbott Payson Usher: A. P. Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions,” Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 779–96, quote on 781; and Arthur P. Molella, “The First Generation: Usher, Mumford, and Giedion,” in In Context: History and the History of Technology: Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 88–105.
24. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, with a new introduction (New York, 1962), esp. 107–50, citation on 150; Rosalind Williams, “Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization,” Technology and Culture 43 (2002): 139–49, quotes on 145. See also Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes, eds., Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (New York, 1989); and Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York, 1989). Recent discussions of Mumford’s intellectual context, which place him more firmly in the context of early-twentieth-century thought, include Adam Green, “Matter and Psyche: Lewis Mumford’s Appropriation of Marx and Jung in His Appraisal of the Condition of Man in Technological Civilization,” History of the Human Sciences 19 (2006): 33–64, and Gregory Morgan Swer, “Technics and (Para)praxis: The Freudian Dimensions of Lewis Mumford’s Theories of Technology,” History of the Human Sciences 17 (2004): 45–68.
25. John Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
26. For insight into those early years, see Robert C. Post, “Missionary: An Interview with Melvin Kranzberg,” American Heritage of Invention and Technology, winter 1989, available at http://shotnews.net/fiftieth/?p=294 (accessed 13 December 2009), and Robert C. Post, “Chance and Contingency: Putting Mel Kranzberg in Context,” Technology and Culture 50 (2009): 839–72. Also see David A. Hounshell, “Eugene S. Ferguson, 1916–2004,” Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 911–21.
27. A selection includes Martha Teach Gnudi and Eugene S. Ferguson, eds. and trans., The Various and Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli (1588) (Baltimore, 1976); Bert S. Hall, The Technological Illustrations of the So-Called “Anonymous of the Hussite Wars”: Codex Latinus Monacensis 197, pt. 1 (Wiesbaden, 1979); Ladislao Reti, ed. and trans., The Madrid Codices, 5 vols. (New York, 1974); Anneliese Grünhaldt Sisco and Cyril Stanley Smith, eds. and trans., Bergwerkund Probierbüchlein (New York, 1949); Cyril Stanley Smith and John G. Hawthorne, eds. and trans., Mappae clavicula: A Little Key to the World of Medieval Techniques (Philadelphia, 1974); Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi, eds. and trans., The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio: The Classic Sixteenth-Century Treatise on Metals and Metallurgy (Mineola, N.Y., 2005); Theophilus, On Diverse Arts, trans. and ed. John G. Hawthorne and Cyril Stanley Smith (New York, 1979); Mariano Taccola, De machinis: The Engineering Treatise of 1449, ed. Gustina Scaglia, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1971); and Mariano Taccola, De ingeneis, ed. Gustina Scaglia, Frank D. Prager, and Ulrich Montag, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1984). This selection is far from inclusive, and in particular it omits numerous editions in German, French, and Italian.
28. A remarkable recent addition is Konrad Gruter von Werden, De machinis et rebus mechanicis: Ein Maschinenbuch aus Italien für den König von Dänemark: 1393–1424 [Ms. Vat. Lat. 5961] (Vatican City, 2006). Another is a manuscript containing the first extant treatise on shipbuilding, a mathematical treatise, and much else, written in the 1430s by a mariner, Michael of Rhodes—Pamela O. Long, David McGee, and Alan M. Stahl, eds., The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).
29. A small selection of this scholarship includes Eric H. Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, 2004), esp. 55–86, on Dover Harbor; Armelle Bonis and Monique Wabont, eds., L’Hydraulique monastique: Milieux, réseaux, usages, directed by Léon Pressouyre and Paul Benoit (Grâne, 1996); Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave, “Some Reflections on the Use of Water Power in Al-Andalus,” in Economia e Energia secc. XIII–XVIII, Atti della “Trentaquattresima Settimana di Studi,” 15–19 aprile 2002, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Florence, 2003), 931–49; Alessandra Fiocca, Daniela Lamberini, and Cesare Maffioli, eds., Arte e scienza della acque nel Rinascimento (Venice, 2003); Thomas F. Glick et al., Els molins hidràulics valencians: Tecnologia, història i context social (València, 2000); Pamela O. Long, “Hydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity: Rome, 1557–1570,” Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 1098–1138; Roberta J. Magnusson, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire (Baltimore, 2001); Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, N.J., 2009); Paolo Squatriti, ed., Working with Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource-Use (Leiden, 2000); and Petra Van Dam, “Ecological Challenges, Technological Innovations: The Modernization of Sluice Building in Holland, 1300–1600,” Technology and Culture 43 (2002): 500–20. See also an edition of an important manuscript on hydrology: Giovanni Battista Aleotti, detto l’Argenta, Della scienza et dell’arte del ben regolare le acque, ed. Massimo Rossi (Modena, 2000).
30. David Jenkins, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2003), provides a comprehensive introduction to the field with articles on a wide range of eras from early medieval to early modern. See also Luca Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, 2000); and Luca Molà, Reinhold C. Mueller, and Claudio Zanier, eds., La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento: Dal baco al drappo (Venice, 2000).
31. A selection: Thomas Beddies, Becken und Geschütze: Der Harz und sein nördliches Vorland als Metallgewerbelandschaft in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (New York, 1996); Paul Benoit and Philippe Braunstein, Mines, carriers et métallurgie dans la France médiévale, Actes du Colloque de Paris, 19, 20, 21 June 1980 (Paris, 1983); Paul Benoit and Catherine Verna, eds., Le charbon de terre en Europe occcidentale avant l’usage industriel du coke (Turnhout, Belgium, 1999); Ian Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy, and Minting in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 2005); Philippe Braunstein, ed., La Sidérugie alpine en Italie: XIIe–XVIIe siècle (Rome, 2001); Pamela O. Long, “The Openness of Knowledge: An Ideal and Its Context in 16th-Century Writings on Mining and Metallurgy,” Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 318–55; Marco Tizzoni and Costanza Cucini Tizzoni, Il comprensorio minerario e metallurgico delle valli Brembana, Torta e Averara dal XV al XVII secolo, and Costanza Cucini Tizzoni, Le fucine da ferro e I magli da rame delle Alpi lombarde. Il caso bergamasco e lecchese (Bergamo, 1997); Catherine Verna, Les Mines et les forges des Cisterciens, en Champagne méridionale et en Bourgogne du Nord: XIIe–XVe siècle (Paris, 1995); and Angelika Westermann, Entwicklungsprobleme der Vorderösterreichischen Montanwirtschaft im 16. Jahrhundert (Idstein, 1993).
32. For example, John Blair and Nigel Ramsay, eds., English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products (London, 1991); Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave, La Industria medieval de Córdoba (Córdoba, 1990); Uta Lindgren, ed., Europaische Technik im Mittelalter: 800 bis 1200, Tradition und Innovation: Ein Handbuch (Berlin, 1996); Rosenband (n. 18 above); and Daniela Stiaffini, Il vetro nel medioevo: Techniche, strutture, manufatti (Rome, 1999).
33. See Richard A. Goldthwaite’s classic study, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980), and, for a recent example, Nicoletta Marconi, Edificando Roma Barocca: Macchine, apparati, maestranze e cantieri tra XVI e XVIII secolo (Rome, 2004).
34. S. R. Epstein and Maarten Prak, eds., Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2008), and S. R. Epstein, “Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe,” Journal of Economic History 58 (1998): 684–713.
35. For patents, see Carlo Marco Belfanti, “Guilds, Patents, and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge: Northern Italy during the Early Modern Age,” Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 569–89; Roberto Berveglieri, Inventori stranieri a Venezia (1474–1788): Importazione di tecnologia e circolazione di tecici, artigiani, inventori (Venice, 1995); Roberto Berveglieri, with the collaboration of Paolo Vecchi, Tutela e brevettazione in campo medico e farmaceutico nella Serenissima Repubblica (Cavriana [Mantova], 2007); Karel Davids, “Patents and Patentees in the Dutch Republic between c. 1580 and 1720,” History and Technology 16 (2000): 263–83; Pamela O. Long, “Invention, Authorship, ‘Intellectual Property,’ and the Origin of Patents: Notes toward a Conceptual History,” Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 318–55; and Luca Molà, “Energia e brevetti per invenzioni nell’Italia del rinascimento,” in Economia e Energia (n. 29 above), 981–91. Issues of credit and patenting have also become a focus of scholarship in the historiography of science. See especially Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments (n. 16 above), and Mario Biagioli, “From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe,” History of Science 44 (2006): 139–86. For traditions of technical openness, see Karel Davids, ed., “Openness and Secrecy in Early Modern Science: Special Issue,” Early Science and Medicine 10 (2005), and Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001).
36. Horst Bredekamp, trans. Allison Brown, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine (Princeton, N.J., 1995); Luisa Dolza, “Theatrum Machinarum: Utilitas et Delectation,” in The Power of Images in Early Modern Science, ed. J. Renn, W. Lefévre, and U. Schoepflin (Basel, 2003), 89–106; Marco Formisano, Tecnica e scrittura: Le letterature tecnico-scientifiche nello spazio letterario tardolatino (Rome, 2001); Wolfgang Lefévre, ed., Picturing Machines, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Rainer Leng, Ars belli: Deutsche taktische und kriegstechnische Bilderhandscriften und Traktate im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 2002); Long, Openness, Secrecy; Marcus Popplow, Neu, nützlich und erfinungsreich: Die Idealisierung von Technik in der frühen Neuzeit (Münster, 1998); and Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London, 2007). See also Wolfgang Lefévre and Marcus Popplow, “Database Machine Drawings,” at http://dmd.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/home (accessed 13 December 2009).
37. For early results of this research, see Long, “Hydraulic Engineering” (n. 29 above); Pamela O. Long, “Engineering, Patronage, and the Authorship of Practice in Early Counter-Reformation Rome,” in Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine, and Religion in Rome, 1550–1750, ed. M. P. Donato and J. Kraye (London, 2009); and Brian Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss, Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).
38. Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (New York, 2006); Mokyr, The Lever of Riches (n. 16 above); and Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2002).
39. A good example of an analysis that includes such a dialogic approach is Rosalind Williams, “Does Progress Have a Future? Joel Mokyr’s Gifts of Athena,” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 371–75.
40. See especially Kevin Greene, “Archaeology and Technology,” and T. J. Wilkinson, “The Archaeology of Landscape,” in A Companion to Archaeology, ed. John Bintliff (Oxford, 2004), 155–73 and 334–56. An excellent example of the use of archaeology by a technologically oriented historian is Thomas Glick’s adoption of the concept of incastellamento from the countryside around Rome to al-Andalus. As Glick notes, incastellamento is “the term given by Pierre Toubert to a process of the general reorganization of the countryside of Lazio in the high Middle Ages around AD 1000 which resulted in the disappearance of dispersed habitats and a regrouping of settlements around castles.” Thomas F. Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester, 1995), 105–13, quotation on 105, referring to Pierre Toubert, Les Structures du Latium medieval (Rome, 1973). The archaeologist Matthew Harpster organized an interesting session on archaeology and the history of technology at the 2006 SHOT meeting in Las Vegas—“Roundtable: Archaeology, Technology, History.”
41. A foundational study is Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).
42. See especially Paula Findlen, “Possessing the Past: The Material World of the Italian Renaissance,” in “AHR Forum: The Persistence of the Renaissance,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 83–114; Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York, 1996); Martin Kemp, “‘Wrought by No Artist’s Hand’: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the Scientific in Some Artifacts from the Renaissance,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450– 1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 177–96; Pamela O. Long, “Objects of Art/Objects of Nature: Visual Representation and the Investigation of Nature,” in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York, 2002), 63–82; and Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004).
43. Bredekamp (n. 36 above); Scott Lightsey, Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature (New York, 2007); Sawday (n. 36 above); and Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford, 2006).
44. For Zilsel and his writings, see Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science, ed. Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn, and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht, 2000). For social constructivism and the figures mentioned here, see Golinski (n. 6 above). For Koyré’s thought, see From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York, 1957), and a collection of essays by Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
45. See, for example, J. A. Bennett, “The ‘Mechanics’ Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy,” History of Science 24 (1986): 1–28; Long, Openness, Secrecy (n. 35 above); Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvatore Attanasio, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York, 1970); and Smith, The Body of the Artisan.
46. Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 739–72.
47. Since, as this essay has tried to indicate, historians of a variety of early technologies are extremely active, the question arises whether SHOT’s failure to attract such historians is an isolated phenomenon or is shared by other organizations devoted to the history of technology. Anecdotally, several European colleagues have mentioned that the same situation is visible in some European organizations. My own experience in the History of Science Society is that at every annual meeting there are numerous panels on premodern and early modern topics, many of which would be perfectly appropriate as SHOT panels.
©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.
Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 3 (July 2010)
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