Medieval Technology and Social Change
Part of White’s approach in Medieval Technology and Social Change was to write accessibly, and in the course of writing this review, I found myself having to explain the book to two hapless co-passengers on an airplane. Lynn White’s foundational history of technology text is so sorely abused in STS circles today that it is difficult to be too positive about it, even with laypeople. But that it remains such a classic fifty years after its publication authorizes another look at what it provides to a modern scholar of science and technology, if not the general reader. And that is, I argue, an example of what powerful work a relatively conservative take on technology studies can accomplish, and also a parable for the negotiation of closures in our own field. Like any work that attracts too much attention, however, Medieval Technology and Social Change has a troubled history.
White positioned his argument as part of a revolutionary new wave in historical study which, to borrow terminology anachronistically from a later movement in sociology of technology, was attempting to surface the “missing masses” of history. His aims seem no less lofty: History cannot be properly understood, he argues, unless we move beyond a focus on written texts. Against a backdrop of socio-political and “great-man” histories based on written records, White writes in his preface of the value of the new “resources of archaeology, iconography, and etymology to find answers when no answers can be discovered in contemporary writings” (White, vii). This is particularly important for studying the “unlettered portions of the past,” anything outside of the point of view of those “specialized segments of our race which have had the habit of scribbling”; but more specifically, it is an attempt to bring technology into the lens of history as a first-rate actor in its own right. And indeed White managed to do this, perhaps, his critics would suggest, too well.
White’s short and lucid book, an extension of a series of lectures given at the University of Virginia, presents three case studies in medieval technology: First, a re-thinking of the origins of feudalism that focuses on the impact of the stirrup (the most famous and notorious of the three); second, a new look at the three-field crop rotation system as a sort of agricultural revolution; and third, an investigation of an early explosion of relatively complex machine design to harness the powers of nature that greatly predates the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. In brief, White surveys the classic theories about the emergence of feudalism and the confiscations of Church lands, focusing particularly on Brunner’s notion that tactical failures of Martel’s infantry at the Battle of Poitiers, against the Saracens, were the catalyst for a new social order built around the furnishing of mounted warriors (White, 5). But White casts doubt on the threat posed by the Muslim invasions as sufficient to cause a whole societal reorganization at great risk to Church support, and focuses instead on the introduction of the stirrup to Western Europe, which he traces in detail through available archaeological evidence and dates to the time of Charles Martel (White, 27). The stirrup then, was the catalyst for the development of feudalism. Though when put in so few words this argument sounds absurd, it is beautifully worked-out in the text as the only remaining logical solution White could discover.
Likewise, White’s second chapter presents a detailed tracing of the use of the heavy plough, the horse as draft animal, and the emergence of the three-field system in Northern Europe in an attempt to explain the foundations for the “startling expansion of population, the growth and multiplication of cities, the rise in industrial production” that “enlivened” the Middle ages from the tenth century (White, 76). Though this chapter, unlike the first, has no strong conventional narrative it opposes, White’s point is that this new agricultural dimension is largely invisible in the written record. This chapter stands as a test case then in how different forms of historical evidence can produce new views on the past. The third chapter is interested in examining a “new exploratory attitude towards the forces of nature,” evidenced in the proliferation of windmills and water mills in what White characterizes as a “medieval industrial revolution” (White, 89). Again, White uses amassed archaeological evidence to set the timeline for this new attitude, and weaves in histories of clocks and cannons as related objects that further evidence medieval technicians’ capacities for metallurgy and machine design. This chapter is more a survey of the available evidence than a pointed argument about the revolutionizing capacity of a single invention, and seems to do a careful job tracing the emergence of various types of mills and machines in the historical record.
Each chapter tells a wonderful story, and exposes new technological dimensions of an era too easily assumed to be technologically backward. However, are White’s stories simply too good? Many reviews and refutations claim just that. Bachrach’s attack on the first chapter, largely on the basis that the stirrup was little-used by Martel’s armies, has been particularly destructive for the particulars of that argument. And Hilton’s refutation of White’s narrative of agricultural revolution is similarly effective at challenging the putative facts presented in the second chapter. White also suffers, as Roland notes in his 2003 review, a technological determinist problem. Being read as espousant of a now-outmoded view on technological impacts is as damaging to the character of White’s arguments as further research has been to its particulars. But if it is determinist, then Medieval Technology and Social Change may well be the subtlest, and one of best and most careful technologically determinist argument ever made. With this, Roland seems to agree, coming to the conclusion that the places in which White has been particularly critiqued for his technological determinism have been largely misread, the carefully worded circumscriptions missed or dismissed.
I would join Roland in arguing that White’s time has not yet passed. There is room for its rehabilitation yet. Part of what White manages to show, both as celebration and cautionary tale, is the power that technological arguments have for the explication of history. Newer research has uncovered errors in White’s assumptions and readings of evidence. But, for good or ill, his chapters remain convincing stories that capture important lessons about technology and history. Technologies have effects. They shape and enable, constrain and support, even if they do not determine. And they have important material properties that matter for, and perhaps beyond, what they are taken by societies to do. White’s general principle, that archaeological evidence of technologies opens the door to radically new studies of history, is not undercut by any findings that his specific facts were in error. To study realms where written accounts do not adequately reach—and to check such accounts against material history—archaeological evidence of technology is a very convincing source. And this point remains true also for White’s value to laypeople, for whom technology history is itself rather esoteric.
It is amusing to note how much of White’s actual methodology seems to have been taken up by the field of history—for example by Hills in Power From the Wind, and in more contemporary environs by the likes of Hughes, Nye, and even Yates—now tempered by appropriate bowing to the risks of technologically determinist narratives. For White’s pathbreaking work, however, there would have been no need for such an explicit disclaimer. If anything, the mechanisms of closure in history of technology have spoken, taking up his principles while attacking the particulars of their application here. So White’s book remains well-written, thought provoking, methodologically interesting, and wrong. Its wrongness means it should be presented with a disclaimer, but there are no books that will not be found to be, somehow, in error. And there are few which were so revolutionary and which have had such lasting impacts on the field of the history of technology.
References
Bachrach, Bernard S. “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup, and Feudalism.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1970): 49–75.
Roland, Alex. “Once More into the Stirrups: Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change.” Technology and Culture 44, no. 3 (2003): 574–85.
Sawyer, P. H., and R. H. Hilton. “Technical Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough.” Past and Present, no. 24 (1963): 90–100.
White, Jr. Lynn. Medieval Technology and Social Change. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
