However, this book covers those topics in only passing detail. For readers who have read their previous Life in a Medieval. Yet, they add, the workers and inventors of the Middle Ages "all transformed the world, on balance very much to the world's advantage.A very succinct look at human technical ingenuity, from the 6th to 16th centuries. 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. 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. 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. 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. Martin as source material for Game of Thrones, comes a classic book on innovation and technological change in medieval Europe From bestselling historians Joseph and Frances Gies, whose books have been used by George R.R.
0 kommentar(er)
