The Medieval Machine

The Medieval Machine
By Jean Gimpel.

Although this book is from 1976, it still has a certain relevancy in how one might perceive the high middle ages of the medieval period. Gimpel describes what he likes to refer to as a ‘medieval industrial revolution’ by paying particular attention to wind and water mills, the productive assets of the Cistercian order and how these effected society, and clockwork. His argument is that the medieval person both lived in a society that was full of working machinery and regarded technological innovation as being something to aspire to. According to Gimpel, this period ended when the Catholic Church and spiritualism overcame reason and intellect (though he does point out that the same church was also responsible for the blossoming of technological innovation that preceded 1277). He goes on to advance a theory that powerful nations go through boom and bust periods and that Europe as a whole has seen three technological high points in the last thousand years. These being, his ‘medieval industrial revolution’, the Italian Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution of common perception.

The irony of this is that many historians today are moving away from the idea of the Italian Renaissance as being an era of any sort at all. Its been pointed out that the great names of the Renaissance were not quite the cultural giants and innovative characters they’ve been made out to be. Gimpel himself touches on this theory several times when he advances the idea that the Renaissance was not built on a foundation of ignorance and superstition in the middle ages and that pre 1277 Europe was not ignorant of the cultural treasures of the classical world.

It’s all a bit ephemeral though. Gimpel’s argument seems okay at first, but he doesn’t really prove his point regarding the common perceptions of the time. If the medieval population were living in a technologically innovative time, or an industrial revolution, were they even aware of it? Gimpel’s says they did but he never offers anything to prove so.
For my part, I can’t see how mills and monastery’s make an industrial revolution. Gimpel also adds the fabric industry, clockwork and architecture into the mix, but again, these seem like seeds to me and not the whole tree. If this was a revolution, then it was a very quite one and if mills and monasteries make for ‘industry’, then I suppose the theory works.

I liked the book, but considering its title I missed the absent machinery. I had hoped there would be more written about obscure medieval machines, and how these were invented and used, but Gimpel pays more attention to the society in which the few machines he describes existed.
4/5