Lynn Townsend White Jr.

In Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White considers the effects of technological innovation on the societies of medieval Europe: the slow collapse of feudalism with the development of machines and tools that introduced factories in place of cottage industries, and the development of the manorial system with the introduction of new kinds of plows and new methods of crop rotation. One invention of particular import, writes White, was the stirrup, which in turn introduced heavy, long-range cavalry to the medieval battlefield. The development thus escalated small-scale conflict to "shock combat." Cannons and flamethrowers followed, as did more peaceful inventions, such as watermills and reapers.

A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man's unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how, during the previous summer, he had returned to a little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a child. Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbits' destruction of crops. Being something of a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry. [...]

This collection of nineteen essays, their previous publication dates scattered over a long career, is designed to indicate the velocity and variety of the inventiveness visible in medieval engineering and also to explore the relation of technology to the values of western medieval culture. During the Middle Ages, values and the motivations springing from them—even those underlying many activities that to us today seem purely secular—were often expressed in religious presuppositions. Hence this book's title. The conceptual unity of the collection is brought forth in the author's Introduction, "The Study of Medieval Technology, 1924–1974: Personal Reflections." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978 and reissued as a paperback in 1986.

Although the cleavages of change, technological and social, have indeed alienated man from his proper past in a significant way, certain indissoluble continuities survive. That engineering and science have their roots in the Greco-Roman world is well known. But that our present science and technology grew directly out of the Judeo-Christian view of reality as it developed in the Middle Ages is still not widely recognized. Tracing this continuity is one of White's major themes, persuasively developed.The last chapter of the book looks ahead to one possible future by probing the psychological agonies that accompany times of rapid cultural change. Such periods of conceptual uncertainty breed mass irrationalities, a recurring symptom of which, historically, has been the public driving out of scapegoats and the hunting of "witches." The extent to which our society, changing largely under technological impulse, can avoid this reaction is itself uncertain. It has happened before in "civilized" times. As White notes, "There was a period in our own society when we needed witches and had them in enormous numbers. It began about the year 1300, ended somewhat after 1650, and is usually called the Renaissance."

El propósito de este libro es divulgar, en un lenguaje no técnico, los nuevos métodos de investigación, los nuevos enigmas y la nueva profundidad que el conocimiento de los estudiosos de la naturaleza humana han adquirido en años recientes.Los capítulos de este libro representan a los sectores académicos habituales en que se dividen los humanistas de nuestro tiempo. Pero, a pesar de estar escritos por especializaciones. Cada uno de los autores presenta un ángulo de aproximación al fenómeno humano: Theodosius Dobzhansky, genética; Gardner Murphy, psicología; Clyde Kluckhohn, antropología cultural; Gordon R. Willey, arqueología; Lynn White, historia; Everett Cherrington Hughes, sociología; Peter H. Odegard, política; George H. T. Kimble, geografía; Kenneth E. Boulding, economía; I. Bernard Cohen, historia de la ciencia; Manfred F. Bukofzer, musicología; Alfred Neumeyer, historia del arte; Howard Mumford Jones, literatura; John Lotz, lingüística; Anatol Rapoport, matemática; Susanne K. Langer, filosofía, y George Hadley, religión. Fronteras del conocimiento no es una simple suma de partes; aunque está compuesta por capítulos independientes presenta un sorprendente acuerdo en las tendencias intelectuales. La idea preponderante es el concepto antropológico de cultura, que ha penetrado en todo el campo del estudio humanístico. En el capítulo final, Lynn White, director de la obra, expone sus puntos de vista sobre los cambios producidos en los cánones tradicionales de la cultura de Occidente y afirma que al concepto de cultura occidental se opone cada vez con mayor fuerza el de cultura universal. Finaliza expresando su anhelo de que el lector encuentre en la obra los elementos que le permitan comprender no solo nuestra época, sino tambien comprender a sí mismo.