Le Moyen Age pour quoi faire? by Régine Pernoud, et al

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 667 Le Moyen Age pour quoi faire? By Régine Pernoud, Raymond Delatouche , and Jean Gimpel. Paris: Editions Stock, 1986. Pp. 315; il­ lustrations, notes. F 89.00 (paper). Since the 19th century, the rehabilitation ofthe long-scorned Middle Ages has been proceeding vigorously, not only in political, economic, and intellectual history but in that of science and technology as well. Thanks to the work of a series of great scholars, from Lefebvre des Noëttes to Lynn White, jr., the medieval material civilization created in north temperate Europe has come to be appreciated for the great achievement that it really was, complementing the equally impressive economic takeoff that economic historians have long noted and that the late Robert Lopez called “the birth of Europe.” Now three French medievalists propose to put the European medi­ eval technological experience at the service of the Third World. Ré­ gine Pernoud provides the historical setting—the story of how, between the social and military turbulence of the early Middle Ages and the epidemic and military turbulence at the end of the period, four pros­ perous and peaceful centuries (the 10th through the 13th) produced the solid agrarian and urban base that later disasters could not destroy. Raymond Delatouche then examines the conditions of this remarkable development: the exploitation of natural resources, an original form of property holding and management that assured full employment and freedom of economic enterprise, and a liberal economic system that prevented the formation of monopolies and allowed for immense creative variation. Jean Gimpel, whose work is known in English as very competent history of technology, then takes the lesson to the authors’ logical conclusion. He recounts how, under the sponsorship of the United Nations, he has traveled in Africa and Asia with his medieval materials and information, camshafts, pulley and block and tackle devices, floating mills, and hydraulic power saws, which, in his view, will help developing nations in the Third World far more than the tractors and factories that routinely break down or stand empty after optimistic beginnings. As early as the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans learned the error of using the remote European past as a model for interpreting the cultures of non-European peoples, but the model of agricultural technology is not as misleading as those of legal and political forms and specific revealed religion. Many other economists and develop­ ment experts have pointed out the extent to which crises in the Third World possess a major agricultural component that is not overcome by the importation of attractive, but inappropriate, high technology. Pernoud, Delatouche, and Gimpel are indeed medievalists, but they are also 20th-century citizens with 20th-century perceptions and sym­ pathies, and their book is a lively, readable, and provocative contri­ bution toward solving a problem that will probably (nuclear war aside) be the world’s greatest problem over the next half-century. The book 668 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE has many useful and clear line drawings and ample statistical infor­ mation to prove that their program certainly worked once, and, given the chance, might very well work again in the hands of peasants who must still extract food and some wealth from a reluctant earth. Edward Peters Dr. Peters teaches medieval history at the University of Pennsylvania. Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History. By Ahmad Y. al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xiv + 304; illustrations, bibliography, index. $39.50. Ahmad al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill present a survey of mechan­ ical and civil engineering, military technology, navigation, chemical technology, textiles, agriculture, mining and metallurgy, and the role of engineers in Islamic society, with an introduction on Islamic science and an epilogue on “critical issues.” Islamic Technology is intended as a popular book, and, for this reason, footnotes are omitted. This is frustrating, especially when new material is presented and the source is not readily accessible; it also leads to the inclusion of a number of passages in quotation marks to which—inexcusably—no author is ascribed. The volume covers mainly the Middle Ages and, although no ter­ minal date is indicated, extends the study of some techniques into early...