Pamela Long considers the ways in which different medieval cultures, from the Byzantine empire to northern Europe, adopted and transformed technologies according to their own needs. Long introduces readers to recent scholarship and to some of the significant issues in the historiography of medieval technology.

This volume brings together a series of papers at Kalamazoo as well as some contributed papers inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lynn White Jr.’s, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), a slim study which catalyzed the study of technology in the Middle Ages in the English-speaking world. While the initial reviews and decades-long fortune of the volume have been varied, it is still in print and remains a touchstone of an idea and a time. The contributors to the volume, therefore, both investigate the book itself and its fate, and look at new research furthering and inspired by White’s work. The book opens with an introduction surveying White’s career, with a bibliography of his work, as well as some opening thoughts on the study of medieval technology in the last fifty years. Three papers then deal explicitly with the reception and longevity of his work and its impact on medieval studies more generally. Then five papers look at new cast studies areas where White’s work and approach has had a particular impact, namely, medieval technology studies and medieval rural/ ecological studies.

Essays fra 1940-1975, med udgangspunkt i middelalderens teknologiske frembringelser, og videnskabsmænd.

Focusing attention on gravity-fed water-flow systems in medieval cities and monasteries, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire challenges the view that hydraulic engineering died with the Romans and remained moribund until the Renaissance. Roberta Magnusson explores the systems' technologies -- how they worked, what uses the water served -- and also the social rifts that created struggles over access to this basic necessity. Mindful of theoretical questions about what hastens technological change and how society and technology mutually influence one another, the author supplies a thoughtful and instructive study. Archeological, historical, and literary evidence vividly depicts those who designed, constructed, and used medieval water systems and demonstrates a shift from a public-administrative to a private-innovative framework -- one that argues for the importance of local initiatives. "The following chapters attempt to chart a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of technological and social determinism. While writing them, I have tried to strike a balance between the technical and human aspects of medieval hydraulic systems, and to remember that beneath the welter of documents and diffusion patterns, configurations and components, ordinances and expenditures, lie the perceptions, the choices, and often the plain hard work of individual men and women." -- from the Preface

Explores the cultural framework within which changes in agricultural technology and economic organization occur and the ways in which changes in the social fabric influence attitudes toward rural work and the peasantry.

This volume focusses on the interplay between war and society in the Eastern Mediterranean, in a period which witnessed the Arab conquests, the Seljuk invasion, the Crusades, and the Mongol incursions. The military aspects of these momentous events have not been fully discussed so far. For the first time this book offers a synthesis of trends in military technology and its effect on society in the period from the Arab conquests to the establishment of an Ottoman hegemony. "War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean" provides for medievalists an Oriental context to the military aspects of the Crusades, and for scholars of both Middle Eastern and military history a coherent treatment of an important topic over a long period and covering many different cultures.

The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction is a new look at an ancient subject: the silk road that linked China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean across the expanses of Central Asia. James A. Millward highlights unusual but important biological, technological and cultural exchanges over the silk roads that stimulated development across Eurasia and underpin civilization in our modern, globalized world.

Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, or silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed surveillance or discipline. Medieval Robots explores the forgotten history of real and imagined machines that captivated Europe from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries.

In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal mastery from the crossbow—banned by the Church in 1139 as too lethal for Christians to use against one another—to the nuclear missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears and, as McNeill hopes, "a ground for wiser action."

This social history of war from the third millennium BCE to the 10th-century CE in the Mediterranean, the Near East and Europe (Egypt, Achamenid Persia, Greece, the Hellenistic World, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic World and early Medieval Europe) with parallel studies of Mesoamerica (the Maya and Aztecs) and East Asia (ancient China, medieval Japan). The volume offers a broadly based, comparative examination of war and military organization in their complex interactions with social, economic and political structures, as well as cultural practices.