Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

I found The Medieval Machine a refreshing examination of the material cicumstances of medieval life, including power sources, agriculture and food, mining, and the environment. I also appreciated Gimpel's fairly 'hard' approach, including many real numbers (e.g. considing the percentage of vegetables consumed and what health problems might arise from that). The sections on general mechanization and science are less good than the others, but not terrible. The book does not try to be sweeping but to focus on a few select topics, and it does this well.

The book is divided into 8 chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of medieval industrial development. The first chapter, my favorite, deals with energy sources, mostly windmills and watermills. It is a fascinating essay on the subject. Another good chapter is on pollution in the Middle Ages. I never considered this a medieval problem but it really was, making this a captivating read. The reason why I can' give this book 5 stars is that there are way too many in-text quotes that just do fit the passages. Rather than quoting a 13th century German poet who wrote about the plight of the Bavarian forests, Gimpel (the author) should have merely stressed the ecological consequences in his own capable articulation.

What I liked about the book was how it provided a glimpse into the every day life in the Middle ages by describing technological advances. It just opened up that facet of Medieval History that is hardly ever touched on. Medieval times are usually protrayed as a step backwards from the classical era in terms of technology and sophitication. This book sort of dispells our generic view of the Middle Ages as an age of Pagentry and fairy tales, and shows us how commerce was run during that era. Maybe I'm just a geek, but I found it very interesting.

An excellent work marred by a little too much enthusiasm, this book will convey to the student of history the notion that the middle ages were not the black hole of lack of technology that most historians portray them to be. The author compares the changes in technology, and the scope of their results, to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and he may be pushing the analogy a bit. However, it is certainly true that technology did advance in ways in the Middle Ages. As for biases and tone, the author veers deceptively about, now seeming anti-industrialist, now communist, now capitalist, now labor historian. The book is marred by a final chapter in which the author tries to draw a parallel between the Middle Ages and the modern day that is both not well described and does not seem to be accurate given the circumstances of the world 20 years after the writing. But for the descriptions of technology alone, and of corporate-like structures in the middle ages, this is a good read.

As a non-historian I only thought of the Midieval times as the Dark Ages (whatever that means... people crawling around dying of the Black Plague? ... illiterate, uncultured, dirty, stupid, lazy, blah blah blah). Well, this book dispells the popular misconception. I loved it.