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Lynn Townsend White (1907–1987)

Auteur van Medieval Technology and Social Change

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Ontwarringsbericht:

(eng) There was an earlier Lynn Townsend White (born in 1875 or 1876) but he has no works in Librarything at the moment, so the page can be left undivided.

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Algemene kennis

Officiële naam
White, Lynn Townsend, Jr.
Geboortedatum
1907-04-29
Overlijdensdatum
1987-03-30
Geslacht
male
Woonplaatsen
Oakland, California, USA
Beroepen
professor
Organisaties
Princeton University
Stanford University
University of California, Los Angeles
American Historical Association (president | 1973)
Ontwarringsbericht
There was an earlier Lynn Townsend White (born in 1875 or 1876) but he has no works in Librarything at the moment, so the page can be left undivided.

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One of the major disadvantages of being an amateur historian is having to work with stuff that may be out of date. If I were really serious about medieval history, I’d have to subscribe to half a dozen very expensive academic journals or spend a considerable amount of time every month in a serious research library. Since I can’t afford to do either of those things, I have to take my chances with books. This particular one is pretty old – 1962. Therefore, I’ve no real idea if the stuff here is seriously out of date or not.


With that caveat, it’s pretty interesting. There are two foci – what you might call “horse technology”, and the development of other sources of power (windmill, water wheel, gravity escapement). Since I’ve read some books on horse history, I was interested in what author Lynn White had to say about horses.


The horse (or a similar equid) was domesticated about 3000 BCE; there’s some horse skeletons in Central Asia that show characteristic jaw wear from having a bit in their mouths. The first reliable illustration of a horse (well, onager) drawn vehicle comes from the so-called “Royal Standard of Ur”, which dates to about 2600 BCE. The saddle (as opposed to a simple pad on the horse’s back) shows up about 400 BCE. The tandem harness appears in the first century AD (and catches on very quickly; Pliny is already talking about six-ox teams); the stirrup appears in Europe about 750 CE (evidence is surprisingly slight, but Charles Martel defeated stirrup-less Arab cavalry at Tours with an infantry shield wall in 732 CE while the entire Frankish army appears to have been mounted knights by 755 CE); the horse collar about 800 CE and the nailed horseshoe shows up about 900 CE. The synergy between these technologies and medieval social life is not obvious but interesting when explained:


* It didn’t make sense to use horses to pull anything until the invention of the horse collar. A collared horse can pull five times as much weight as one with a simple neck strap.


* It didn’t make sense to breed large horses until the introduction of the stirrup. The warhorse therefore came before the plow horse.


* It didn’t make sense to use horses for plowing in damp climates until the introduction of the nailed horseshoe. Unshod horse’s hooves get soft in damp soil, then crack and get infected when back on a harder surface.


Once all this was in place, however, farming started to change. A horse team and an ox team can pull about the same maximum weight; however, the horse team can pull it considerably faster. Even though horses eat more than oxen, the extra work done by horses more than makes up for it, and the introduction of horse plowing seems to have increased medieval agricultural production by about 30%. One thing I didn’t consider is not only do horses plow faster; they get to the field faster. Thus peasants could live farther from their fields, leading to the expansion of towns and villages.


White’s linkage of this improved technology to social change is necessarily tentative. You can’t actually prove that the tremendous increase in cavalry efficiency made possible by the stirrup lead directly to feudalism, or that the ability to get horses to the field faster than oxen led to the growth of urbanism, but the suggestions aren’t unreasonable.


The later chapters on alternate power sources can get a little speculative. White argues that rotary motion seems unnatural to humans, or at least unintuitive, and that the idea of converting linear motion to rotary motion was particularly difficult to grasp, leading to what seems to be a long delay in inventing the crank. I wonder if strength of materials and joining technology are a better explanation? A crank is a relatively high stress thing and joining three pieces of wood together to make a crank must have been a difficult challenge to carpenters used to working with foot-thick beams. The kick-turned potter’s wheel was known since Egyptian and Sumerian time, so the concept of converting linear to rotary motion couldn’t have been that hard.


An interesting read. As discussed above, I can’t say for sure that everything here is state-of-the-art technological history. There are extensive footnotes and endnotes, and a few illustrations.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
setnahkt | 3 andere besprekingen | Dec 15, 2017 |
In 1967, White conjectured that the Christian influence in the Middle Ages was at the root of the ecological crisis in the 20th century. He gave a lecture on December 26, 1966, titled, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" at the Washington meeting of the AAAS, that was later published in the journal Science (10 March 1967, _Science_, Volume 155, Number 3767). It has been become a core document in a long controversy and the development of a renewed Christian theology of creation.
 
Gemarkeerd
Philosophate02 | Apr 19, 2014 |
Essentially this is a book made up of threes essays on different technologies. There is very little to add to Kant's excellent review of this book in Librarything. Except perhaps to say that at least the publishers suggest that it would be a good introduction (rather than the 'last word') on the subject. Personally I found the assertions in relation to the Chinese lack of priority in the development and deployment of the windmill and gunpowder technologies unconvincing, and will go to my Needham's to check the details. Which proves the point that White has written what at least could be called an intriguing and stimulating book. But the degree to which White claims and asserts comes across a bit strong and I would have read his essays with less 'discomfort' if they had been in a larger collection containing some contrary views. Certainly recommended as an introduction or counterpoint, perhaps alongside something like a summary of Needhams 'Science and Civilization in China'.… (meer)
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nandadevi | 3 andere besprekingen | Nov 25, 2012 |

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Werken
12
Ook door
4
Leden
601
Populariteit
#41,822
Waardering
3.8
Besprekingen
6
ISBNs
18
Talen
2
Favoriet
1

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