Amazon.com Review
The Middle Ages, writes French academician Jean Gimpel, saw an unusual multiplying of technological expansion via Europe. With a epoch came waterwheels as well as time towers, scarcely unvaried appurtenance tools as well as improvements in open hygiene, vaulting cathedrals as well as soaring city walls, as well as a idea of devout as well as conceivable swell which betrothed improved things to come. In analyzing a expansion of pointing in dimensions as well as of a initial sciences, as well as i… More >>
The Medieval Machine: Industrial Revolution of a Middle Ages
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Quite possibly THE most boring book ever written. I love history, particularly the middle ages, but this book droned on about topics for up to thirty pages that easily could have been summed up in a page or two. This book is terrible, do not buy it - especially if you are a teacher - Forcing someone to read this book is cruel and unusual punishment.
Rating: 1 / 5
The first thing you need to know about this book is that it is not really entitled The Medieval Machine. That is the American title given to this French book which was originally published as The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. If you are interested in learnin about medieval machinery and mechanical inventions this, despite the title, is not the book for you.
The second thing that you need to know about this book is that, well, it is not a coherent “book.” It is, basically, a collection of loosely related essays about industrial life in the high and late (mostly late) middle ages.
The third thing you need to know about this book is that these essays are not very good. Simply, they are a good representation of typical Romance-language scholarship: a series of non-sequitors riddled with quotations from source material which are not properly cited.
The only reason to buy this book is the essay on pollution and the environment. This book is the only published work (in book form) in English to deal with this important aspect of medieval life. Again, and unfortunately, while the essay is unique, it remains poor. I strongly suggest that you not purchase this book.
Rating: 2 / 5
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
Gimpel does a fine job at recreating the technology of the past, yet the book does not read like popular history so it might scare layman away. With regards to scholarship however, I have not found a better single volume that covers the material as well as Gimpel does here. If you are truly interested in this specific subject then read this book, you will not be disappointed.
Rating: 4 / 5
A poor piece of work. Certainly Gimpel shows he has done the research, but he continually uses it as a prop for blatantly Communist dialectics. His interpretation of history as class warfare, his inability to see religions in other than a completely hostile and superficial light, his essentially antagonistic view of European industrialism– whether you agree with this overriding belief structure of his, or not– prejudices each and every issue raised in his work.
In an older release on Penguin (and possibly not in the latest; I haven’t examined any later editions), Gimpel concludes his text with a long, whining complaint about the way he was treated in a 70’s lecture tour of the USA, averring that only Berkeley/SF students understood his views, and that the rest of America was deaf to the failure and imminent wholesale destruction of its industrial system and mass culture. Gimpel was certain at the time that it was heading into an immediate downhill spiral which mirrored the last days of the European Middle Ages.
In fact, the Middle Ages did quite well, and so has the United States, despite Gimpel’s prognostications. This book has some interesting facts, but they are so interwoven with ill-supported opinions based on unsubstantiated theorizing as to make the result both unintentionally hilarious and virtually useless.
Rating: 1 / 5