Most Americans and Europeans are well aware that they belong to a culture that has long been shaped by its love of science and engineering. But ask them what era in our history that technological impulse can be traced to, and I suppose that most would either say it began with the ancient Greeks, or else during the Renaissance and the “Scientific Revolution” around the year 1500.
Few think of the Christian Middle Ages as a time of great innovations, a time when mathematics, science, and especially engineering came to matter in daily life to a degree that would have stunned the ancients. This ignorance, on the part of most people now living, is a crying shame.
I trust that most readers, even if they have not read Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, are at least familiar with the basic premise of this greatest work of Middle English poetry. The Knight’s Tale is followed by the Miller’s Tale, then the Reeve’s Tale, then the Cook’s Tale, and so forth, as twenty-four pilgrims tell stories to entertain one another on their way to venerate the martyred St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
While Chaucer gives some of his characters personal names (Robin the Miller), they’re mainly known to us by their occupations, and they identify themselves that way, too. So, for instance, when Robin the Miller tells a derogatory (and lewd!) story about a carpenter, the Reeve (who had been a carpenter as a young man) feels honor-bound to tell a derogatory story about a miller.
Nothing about this strikes 21st-century Americans as unusual — we too are a society where our occupations (which we usually arrive at by personal choice) are the most basic way we identify ourselves. It takes a fair bit of historical perspective to realize how rare this is — how few premodern societies, apart from medieval Western Europe, did this. (For instance, in the New Testament, St. Paul introduces himself as a Jew from the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, a native of Tarsus, and a student of the rabbi Gamaliel; it is almost by chance that we learn that he was also a tentmaker, when he briefly takes up his old trade with Aquila and Priscilla in Corinth.)
The high degree to which medieval Christians identified with their trades did not come up in isolation. It came hand in hand with the high status their society granted to its increasingly numerous middle classes, and also the inventiveness with which millers, carpenters, shipwrights, masons, accountants, and other skilled workers were continually improving their various crafts.
There are two books on this subject that I have recently read, and which I can enthusiastically recommend to people with some spare reading time and a desire to really understand and appreciate our medieval scientific heritage.
Frances and Joseph Gies’s 1994 book Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages is a thorough, if rather dry, account of the many inventions that reshaped Europe between the fall of Rome and the 15th-century Renaissance, and which turned Europe from a backwater that could only envy Arabic and Chinese engineering into a continent on the edge of world domination.
Seb Falk’s 2020 book The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science gives a panoramic tour of 14th-century mathematics, science, astronomy, and education as it would have looked from the point of view of one man — an English Benedictine monk named John of Westwyk, whose most famous work was a set of instructions on how to make and use the Equatorie of the Planetis — a sort of mechanical computer for doing Ptolemaic astronomy. While Falk’s book is more narrowly focused than the Gieses’, it is also more pleasurable to read. (Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel is the sort of book that’s more likely to show up on a college syllabus, though someone as interested in technology and history as I am would almost certainly enjoy both of them.)
Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel is divided into seven chapters and tells a roughly chronological story of European engineering between the fall of Rome, c. A.D. 500, and the end of the Middle Ages a thousand years later. A typical chapter might have a few pages each devoted to ploughing, waterpower, weaving, dying, carpentry, glasswork, Gothic architecture, military engineering (castles, trebuchets, etc.), road- and bridge-building, navigation, naval architecture, and bookmaking.
The myth of the Middle Ages as a time of stasis, where curiosity dwindled and hardly anything was done to improve on Greek and Roman science, is quickly dispelled. Although some technologies were lost at the very beginning of the period, most of them were recovered fairly quickly, and in a few areas — especially agriculture and weaponry — progress continued without the slightest interruption. Even before the year 1000, when written records were scarce and the population remained well below its Roman peak, new spinning and weaving methods, new animal harnesses, new kinds of ships, and the first water-powered mills had revolutionized life in Christian Europe.
By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — with the Renaissance and its conscious attempts to revive Greek and Roman lore still a century away — devout master masons were adorning England, France, and the Low Countries with their highly innovative Gothic cathedrals, marvels of architecture far in advance of anything the Romans ever had. One of these, Lincoln Cathedral, was the tallest building in the world at its completion in 1311; it would not be surpassed until the Washington Monument was erected in 1884.
Tracing the evolution of new technologies is no easy task for a historian, and it is often a great mystery whether a particular invention — the padded horse collar, for instance, or the blast furnace, or the magnetic compass — arose independently or was brought from Asia.
For evidence of which technologies were known in a certain country in a certain century, scholars often turn to the beautiful illuminated Bibles into which medieval scribes put so much labour. There, illustrations of the ancients hard at work building Noah’s Ark or the Tower of Babel would reveal how carpentry or masonry was done in the illustrator’s century — the irony being that it was those men’s lack of interest in historical accuracy that gives us our best window into the past.
One memorable scene in the 9th-century Utrecht Psalter illustrates some verses from the 63rd Psalm: “But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth. They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes.” The wicked (“those that seek my soul”) are preparing for battle by sharpening their swords the old-fashioned way, with handheld whetstones, whereas the righteous use the new rotary grindstone, a machine unknown in earlier centuries.
To medieval men and women, hard work and innovation were spiritual callings. This was obvious for the priests, monks, and nuns who almost alone kept literacy and mathematics alive, as well as for the architects who built the churches, the sculptors and glaziers who adorned them with “a Bible in glass and stone,” and men like the “Frères Pontifes,” or Brothers of the Bridge, a small order of monks devoted to bridging the treacherous rivers of southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries, and who built (among other edifices) the famous Pont d’Avignon.
But it was also true for all of the craft guilds that made up that rapidly growing middle class in medieval Europe’s cities. They all had their patron saints, they all had their peculiar donations to the parish churches and the great cathedrals, they each had a mystery play to perform in the festivals at Christmas and Easter, and they all exhorted their members to remember that their curiosity was a gift of God and that it was by Christ’s grace that they exercised their talents upon the elements.
And it was largely through the work of these guilds that many European countries — most especially Italy, England, and Holland — made the slow journey from being nations of serfs to nations of free men.
The Church had already seen to it that, from the beginning of the Middle Ages, the masses had far more rights than the Roman slaves from whom they were often descended. A serf was bound to work his master’s land, but he could own property in his own right as well, and he could not be sold, or even compelled to work on the sabbaths and the saints’ days that the Church had set aside for rest.
The lack of a cheap supply of movable chattel slaves drove medieval entrepreneurs to put much more effort into discovering labor-saving devices than their Roman forebears ever had. And as the cities with the skilled laborers became ever more important to the public good, kings and emperors began granting these bustling settlements new privileges — such as the right to elect their own mayors, or the “freedom of the city,” whereby any serf who escaped to a city and managed to live there for a year and a day was a free man, entitled to pursue whatever occupation he liked without fear of being returned to his master..
It was then only a matter of time until characters like Chaucer’s Miller and Reeve and Franklin and Merchant, upwardly mobile citizens proud of their various professions, began filling the pages of medieval literature.
When one is aware of all this history, it will seem baffling that the myth of a stagnant Middle Ages still holds sway over so many minds. Its persistence can really only be understood by remembering the anticlericalism that gave rise to it: basically, a lot of 18th-century intellectuals — the same sorts of people whose theories produced the French Revolution — couldn’t give the Catholic Church credit for fostering so much learning and social progress.
Also, one must consider the modern left’s general mixture of ignorance and disrespect for the cultural heritage of white Europeans, plus its hatred of capitalism. For it was the wish “to serve God and his Majesty … and to grow rich as all men desire to do,” as the conquistador Bernal Díaz so memorably put it, that had turned peasants into townsmen, and townsmen into inventors and engineers, and eventually sent the most ambitious of them to make their fortunes in the New World.
Twilight Patriot is the pen name for a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree. You can read more of his writings — including a longer version of this essay, which also reviews Seb Falk’s The Light Ages — at his Substack.
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