A review by chelsea_rae
Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn Townsend White Jr.

I honestly do not know how to rate this. at first I couldn't tell whether it was a methodological/disciplinary difference that made some of White's conclusions seem absurd. It's not common for me to read strictly historical work (though this is fairly interdisciplinary, it feels like the archaeologists, literary critics, economists, and other scholars White draws on are all subsumed in his own historicist maneuverings), so I was really unprepared for the emphasis on extrinsic teleological causality that drives the book. It's a quick, easy read (and honestly his section on steam bellows made the entire thing worth it for me), but I felt skeptical and bemused for most of it.

I should note that if I sound dismissive, I'm coming from a perspective that the book itself enabled. White's broadest claim is that rather than a backwater "dark ages," the medieval period was defined by real technological advancement, and his book was one of the first that really argued for that field as one with scholarly potential. If his underlying argument seems obvious to us now, it's only because he and other scholars (incl. Marc Bloch) did the work in opening up that field to begin with.