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

3.0

This text spent most of its time detailing arguments between archaeologists about the dating of different things that might indicate people had certain types of plows, cranks etc. If I was getting ready to make an academic argument in the archaeology of stuff I never knew was this important, I would find this book ridiculously valuable. However, I was kind of trying to read this for fun, and I wish the argument had been more centered on the ways technology and social change were connected, rather than retroactively trying to assign winners to an arms race about stirrups.

Also this book has convinced me that if my advisor lived in the middle ages, she would have built automatons... and been even more miserable than she is now.