Villard's Legacy: Studies in Medieval Technology, Science, and Art in Memory of Jean Gimpel (review)

Villard's Legacy is a worthy memorial to the scholar and humanitarian Jean Gimpel, whose achievements include the founding of AVISTA—Association Villard de Honnecourt for Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art. This volume, edited by Marie-Thérèse Zenner, includes fourteen studies divided into two sections: Art and Architecture (eight essays), and Science and Technology (six essays). It also contains a useful introduction by Zenner, two short biographical essays dealing with Gimpel's life and work, a bibliography of his scholarship, and selected folios from the celebrated thirteenth-century portfolio of the famed artist Villard de Honnecourt, Gimpel's medieval hero.

The first six essays focus on Villard's portfolio and use it both to gain insight into his thinking and to obtain a broader understanding of the world in which he lived. In considering the first of these questions, William Clark, after a careful reassessment of Villard's numerous depictions of Rheims Cathedral, shows that he was an enthusiast with a love for the process of building, but that he lacked a clear understanding of the theories that underlay the building process. Clark argues that differences between Villard's drawings and the actual construction of the cathedral, long noted by scholars, were the result of Villard's errors rather than evidence of changes in the building plan, as once had been thought.

Nigel Hiscock's examination of architectural geometry in Villard's portfolio points to broader conclusions regarding the perceptions and uses of geometry in the thirteenth century. Rather than insisting on two sealed-off worlds of practice and theory, Hiscock indicates that scholars should look toward a model of both/and rather than either/or when considering how medieval builders and philosophers contemplated the practical and allegorical roles of geometry. Although included in the first section of the volume, Robert Bork's study of medieval cathedral spires and Malcom Thurlby's examination of tufa webbing in cathedral vaults have a broader focus than Villard's portfolio. Both essays consider numerous cathedrals in order to draw attention to two previously neglected aspects of cathedral construction. In each case, Bork and Thurlby make clear that it is only by examining a large rather than select corpus of data that historians of architecture, and by extension all historians, can draw valuable broad-gauged conclusions.

The six essays in the second section are rather more heterogeneous, with a broader geographical and temporal range than those in the first. Robert D. Stevick considers geometric design in the art and architecture of Ireland and Northumberland from the sixth century through the tenth. Alan M. Stahl examines the technology of coin minting in Venice from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, identifying the interconnection between technological advance and economic gain in this most important of state industries. Wesley M. Stevens reevaluates the transmission of Euclidean geometry in Latin to the Carolingian empire and its successor states, focusing on the difficulties presented by the numerous surviving manuscripts to teachers and students between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries. He concludes that Euclidean geometry was well known and well studied in the medieval West long before translations of Euclid from Arabic were made available in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The study with the greatest significance for the relationship of technology and culture is Paul J. Gans's reexamination of the development of the horse harness in the West and its impact on agricultural production. After a brief discussion of the state of the question, Gans emphasizes that the introduction of horses as a significant factor in the mix of agricultural beasts of burden was a gradual rather than a revolutionary phenomenon. Even after the development of the "modern" horse collar, which is dated to the ninth century, there simply were too few horses available to replace the oxen traditionally used for plowing and other...