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Reviewed by:
  • Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology
  • Massimo Mazzotti (bio)
Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology. By Adam Lucas . Leiden: Brill, 2006. Pp. xx+439. $197.

Watermills and windmills were often the most sophisticated technological artifacts to be found in premodern communities. They were also at the center of most communities' social and economic life. Until quite recently, these two aspects of the historical significance of milling have been kept apart by specialized scholarship. While social historians have investigated the social relevance of milling activities, they have not pushed their analysis to the level of technical design. On the other hand, historians of milling have provided careful technical descriptions of milling machines, as well as reconstructions of their patterns of chronological and geographical diffusion, but mostly against a stereotyped social and cultural background, one that has only recently begun to be explored and revised. Now, sophisticated studies are providing fine-grained illustrations of the relation between the machines' technical features, the ways in which they were used, the criteria by which they were judged to work efficiently, and the patterns of social interaction that invested these machines with meaning.

The best examples of this revisionist scholarship have taken the form of detailed case studies, based on new archival and archaeological materials. Because of their richly textured reconstructions and microanalytic methodologies, these studies tend to be limited in their scope—both geographically and chronologically. Adam Lucas's remarkable monograph is a timely attempt to offer the reader a broad survey based on this growing but still fragmented literature. The result is a valuable overview of the development of milling technology in ancient and medieval societies, an overview in which a few long-held historiographical assumptions are interestingly revised.

The book is divided in a rather conventional manner, with a first part on agricultural milling—that is, machines and activities related to grinding grain—and a second part on industrial milling—the processing of materials other than grain. In the first part Lucas follows the development of milling from the ancient world to the late medieval period. Although the main focus remains on Europe, there are numerous references to milling activities and machinery from the Islamic world and China. Some significant points are based on archival and archaeological findings, such as the chronological priority of the vertical-wheeled watermill with respect to the [End Page 848] horizontal, and the existence of sophisticated turbines in the late Roman Empire. More generally, Lucas marshals his materials effectively to undermine the thesis of technological stagnation in the ancient world, whose historiographical fortune has been more related to the apology of Western progress than to solid empirical evidence.

Moving to another debated issue, Lucas provides convincing evidence that the role of Christian monasteries in the diffusion of watermilling in medieval Europe has been exaggerated. He argues that the arrival of powered milling, whether vertical- or horizontal-wheeled, predated monastic activity in regions for which significant evidence survives. Moreover, he claims that the subsequent diffusion of this technology was related to other relevant social groups as well.

In the second part of the book, Lucas concentrates on industrial milling in a few regions of medieval Europe, using recent scholarship on England, Wales, France, and Italy. He questions the extremely influential thesis according to which the second half of the European Middle Ages witnessed an industrial revolution based on waterpower. The most evident signs of this revolution, according to its supporters, would be a dramatic increase in the number of mills powered by water and wind, and a multiplication of their industrial applications. Against this interpretation Lucas argues that the widespread application of water- and wind power is recorded only in a few regions ("pockets of innovation") of what today we call France and Italy. Instead, the much-referred-to case of the English and Welsh fulling industry, which boomed in the thirteenth century, should be understood as the effect of a restructuring of local manufacturing due to contingent socioeconomic conditions, rather than an "industrial revolution" ante litteram.

In his conclusion, Lucas introduces the nuts and bolts of contemporary social studies of science and technology, showing how the history of milling, including his...

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