The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation

289 Pages·2015·9.66 MB·English

by  Patricia Clare Ingham

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This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC
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This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC
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for Doug
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Contents
introduction. Newfangled values 1
PArT i. ex Nihilo
Chapter 1. scholastic Novelties 23
Chapter 2. Conjuring roger Bacon 48
PArT ii. iNgeNiUM
Chapter 3. ingenious Youth 75
Chapter 4. little Nothings 112
PArT iii. CUriosiTAs
Chapter 5. suspect economies 143
Chapter 6. old worlds and New 167
Afterword. An Age of innovation 194
Notes 199
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Bibliography 251
index 269
Acknowledgments 275
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Introduction
Newfangled Values
Le nouveau n’est pas une mode; c’est une valeur.
––Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte
Novelty- mongering does not necessarily reflect novelty, much less
progress.
––David Edgerton, “Innovation, Technology, or History”
“The New is not a fashion,” writes Roland Barthes, “it is a value.”1 Referring to
novelty as a feature of the pleasure of the text, Barthes casts the new as discur-
sive value rather than empirical fact. This seems both undeniable and counter-
intuitive. From the “New World” to the “latest iPhone,” newness stakes its
power on the side of the event, unpredicted and unlooked for—o n surprise and
discontinuity as empirical fact. Yet our attraction to gadgets, fashions, or
breathtaking discoveries exceeds utility, as a variety of scholars have shown.2
Take, for example, medieval historian Lynn White’s controversial “stirrup the-
sis” (1962). White’s ground- breaking account of the instrumentality of the
lowly stirrup to the dramatic rise of feudalism was, of course, mostly wrong
about feudalism; but this has not blunted the significance of his imaginative
method to the History of Technology, a field still oriented around the inestima-
ble value of small inventions. Yet if the full measure of our fascination with new
things, new discoveries, or new events is on display in narratives like White’s,
the process by which the new affects the movements of history and culture is
not adequately described by them. Whatever the new is or means at its broad-
est, it is not the stirrup (or any other single invention, discovery, or mode of
thought), no matter how seductive or ingenious such arguments may be.3
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