Feudalism

• Fall of the Roman Empire, feudal economy, local defense and self-sufficiency, trade in luxury goods and slaves
• Land based feudal system, craft based industry
• Common ownership of land, forced labor
• Lords provided protection from aggressors, demanded service
• Technological advances (iron, ploughs, harnesses and looms, mills) dispersed
• Feudal economy expanded in scope over more land
• Trade and local manufacturing, importance of towns, wealthy capitalists
• Expansion and labor shortages, mechanical action and water and animal power

The Christian Church

• Church a landowner, source of literacy
• Church opposed the rising urban class of merchants and artisans
• 12^th century: universities in Europe, liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music), philosophy and theology
• 12^th century massive translation of Arabic works into Latin, classical ideas
• Islamic and Christian problems with natural philosophy: how was the universe created, how were faith and reason related, literal readings of the Bible and Koran, and the validity of mystical experience
• Conflict and change, economic needs
• European science and clerics, Islamic science and doctors
• Christian science part-time, supporting revelation with experience
• Astronomy for calendars and astrology
• All nature was a hierarchy, spheres for the fixed stars, planets and moon

Technology and Industry

• Technologies from China: the horse-collar, the clock, the compass, the sternpost rudder, gunpowder, paper and printing
• Improved means of production and transportation, trade
• Industry in the countryside, water and windmills (fulling cloth, forging iron and sawing wood), innovation outside of guilds
• Millwrights as “mechanics” base of knowledge for later innovations
• Mechanical clocks, magnets and the compass, force at a distance
• Gunpowder, Chinese origin, land based aristocracy and wealthy republics, technical skills and natural resources
• Gunpowder and medieval chemistry, theories of combustion
• Cannonball trajectories and dynamics, distillation, alcohol
• Paper, shortage of copyists, development of printing
• Printing with movable type, literacy, cheap books, trades and the learned classes
• Larger market for manufactured goods, rich merchants
  “The fundamental reason why that advance [of science] was so long delayed was that in a feudal economy, Islamic or Christian, there was no way in which rational science could be used to any practical advantage.” (246)