The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation PDF
Preview The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation
This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms for Doug This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:39:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:41:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Bibliography 251 index 269 Acknowledgments 275 This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:41:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 104.239.165.217 on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 12:42:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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