Folio Society Hardcover
Inventions of the Middle Ages
by Chiara Frugoni
AS NEW UNREAD condition in SLIPCASE
1st Printing 2007
186 pages
Illustrated in color and black and white
A delightful examination of the many inventions we owe the Middle Ages by the great medieval scholar Chiara Frugoni.
This ‘backward’ period gave us printed books, spectacles, anesthetics, pets, checkbooks, glazed windows, clocks, underwear, playing cards, the fireplace, universities and the wheelbarrow – inventions, items and ideas without which our lives would be poorer, more painful and definitely less healthy.
The evidence is provided by a rich seam of medieval arts and letters. Eyeglasses, for example, turn up regularly on the noses of devotional figures in the corners of illuminated manuscripts, and a mechanical clock chimes sweetly in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Frugoni reveals charming, remarkable stories of how each innovation began. The fork, considered an instrument of sin by 12th century churchmen, found its salvation as a means of dealing with hot and slippery pasta, also invented at this time. From a father upbraiding his student son for playing dice and visiting ‘the most disreputable places’, to the way gunpowder enabled men ‘of base extraction and modest physical prowess’ to render years of training in the chivalric arts meaningless, what is revealed here is the unique character of the Middle Ages itself.
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