The Alchemists

Author :Taylor, Frank Sherwood.

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: Granada Publishing Ltd. (1976)
• Language: English
• Condition:  Good
• Price: $8

Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

Author : Gimpel, Jean.

• Paperback: 255 pages
• Publisher: Futura Publications (1979)
• Language: English
• Condition:  Good
• Price: $8

This review is from: Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Paperback)

An excellent work marred by a little too much enthusiasm, this book will convey to the student of history the notion that the middle ages were not the black hole of lack of technology that most historians portray them to be. The author compares the changes in technology, and the scope of their results, to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and he may be pushing the analogy a bit. However, it is certainly true that technology did advance in ways in the Middle Ages. As for biases and tone, the author veers deceptively about, now seeming anti-industrialist, now communist, now capitalist, now labor historian. The book is marred by a final chapter in which the author tries to draw a parallel between the Middle Ages and the modern day that is both not well described and does not seem to be accurate given the circumstances of the world 20 years after the writing. But for the descriptions of technology alone, and of corporate-like structures in the middle ages, this is a good read.

The Triumph of Christendom in The Roman Empire

Author :  Gibbon, Edward.

• Paperback: 411 pages
• Publisher: Harper & Row, Publishers (1958)
• Language: English 
• Condition: Good
• Price: $15
  

History In Schools - The Study of Development

Author :  Jeffreys, M.V.C.

• Hardcover: 104 pages
• Publisher: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd. Pitman Press (1984)
• Language: English 
• Condition: Good
• Price: $10
  

This is a book for the teacher of history who seeks to make the subject more intelligible as well as more attractive to the pupil.

Winstanley 'The Law of Freedom' and other Writings

Author : Winstanley, Gerrard.
Editor:  Hill, Christopher.

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (October 25, 1973)
• Language: English 
• Condition: Good
• Price: $6
  

This review is from: Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Pelican classics) (Paperback)

As the document under review, True Leveler Gerrard Winstanley's agrarian socialist utopian tract from the 1640's, demonstrates the notion of a socialist solution to the problems of humankind has a long and storied history. The solutions presented by Winstanley had and (in a limited sense still do) do represent rudimentary ways to solve the problem of social and economic distribution of the social surplus produced by society. Without overextending the analogy Winstanley's tract represented for his time what the Communist Manifesto represented for Marx's time. And those with property hated both in their respective times.

One of the great advances of Marx over Winstanley was that he did not place his reliance on an agrarian solution to the crisis of society as Winstanley was forced to do by the conditions of social development of his time. Marx, moreover, did not concentrate on the question of distribution but rather on who controls the means of production that all previous theorists had either failed to account for or did not know about. Thus, all pre-Marxist theory is bound up with a strategy of moral as well as political persuasion as a means changing human life styles rather than the question of creating social surplus so that under conditions of plenty the struggle for daily survival can be taken off the human agenda and other more lofty goals put in its place. Still, with all the True Levellers weaknesses and the improbabilities of their success in the 1640's Cromwellian England we today still doff our hats to Winstanley's vision.