Inventions of the Middle Ages

This illustrated history treats the medieval centuries as a period of everyday invention rather than of stalled technique. Frugoni proceeds by object and habit: spectacles and the book, mechanical clocks and hours of equal length, banks, paper, and Arabic numerals; buttons and tailored clothes; the fork and pasta; gunpowder; the wheelbarrow, mill, compass, and rudder; universities and new ways of reckoning time, including the idea of purgatory. She uses paintings, inventories, and chronicles to show when each device or custom appears and how contemporaries first met it. The book is a thematic catalogue of material and social innovations, written against the notion of a dark, uninventive interval.

Three-quarter bound in black buckram with colour image printed paper cover. Red slipcase and endpapers.