/lit/ - Literature

>>15343032

also, i should probably should have used this image for the previous post.

>The true solution for this difficulty, the monks had found by the eleventh century, was the invention and wider use of labor-saving machines. This began with the systematic adoption of prime movers like the horse powered treadmill, the watermill, and later the windmill. The invention of machines and their organization into large work-units went on together. The main features of this process of rationalization were elegantly embodied in the original building plans for the monastery of St. Gall, which have survived the dilapidation and destruction of the original complex of buildings. With the centralized administrative system introduced in the twelfth century by the Cistercians, it is noteworthy that new monasteries were built according to a standard plan.

>Monastic mechanization was itself part of an over-all rationalization, which embraced the entire technological process, and only in recent times has it been appraised at its full value. The changeover to free industry, based not on tools and craft processes alone, but greatly aided by labor freeing machines, began around the tenth century, and was first marked by a steady increase in the number of watermills in Europe.

>The Benedictine commitment to 'labor and prayer' had done more than take the ancient curse off work. For the productivity of this system established, likewise, the economic value of a methodically ordered life; and that moral was not lost on contemporary craftsmen and traders. The Venetian merchant, Louis Cornaro, in his classic essay on attaining longevity, took this regularity and abstemiousness to be the guarantee not only of a fruitful life but of financial prosperity. These 'Protestant' virtues long antedated Calvinism.

>What the monastery began, the medieval guilds carried through; for they not merely laid down a fresh basis for association in craft and trade, but they restored to work the esthetic and moral values, conditioned by religion, that governed the rest of their life. They, too, were autonomous corporate bodies, which established a common discipline for the performance of work and the regulation of wages and prices.

>This transformation was decisive: so there is no need to exaggerate it. The integration of work with moral regulations, esthetic expression, and social security, was never completed in the guilds, any more than in the monasteries. As wealth accumulated, particularly in the wholesale trades and in mining and shipping ventures, the economic gap between the poor and the wealthy guilds grew.

so this is why you read about the first industrial revolution actually happening in the middle ages. land notes it also.