[torrance]

Is this question implicitly restricting itself to European Middle ages? If not, surely it's worth mentioning the scientific advances in the Islamic Golden Ages? [1] As I understand it, these were so important that in Europe if you wanted to keep apace of scientific advances, many undertook to learn to read Arabic.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic...

[benbreen]

This is a cogent question and one that historians of science are currently debating. There's been a lot of debate in my own field (early modern history) about whether we can speak of such things as "early modern Japan," "early modern India" or indeed an "early modern world," or whether we should restrict the term to Europe. I personally vote for the former on the basis of the globalization that had been occurring since the Pax Mongolica. (A few book recs on this would include Janet Abu-Lughod, "Before European Hegemony," and the third book of Braudel's "Civilization and Capitalism" series).

So if we can agree that there was a medieval world or world system, then the old picture of a scientific dark age ceases to make much sense. At the same time that Western Europe was in a period of slowed technological innovation--the period just before Charlemagne, let's say--huge advances were occurring not only in places like modern-day Iraq, India and China, but even cities on the periphery of what we think of as medieval Europe, like Cordoba and Constantinople.

A couple more interesting takes on global premodern science and technology - Richard Bulliet's "The Camel and the Wheel" and Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China series, which I admittedly have only skimmed, but is really fascinating stuff.

[selimthegrim]

If you read George Steiner on Needham, it's interesting to see that he ended up identifying with China to a point that he even parroted their line in the Vietnam War uncritically.