da Vinci Medal: 1964 Dexter Prize: 1970
The death of Lynn White in March 1987 marks the passing of one of the Society for the History of Technology’s most distinguished founding members. As president from 1960 to 1962, White lent his considerable scholarly prestige and his administrative acumen to the task of ensuring that the study of technology and its history would be placed on a firm foundation. SHOT’s many successes over the years owe much to the talents of its founders, and most especially to Lynn White. What sets White apart even from such distinguished company is his role in historical scholarship. His works represent the point of departure for all serious modern study of the history of medieval European technology and its larger cultural meanings. In this respect, White’s most enduring monument is not found in organizations or in his students but in the body of his published writings.
White received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1928; by his own admission, he had decided to become a medieval historian his first year at university. He received a Master’s degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1929, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1934. His teaching career began at Princeton University, where he was an instructor from 1933 to 1937. In 1937 he joined the faculty of his alma mater, Stanford, as an assistant professor, moving to professor by 1943. He left Stanford in that year to assume the presidency of Mills College, a school for women in Oakland, California, and he remained at Mills until 1958, when he joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles in the Department of History. As a professor (until 1972) and as a university professor (1972-7 4), White played an important part in the founding and flourishing growth of UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He served as its director from 1964 to 1970.
White’s career thus followed a number of unconventional pathways, an understanding of which is necessary in order to grasp the pattern of his publications. He was the son of a Presbyterian professor of Christian ethics, and, although he wore his religious convictions with grace and charm, White remained an active Presbyterian layman his entire life. His deep convictions informed his writings in many ways. A student at Harvard of Charles Homer Haskins, White was obliged by Haskins’s illness to seek Ph.D. supervision from George LaPiana; combining his native religious training with Haskins’s interest in institutional history and LaPiana’s devotion to Sicily, White’s initial publications were in Sicilian history. His dissertation, published in 1938 as Latin Monasticism in Norman Sicily, was reissued in 1968 by its publisher, the Medieval Academy of America, and the work appeared in Italian translation in 1984. White remained interested in Sicilian history throughout his life, reading and reviewing many works in this field.
In the pages of Technology and Culture and elsewhere, White presented his turn toward the history of technology as largely adventitious. While at work in Sicily in early 1933, he learned of the Reichstag fire and Hitler’s rise to power. He felt then that another war was inevitable and, like many American intellectuals of the day, White expected the conflict to drag on interminably, a modern Thirty Years’ War, preventing access by Americans to European archives and libraries. He decided while still in Sicily to focus on some field where significant work could be done without archival materials. In the fall of 1933, White read with the excitement of discovery A. L. Kroeber’s 1923 book, Anthropology, in preparation for an undergraduate course he was teaching. Reading further, he became familiar with pioneering works such as F. M. Feldhaus, Die Technik, the studies of Lefebvre des Noettes, and above all Marc Bloch’s Les caracteres originaux de l’histoire rurale franr;aise-all published in 1931. By 1938, White had compiled a bibliography on medieval technology that he published in 1940 under the title “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages.” His second career as a historian of technology was under way.
When war finally came, it had a different effect on White than he had expected. Concerned that the liberal arts and humane studies he loved so deeply were in grave danger, White in 1943 began a third career when he became president of a small liberal arts school for women, Mills College. He quickly became a national figure, an articulate and outspoken advocate on behalf of the liberal arts, small colleges, and women’s education. College presidents, he later admitted, are forced by their position to make too many speeches, too many of which are transcribed and published in alumni magazines and quarterly newsletters. The energy with which he set out to defend humane letters in what must have been difficult circumstances meant that a great deal of White’s bibliography during the Mills years is made up of magazine articles and topical pieces that originated as speeches. He never lost his original commitment to Sicily or to his second love, technology, but other concerns predominate during this period.
White published the most noteworthy of his essays from this period in a collection titled Educating Our Daughters ( 1950). Although not a self-conscious “feminist” in any political sense, White spoke to many issues feminism continues to debate today. He was the first person of either sex to be quoted in Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine (in the Spring 1972 preview issue) on the sexism of English grammar. A similar approach to the problems of the liberal arts in general produced a second collection of studies by White and others in 1956. Frontiers of Knowledge in the Study of Man appeared to favorable reviews and was subsequently issued in Spanish, Portuguese, and Iranian translations. It was this sort of range that set White apart from his scholarly colleagues.
The final transformation of Lynn White’s career was his return to full-time teaching and scholarship at UCLA in 1958. In preparation for this move, White gave a set of three lectures at the University of
Virginia in February 1957 on “Medieval Technology and Social Change,” and he published them under the same title in 1962. The work was extensively reviewed and quickly became a controversial scholarly “best-seller.” By 1973 it had appeared in Italian, German, French, and Spanish as well. Medieval Technology and Social Change retains the form of three long lectures on related themes. White’s aim in writing the work was to present a model of a new historiography in which the nonwritten record would be given equal weight with traditional forms of documentation. For this reason, White decided quite consciously to retain the more fluid form of the original lectures while adding what amounts to a second book beneath the first in the form of intricate, layered footnotes.
White’s chef d’oeuvre secured his reputation. It won the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society as best book in the field in 1962, and SHOT awarded him its highest honor, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, in 1964. He was later honored again by SHOT when in 1970 he received the Dexter Prize for another collection of essays. Other forms of professional recognition included leading positions in several academic organizations: he was president of the History of Science Society from 1971 to 1972, of the Medieval Academy of America from 1972 to 1973, and of the American Historical Association in 1973. He was made a Fellow of the Medieval Academy and also of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1970 he was named a Commendatore nell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.
More important, perhaps, was the fact that this period marks the peak of White’s scholarly output. In a letter written in 1972, White characterized himself as “an ‘article’ man rather than a ‘book’ man,” and true to this characterization, from the early 1960s until the middle 1970s he produced a steady stream of articles and essays setting forth his views on the cultural foundations underlying the medieval accomplishment in technology. The most significant—certainly the most controversial—piece of work from this period is the 1967 essay in Science called “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” By suggesting that Christianity bears a considerable share of the moral burden for our environmental woes because of its hostile and domineering attitudes toward nature, White roused a storm of protest and counterargument that still resonates in the literature. This essay, together with a number of White’s shorter and more general essays, was published under the title Machina ex Deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (subsequently reissued under the title Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered). White’s last major book, likewise a collection of articles that had appeared elsewhere, was published in 1978 through the University of California Press. Its title, Medieval Religion and Technology, suggests the theme that runs throughout White’s post-1962 writings, the connection between religious belief and a cultural orientation toward technology.
Lynn White regarded himself as both a defender of an old faith and as a pioneer. His old faith was a twofold belief in Christianity and humane letters; his role as a pioneer was to place technology into an intimate connection with both. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he served his causes very well indeed. All of us who knew him are the better for having done so, and, through his writings and his legacies in organizations such as this society, so too are all those whose interests are served by this journal.
Bert S. Hall
Originally printed as Hall, Bert S. “Lynn Townsend White, Jr. (1907–1987).” Technology and Culture 30, no. 1 (1989): 194–213. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1989.0185.
White, Lynn, Jr. “The Study of Medieval Technology, 1924–1974: Personal Reflections.” Technology and Culture16, no. 4 (1975): 519–30. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891595.
White, Lynn, Jr. “Kyeser’s ‘Bellifortis’: The First Technological Treatise of the Fifteenth Century.” Technology and Culture10, no. 3 (1969): 436–41. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/901626.
White, Lynn, Jr. “The Invention of the Parachute.” Technology and Culture9, no. 3 (1968): 462–67. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894264.
White, Lynn. Machina ex Deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (subsequently reissued under the title Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture6, no. 2 (1965): 324–326. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894772.
White, Lynn, Jr. “Theophilus Redivivus.”Technology and Culture 5, no. 2 (1964): 224-233. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894894.
White, Lynn. Medieval technology and Social Change. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
White, Lynn, Jr. “The Act of Invention: Causes, Contexts, Continuities and Consequences.”Technology and Culture 3, no. 4 (1962): 486-500. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895105.
White, Lynn, Jr. “Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition.” Technology and Culture2, no. 2 (1961): 97–111. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895545.
White, Lynn, Jr. “Technology in the Middle Ages.” Technology and Culture1, no. 4 (1960): 339–44. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895610.