Lynn Townsend White

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Lynn Townsend White Jr. (born April 29, 1907 in San Francisco , California - † March 30, 1987 ) was an American medievalist and science historian specializing in medieval technology and its social effects.

Life

White received his PhD from Harvard University in 1934 . From 1943 to 1958 he was President of Mills College in Oakland and Professor of Medieval History at Princeton University , Stanford University and from 1958 until his retirement in 1974 at the University of California, Los Angeles . At UCLA he was the director and founder of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies .

In 1963 he received the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society for his book Medieval Technology and Social Change . In 1964 he received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal and in 1970 the Mercer Award and the Dexter Prize. He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Philosophical Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1956) and the Académie internationale d'histoire des sciences . 1971/72 he was President of the History of Science Society, 1972/73 of the Medieval Academy of America and 1973 of the American Historical Association . He was Commander of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy (1971).

In his influential article The historical roots of our ecological crisis in 1966, he traced the ecological crisis as a consequence of the industrial revolution back to a Judeo-Christian attitude towards the control of nature with roots as far back as the Middle Ages. This article has u. a. also given the occasion for significant ecclesiastical-ecological activities from the 1980s, first in the Eastern Orthodox Church, in particular by Patriarch Bartholomaios , and later in the Western Catholic Church by Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato si ' from 2015.

Fonts

  • Medieval Technology and Social Change , New York: Oxford University Press, 1962, German translation: The medieval technology and the change of society , Munich 1968
  • Medieval religion and technology , University of California Press 1978 (collection of articles)
  • What accelerated technical progress in the Western Middle Ages? , History of Technology, Volume 32, 1965, pp. 201-220
  • Machina ex deo. Essays in the dynamism of western culture , MIT Press 1968
  • Latin Monasticism in Norman Sicily , Cambridge (Massachusetts), Mediaeval Academy of America, 1938
    • Il monachesimo latino nella Sicilia normanna , translated by Andrea Chersi, Editrice Dafni, Catania 1984
  • as editor: Frontiers of knowledge in the study of man , New York, Harper 1956
  • Educating our daughters. A challenge to the colleges , New York, Harper 1950
  • as editor: Transformation of the roman world. Gibbon's problem after two centuries , Berkeley, University of California Press 1966

literature

  • Bert S. Hall, Delno C. West (Editor) On pre-modern technology and science. A volume of studies in honor of Lynn White Jr. , Malibu, Undena Publ., 1976
  • M. Claggett, R. Rouse, E. Grant, Speculum, Vol. 63, 1988, pp. 769-771

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information partly from the membership book of the Institute for Advanced Study, 1980
  2. ↑ Science, Volume 155, 1967, pp. 1203-1207. Online . Paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention, Washington DC, December 2, 1966
personal data
SURNAME White, Lynn Townsend
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lynn Townsend White, Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American medievalist and historian of science
DATE OF BIRTH April 29, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco , California
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 1987