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06844_Field_TCUM T409.txt
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1996-04-10
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The kinds of interplay between wheel, bicycle, and airplane
are startling to those who have never thought about them.
Scholars tend to work on the archeological assumption that
things need to be studied in isolation. This is the habit of
specialism that quite naturally derives from typographic
culture. When a scholar like Lynn White ventures to make some
interrelations, even in his own area of special historical study,
he causes a good deal of unhappiness among his merely
specialist colleagues. In his Medieval Technology and Social
Change he explains how the feudal system was a social
extension of the stirrup. The stirrup first appeared in the West
in the eighth century A.D., having been introduced from the
East. With the stirrup came mounted shock combat that called
into existence a new social class. The European cavalier class
had already existed to be armed, but to mount a knight in full
armor required the combined resources of ten or more peasant