If you desire more detail about medieval science, though, other books offer more. And if you’re curious about the medieval obsession with astrology - a prime motivation for building astrolabes - your appetite will be sufficiently satisfied. If you ever wondered how astrolabes worked, down to the last detail, this is the book for you. Most noteworthy among the instruments of the day was the astrolabe, a contraption containing movable disks to measure and represent the positions of astronomical objects. Westwyk is known to have produced two important astronomical manuscripts, both about scientific instruments. Little is known about Westwyk, but Falk re-creates his life through an account of the life events and duties of monks at that time.
Albans Abbey in England in the 14th century. In particular, Falk emphasizes, the medieval era produced high-level technical achievements in the realm of scientific instrument making.įalk tells his story from the perspective of John Westwyk, a monk at St.
Historians have long known that medieval monasteries and universities hosted many deep thinkers engaged in sophisticated intellectual enterprises. “The medieval reality, however, is a Light Age of scientific interest and inquiry,” historian Seb Falk writes in The Light Ages. Science supposedly took a hiatus between the demise of Rome and the rise of Copernican astronomy and Galileo’s physics, some superficial accounts suggest. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren’t so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.A long-standing myth about medieval history is that the Middle Ages were intellectually dark.
From multiplying Roman numerals to navigating by the stars, curing disease, and telling time with an ancient astrolabe, we learn emerging science alongside Westwyk, while following the gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world. In The Light Ages, Cambridge science historian Seb Falk takes us on an immersive tour of medieval science through the story of one fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks, proving that the Middle Ages were home to a vibrant scientific culture. Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era. An illuminating guide to the scientific and technological achievements of the Middle Ages through the life of a crusading astronomer-monk.
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