Star-Gazing in the Eleventh Century

Prevailing narratives in popular history can be difficult to refute, not because they’re patently false, but because they’ve become deeply ingrained in commonly held perceptions about a particular topic, event or individual.

Though much ink has been spilled about the Dark Ages, I’d wager that most have adopted a largely erroneous view of the period, consistent with theses advanced by earlier generations of scholars who posited that the Church — a seemingly monolithic and undifferentiated entity in their view — waged a war on science. While this thesis has been moderated, qualified and even vehemently challenged, it certainly remains a prevalent belief in the popular imagination, leading one scholar of Medieval Irish computus to call the Dark Ages a “tiresome cliche.”

The causal link between the fall of the Roman Empire and intellectual stagnation seems an easy narrative to accept, not least because the paucity of extant source material can make more robust reconstruction of various strands of cultural activity slightly more challenging. However, we do have evidence demonstrating that the Dark Ages were nothing like their name implies. Seb Falk’s appropriately titled, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, was one highly accessible tome that challenged long-standing and erroneous ideas about the state of science in the Middle Ages. I read Falk’s monograph last summer, delighted by stories of curious monks, who were proto-engineers, quasi-herbalists, and rigorous academics. Instead of some powerful…