Reviews
’A spirited jaunt through centuries of scientific development ... captures the wonder of the medieval world: its inspirational curiosity and its engaging strangeness.’---Sunday Times
’This book contains much valuable material summarised with commendable no-nonsense clarity - James Hannam has done a fine job of knocking down an old caricature.’---Sunday Telegraph
’Hannam, the liveliest of guides, makes enjoyable reading out of some seriously dusty history and difficult ideas.’---Scotsman
’Here, in short, is a readable book, aimed at an intelligent but ignorant layman. You’ll enjoy it.’---Daniel Hannan MEP, Daily Telegraph
’A very useful general survey of a difficult topic, and a robust defence of an unfairly maligned age.’---Spectator
Praise
The well-scrubbed modern West likes to imagine the Middle Ages as a cloddish, fetid, incense-stinking darkness swept by hunger, plague and war, and ridden with narrow-minded priests jawing about angels. Certainly, the intellectual thrust of the time is rarely celebrated. The word ?dunce? derives from the (distinguished) 13th-century theologian Duns Scotus, and ?trivial? is a derisive mangling of the medieval university syllabus, or trivium, of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric.
In his spirited jaunt through centuries of scientific development, James Hannam tries to overthrow this cultural prejudice. He trumpets the Middle Ages as an era in which rational thought crystallised and scientific freedom flourished. The plough, horseshoe, stirrup, magnetic compass, mechanical clock, sheet of paper, spectacles, printed book and gunpowder all app?eared in the West between 500 and 1500, he points out. The compass helped navigators map the world while spectacles led to telescopes that enabled Galileo to draw a true map of the heavens. Most important, early clocks (which sound like splendidly fantastical objects, with orbiting suns and moons instead of hands, and dials indicating the tide times at London Bridge) allowed the cosmos to be conceived of as ?a mechanism that could be investigated by reason?.
Hannam?s story is chiefly about astronomy, reason and getting over Aristotle. Our medieval forbears didn?t believe that the earth was flat, but dutifully, following the great Greek philosopher, they did think it was stationary, circled each day by crystalline spheres into whose spinning rims the planets were set. The whole mechanism was supposedly pushed around by angelic beings. Such beliefs, Hannam claims, are ?perfectly rational?. Gerbert of Aurillac, the 11th-century ?Mathematical Pope?, knew the size of the earth to a pretty accurate degree and calculated that if the earth was rotating we?d all be howling along at 1,000 miles an hour. As for the angels driving the system, they were no more absurd than the notion of stars feasting upon fecund airs rising from the earth ? which was what Adelard of Bath told his inquisitive nephew in the early 12th century.
Science really got going, ?Hannam argues, when Aristotle was challenged by theologians at the great universities (all founded in the medieval era, naturally). Orthodoxy would not accept that Aristotle?s ?natural laws? could limit God?s powers, so thinkers were encouraged to investigate the ?consistent and not capricious? workings of God?s universe for themselves. Experience, as ?Chaucer might have put it, started to chase after authority.