🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE Medieval times were not as scientifically stunted as we think. Historian Seb Falk explains how those myths arose — and what science looked like.
I was always interested in medieval history. As a kid, I was really into in knights and battles and that kind of thing. I did medieval history as an undergrad. And I had a kind of strange career route because I worked in the government in the U.K. and then I became a history teacher. It was when I was teaching history, at a school in Canada, that I was asked to teach something called “Theory of Knowledge.
As science develops, people who want to show off their own achievements naturally assume that everything before them was ignorant. It’s assumed that because people didn’t have particular technologies in science, like the telescope, or communication, like the printing press, that nothing was going on. Of course, it’s true to say that theyhave the telescope or the printing press — but that doesn’t mean you can’t make discoveries or communicate your ideas. You just do it in different ways.
Q: Was there a lightbulb moment when you first started to realize, as you say in your book, that the Middle Ages were “so much more than battles and black boils”? I think it was just this moment of realization that there’s this whole other aspect of life in the Middle Ages that we ignore because we’re so caught up in the battles and chivalry and wars and conquest and the Black Death. Yet, all the while, people are still able to look up at the stars and figure out how the world works and do precise calculations and do math and astronomy and go study at universities.
But people in the Middle Ages made really precise measurements of the planets and the sun and the moon through the stars. Because they wanted the most accurate calendars that they could. That was important to Christians; in order to celebrate the feasts and festivals, like Easter, on the right day of the year, they had to get a very tight grip on the solar and lunar calendars.
At the same time, Westwyck had this really fascinating, adventurous life where he goes on a crusade and gets exiled to the north of England where all the monks are complaining about the terrible food and the terrible weather. And he probably went and studied at Oxford, so that gave me an opportunity to talk about the importance of universities in the late Middle Ages. He was really the perfect guide to the achievements of medieval science.
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