Book Review: The Light Ages
Way back in the Dark Ages, when I was in college, I had a minor in medieval studies. I had read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon the summer before I started college, and it had left me mad for everything Arthurian. The English Department dutifully obliged by providing me with a course in Arthurian lit, followed by courses in medieval literature and two semesters of Old English, the second devoted entirely to translating Beowulf (my professor declared my translation “quite Latinate,” which I now know was not a compliment). My history minor helped round out the medieval studies minor with classes on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (one class, two minors—a rare BOGO in higher education). I have a vague memory of standing in the middle of the floor in our honors lounge/classroom, raising my arms overhead and then clasping hands with some soul whose name I have long forgotten while our professor and another classmate stood behind us and pushed squarely between our shoulders in order to demonstrate—I think—how Gothic architecture utilized the strength of flying buttresses to create soaring vaults that allowed cathedrals to replace walls with stained glass windows that filled the hol(e)y space with color and light. The medieval period, our prof stressed, was not a centuries-long stretch between the fall of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Renaissance during which even the sun shown dimly on the benighted and befuddled folk of Europe who killed time killing one another in wars, crusades and inquisitions or succumbing to plague or living hand-to-mouth as a serf or peasant, ignorant and filthy and likely to die before they made it out of childhood. Quite the contrary: the Middle Ages brought not only the advances in engineering that erected Chartres and Canterbury but also the concentration of people in cities, where an emerging merchant class accumulated sufficient wealth to contribute to the civic and religious endeavor of raising a building that served both God and the very human desire to one-up the neighboring city—our cathedral’s bigger than yours. Universities were founded, vernacular languages and literature began to flourish (Dante and Chaucer wrote in Italian and English respectively, not in Latin), and the influence of Islamic scholarship flowed out from Al-Andalus and back from the Holy Lands as a product of the Crusades, carrying knowledge of classic Greek and Latin texts, mathematics, medicine and astronomy throughout medieval Europe.
My professor didn’t like the term Dark Ages, but author Seb Falk takes his disdain for the phrase to another level entirely, passive-aggressively/aggressive-aggressively titling his most recent book The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. Falk, a lecturer in medieval history and the history of science at Cambridge (one of the aforementioned universities founded in the Middle Ages, 1209 to be precise), grounds his story in the person of John Westwyk, a brother at the monastery of St. Albans. Unlike Peters’s Cadfael, Westwyk is not fictional, but so little is known of him that he is almost a cipher. Almost, however, is the key word, for enough of Westwyk is preserved in writing for Falk to place him at the center and build the medieval world around him. The prologue to Falk’s tale begins with the 1952 attribution of a medieval astronomical text to Geoffrey Chaucer (whose prologue to another work is justifiably famous). Derek Price, a physicist and historian of science, discovered a manuscript in Peterhouse Library dated to 1392 and containing the letters chauc as the start of a word, the rest cut off by the manuscript’s binding. The binding was removed and, sure enough, the last two letters were er. Chaucer had, in fact, written Treatise on the Astrolabe, so it was not much of a stretch to assume that he had authored this “draft instruction manual for a completely unknown scientific instrument” (2). (Spoiler alert: he had not.)
The Light Ages is history set to the tune of a detective novel. After introducing us to John Westwyk at the beginning of the first chapter, Falk quickly dives into the role astronomy played in the life of the monastery. The fortunes of the monks at St. Albans were dependent on farming, and knowing when to plant and when to harvest was essential. The way to gain this knowledge was to read the sky: particular stars will be in particular locations at particular times of the year, and knowing what to look for at what point in the sky allowed a practiced eye to know when to sow and when to reap. This is not as simple as it sounds. What appears in the sky above you depends not only on where you stand here on planet Earth as you look up but on a host of other factors ranging from the tilt of the Earth on its axis, the precession of the Earth about its axis, the difference between the ecliptic and the celestial equator, and even the calendar you’re using. Astronomers had long been aware that the clockwork of the heavenly spheres did not exactly run with the precision of Swiss trains (though it would be 1847 before they could make this reference to the Swiss railway system). They did not, alas, know the whys behind this imperfection, but through centuries of close observation, they were able to account for it and even create tables that could be used to calculate the variance for particular calendar dates at particular latitudes to predict the position of stars and planets with a fair degree of accuracy.
Astronomers also created tools to assist them in determining when various stars would appear. Falk has a particular interest in medieval scientific instruments, and his discussion of one such instrument, the astrolabe, in Chapter 4 is so thorough I believe even I could use one now (well, with this book to hand as I fumble to set my rete correctly over the plate). Falk bounces between astronomy and history throughout the text, weaving John’s story throughout the history through which he lived, following him from St. Albans to, potentially, Oxford (Chapter 3) to the St. Albans outpost at Tynemouth (Chapter 5) to France where he fought in the Bishop’s Crusade (Chapter 6) to, finally, the St. Albans inn in London (Chapter 7). By this time John’s astronomical expertise was sufficient for him to embark, in 1392, on the creation of Equatorie, his name for both a new astronomical instrument (yes, the completely unknown one referenced in this review’s second paragraph) and the treatise that instructed users in the construction and use of this instrument and provided tables to assist them in their calculations and predictions. There is no evidence Westwyk ever built his equatorium, certainly not to the scale he had suggested, but in 2012 Falk, with the help of two curators, found a full-scale replica (i.e., six feet in diameter) of the equatorium Derek Price had made in the 1950s forgotten among other artifacts in the storeroom of Cambridge’s Whipple Museum. The description of the find provides a satisfying end to John Westwyk’s story.
Falk’s interweaving of astronomy and history is an effective rhetorical device, but the astronomy sections, even leavened with illustrations, can be tough going. I got my first telescope when I was 12, so I’m no stranger to the azimuth or to finding my way around the sky using declination and right ascension (my telescope today will align itself, but I well remember centering Arcturus in the eyepiece and locking the right ascension wheel at 14 hours 14 minutes), but even I found myself reading and rereading some passages. And I found myself grateful that I didn’t have to labor like John Westwyk to place Saturn or Aldeberan in the night sky. Between my beloved Skalnate Pleso Atlas of the Heavens and my well-thumbed copy of Norton’s Star Atlas, I could point my scope toward most anything I might wish to observe and, if the seeing was good, view it with an immediacy and clarity John could only imagine.
The real point of The Light Ages is not to deliver an astronomy lesson, though, but to make an impassioned case that the Middle Ages were far from dark. Why, Falk asks, do we cling to this characterization? Any comparison of medieval science to what we today know as science is fundamentally unfair. Falk notes that “[a] line runs from the Middle Ages to modern science,” but “[i]t is not an unbroken line, of course, and certainly not straight” (292). Rather than belittling medieval science for its missteps and dead ends, we would do well, Falk asserts, to learn a little humility: with the advantage of an additional seven hundred years of hindsight, our descendants—if there are any—will find our missteps and dead ends every bit as wrongheaded and backward as we find some medieval ideas today. More importantly, the stories of medieval science itself and those who practiced it are worthy of study in their own right. I’ll end with Falk’s closing words: “Perhaps, then, through close contemplation of John Westwyk’s lifelong labours, we have honoured his memory in just the way that a medieval monk would have wanted” (298). Let there be light.
Learn more about Seb Falk and his work.