Both were treatises on the use of astronomical instruments by Richard of Wallingford, a former abbot. (He also criticised their penchant for feasting, hunting, reading banned books and divisive preaching.)Īfter Westwyck’s likely stint at university, he returned to St Albans Abbey, where we find him in 1379, copying two manuscripts. A few years before Westwyck’s time at Oxford, a Franciscan friar complained about two monk-students who regularly drank until they were unable to speak or stand. But, there is also much that is familiar. There is much in this book that is strange to the modern reader: the medical treatise which recommends a patient be given an enema with unsalted goat-kidney fat or Falk’s explanation of the intricacies of the astrolabe – a device for, among other things, measuring the height of a celestial body. We relive his early education in the abbey’s school and his probable stint at Oxford. John of Westwyck left few tangible traces of himself – a few manuscripts, some annotations and the occasional reference in a document are all that remain – but Falk imagines the world through his eyes, tracing his early life in the Hertfordshire village of Westwick, which belonged to St Albans Abbey. The Light Ages takes the reader on a journey, following in the footsteps of a 14th-century English monk who was also a pathbreaking astronomer. The Middle Ages were anything but “dark”. This was the period, in Europe, of the first eyeglasses, the first mechanical clocks and the first universities. The early church fathers likened pagan philosophy to the gold and silver that the biblical Israelites took with them on their exodus from slavery – tainted by association, but still precious. Medieval thinkers also sought to build on the learning of earlier ages, despite viewing pre-Christian writers with a whiff of suspicion. This was not an age that abhorred novelty or an age of narrow conformity, but one in which the latest ideas were hotly debated. Falk speaks of the “irresistible medieval drive to tinker, to redesign, to incrementally improve or upgrade technology” and the same was true of scientific thought. Far from being resistant to foreign ideas, medieval thinkers systematically translated works from Greek, Hebrew and Arabic by writers from Iberia to Persia. And the same applies to medieval scientific thinking, which was complex, interconnected and wide-ranging.

But a mushroom is just the visible surface growth of a larger organism. He points out that several accounts of the history of science begin sometime around 1600, as though scientific inquiry just popped out of the ground like a mushroom. In The Light Ages, Seb Falk unpicks many of these popular assumptions.

The Light Ages by Seb Falk