“I want people to see for themselves how creative and ingenious medieval science was”
The medieval era is often dismissed as a ‘dark age’ before the glories of the Renaissance. But, as Seb Falk explains in his new history of medieval science, this was in fact an age of wonder. He speaks to Rob Attar
Medieval science is frequently disparaged nowadays. Why do you think that is, and do you feel that it’s unfair?
This has a long history. The disparagement of the medieval goes all the way back to the Renaissance, when scholars were trying to recover the learning of ancient Greece and Rome. They saw everything that had come between those times and their own day as being, essentially, irrelevant. And that picture has continued right up to the present day.
The Middle Ages has always been viewed as this mediocre bit in the middle, and it’s true that some of the things that people thought in the Middle Ages were wrong – but that doesn’t make them less interesting. In my book, I wanted to show how the ideas of the Middle Ages weren’t as infertile, stagnant and dark as is often portrayed. This period contributed a huge amount to the development of modern science, including the recovery and the study of ancient texts, the involvement of Islamic texts in western European scholarship and the foundation of the universities and other institutions.
Did such a thing as ‘science’ exist in the Middle Ages and what would it have been called then?
There was nothing like our modern science, which is a distinct discipline, practised by professionals in purpose-designed spaces such as laboratories and observatories, and which follows well-defined rules. and in the Middle Ages this was any field of knowledge – including things like theology – that was a discipline of serious study.
