The discovery of complex mathematical tables and intricately designed scientific instruments led a modern scholar to discard the myth that the Middle Ages were dominated by superstition and irrationality
I don’t get to see my uncle very often. He’s the very model of an elderly gentleman: always smartly turned out in a three-piece suit, sharp-eyed, curious. A few years ago he invited me to a concert in London and, over interval drinks, asked me what I was up to these days. When I told him I’d left schoolteaching to do a PhD on medieval science, he was taken aback.
“Medieval science? But didn’t everyone in those days think the world was flat?”
No, I explained: that was a myth put about in the nineteenth century. Ancient and medieval astronomers had proved the Earth’s sphericity, using geometry, I told him. Not only that: they’d calculated its size, too.
He was doubtful. Firmly held “facts” aren’t easy to let go, and the myth of medieval backwardness was something that my uncle had “known” with certainty for decades. I had barely begun enthusing about the enormous influence of John of Sacrobosco’s thirteenth-century textbook On the Sphere when the gong rang for us to return to our seats. But that evening, I realised I had a great opportunity – as well as a mountain to climb.
