Dan Snow's History Hit - The Light Ages

Episode Date: September 20, 2020

Seb Falk joined me to discuss the science in the Middle Ages, or, according to his new book, 'The Light Ages'. They gave us the first universities, the first eyeglasses and the first mechanical clocks as medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got another medieval podcast on. There seems to be a flurry at the moment. I'm being told off left, right and centre about using the word medieval incorrectly. And let me tell you, after this last week, it's never happened again. This episode, we've got the wonderful Seb Falk on the podcast. He's a man after my own heart. He's written a book called The Light Ages. He's rebranding the Dark Ages, guys. It's now The Light Ages. And actually, he's pretty convincing. This is a great interview. It's very interesting to hear him talk about, particularly his work with astrolabes and astronomy. And he points out that navigation, maths and astronomy were greatly advanced during the period that we tend to think of

as the medieval period, even in the so-called dark ages. And trust me, you'll never use those same words ever again. He's also a sailor. And so we're going to try and get out there and sail across some big bodies of water, some oceans, some seas, seeing if we can use those navigation techniques, whether it's Norse, whether it's Portuguese, whether it's anyone in the medieval period, using their navigational techniques and equipment. If you want to watch programs about the Middle Ages, about the medieval period, well, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's the world's best history channel. There's no aliens on there at all. You just go to historyhit.tv. You enter the code POD1, P-O-D-1, to show you're a podcast listener, a loyal listener to the podcast. And then everybody, the exciting thing is you get

a month for free and your second month is one pound a euro or dollar. So go to historyhit.tv. Have we got some shows for you this autumn? You don't want to believe it, this fall. And use that code POD1. in the meantime here is dr seb fork enjoy seb thank you very much for coming on the podcast thank you for having me now i've just had elena yanager on the podcast shouting me for misusing the term medieval and i know that you're you are someone that feels very strongly about this as well. Tell me why all of us who've been walking around very cleverly talking about the invention of science in the 17th century and beyond, why are we all wrong about that? Well, I'm on a quest to rehabilitate

the word medieval and I want us to think about all of the incredible creativity and ingenuity that existed in the Middle Ages. But basically we're wrong because we judge everything on our own terms. And the first job of the historian, of course, is to try and judge the past as much as possible on its own terms. Of course, we're always reading the past through present tinted glasses, but we've got to try and make the past make sense in the same way as it did to the people who lived through it. And so if we say, oh, people in the Middle Ages, they didn't have the same technology as it did to the people who lived through it and so if we say oh people in the middle ages they didn't have the same technology as we had therefore they must be rubbish they must be stupid well then they don't stand a chance and we don't stand a chance of understanding them properly

where did this come from i keep things myself you know i was too scared to say to elna because i don't want to shout at me but you know the fifth the fifth and sixth century in the in in england weirdly in britain was almost i mean obviously in northern italy it's different in the east but in britain it was really terrible time to be alive, right? It was just a shocking, it was, if I dare say, like a little bit dark, okay? It was like a bit, you know, it's not very nice. Is it just simply that our 19th century forebears were so obsessed with Rome and their kind of hangups of Rome that they just assumed that what came after Rome was somehow a kind of retreat from that pinnacle of greatness? Yeah, I mean, there's a bit of that. And of course,

a lot of it goes right back to the Renaissance, where people in the Renaissance were trying to portray themselves as the heirs to ancient Greece and Rome and as recovering the knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome. And of course, it goes back to the Middle Ages, the medieval idea that the best way to acquire knowledge was to find out and to study what authoritative people had said before. So the best kind of knowledge was the knowledge that had stood the test of time. And the knowledge that stood the test of time was the oldest knowledge and the knowledge that had lasted. So if you could study ancient knowledge, then that was a good way of acquiring science and acquiring wisdom. So all of that idea of revivifying and recovering the

knowledge of the ancient Greeks inspired the Renaissance, and then in order to give some value and in order to show that what they were doing was really valuable, the people in the Renaissance kind of dismissed everything that had come in between. But in any stereotype, of course, there is a grain of truth. And I wouldn't deny that in many ways the lives that people lived in the Middle Ages were of course more difficult and more precarious than our own. And I wouldn't deny that in many ways the lives that people lived in the Middle Ages were, of course, more difficult and more precarious than our own. And ask any historian, even a historian of the Middle Ages who really thinks we should value the Middle Ages, when would you rather be living? And they would say, of course, they'd rather be living in the 21st century. So, you

know, let's not overdo this. But my point is, when we think about the Middle Ages so often we think about them as a dark time But we also think about them as a time when all there was was wars and kings and queens And that's what we study and my job is not so much to say, you know Hold on things in the Middle Ages were brilliant But if you're interested in the Middle Ages You should be interested in every aspect of life in the Middle Ages and life in the Middle Ages Included a hell of a lot of science and It included ingenious astronomical instruments like astrolabes. It included inquiry into the world, study of astronomy, and asking all kinds of questions about the world around them.

So people in the Middle Ages, they may not have known as much about the world as we do today, but they were no less curious, they were no less inquisitive, and they had their own scientific mindset that was absolutely valuable and logical and a scientific method, you know, equally valid in its own way as our own. You and I both love sailing, and you've mentioned astrolabes there and astronomical observations. I know that's something you're an enormous expert on. And it strikes me, yeah, that we look back at the Romans.

I mean, one thing they were pretty rubbish at was ocean passages on their ships. And by the beginning of the early modern, i.e. through the Middle Ages, we get like a revolution in shipbuilding, don't we, with Carvel hulls and hulls that are able to withstand ocean journeys. And then we're not to mention the Portuguese voyages of exploration that begin, I think we can fairly say, in the late medieval. And the Vikings, of course, the greatest European journey of exploration probably of all time is squarely in the middle ages so so it's funny how we are we're not careful enough to remember that yeah absolutely i mean you know we have to kind of put it into a global context and think about the chinese exploring the western pacific and the indian ocean and think about you know polynesians

and central american civilizations as well but from the european perspective all of the foundations for what we call the age of Discovery, for Europeans exploring across the Atlantic and into the Indian Ocean, were laid in the later Middle Ages. So it's mapping and thinking about ways that you can make the world mappable. It's using the magnetic compass, it's understanding of the tides, and as you've said, it's shipbuilding. And of course, all of the other really important stuff, like how do you provision a boat for a long voyage? All of that stuff was kind of worked out in the later Middle Ages, gradually through the 14th and 15th centuries. Your book is very provocatively called The Light Ages, which is great. And you mention in your book some of these beautiful manuscripts, beautiful objects that you've come

across. It's a very tactile book, if that's the right word. Talk to me about some of your favourite things that you feel have opened that door, given you the chink of light from that period. Yeah, I mean, it was a joy to write it because there's so much fun stuff in the Middle Ages. It's not just manuscripts, it's also amazing instruments and inventions. Above all, the astrolabe, which is the kind of medieval smartphone, which you can use to tell the time, you can use to work out the direction of north, or identify a star, or find the time of sunrise, or work out the height of a building, all kinds of things.

And what I realised about the Middle Ages was that medieval people loved their gadgets so in many ways we can really identify with them because they love uh these um lovely brass objects um which i'm waving an astrolabe around at you now which do incredible things and look cool as well so just like our iphone today because sadly this is an audio medium, it looks very like, at the risk of being very lowest common sense, it looks like Lyra's thingy bobs in the Northern Lights,

in the Northern Lights, the Philip Pullman trilogy, you know, when she twists it all around, whatever that thing's called and it tells the future and all that sort of jazz. That's what it looks like. Exactly right.

It's a brass disc and it might be as small as the palm of your hand or it might be as large as an open hardback book. It's a brass model of the heavens and you can use it small as the palm of your hand, or it might be as large as an open hardback book. It's a brass model of the heavens. And you can use it to find the locations of stars. And you can use it to model the world around you.

And it's a kind of tool for understanding. But there's so much ingenuity in the Middle Ages. And there's so much that medieval people were kind of curious about. They are interested in the animals that they find around them. They're interested in plants and herbal remedies and medicine. And above all, astronomy and mathematics. So they work out these incredibly intricate, detailed mathematical tables to calculate the positions of the planets and to work out exactly when the sun is going to be in a certain place. And that's useful for agriculture and it's useful

for astronomy, but it's also useful for astrology because the universal understanding in the Middle Ages was that everything that happened down here on earth was a reflection of what happened up in the heavens just as the sun warms the earth and the moon makes the tides so the stars and the planets also affect what's going down here on earth including your health and the weather and so they were really curious to find out as much as possible about the positions of the planets the positions of the stars and course, in so doing, in understanding the motions of the sun and the moon, they also give themselves the tools to make really astonishingly precise clocks. And the first mechanical clocks come out of the later Middle Ages as well. So Copernicus, with his Copernican Revolution, surprise, surprise,

doesn't just pop out of nowhere. I mean, like Newton, Copernicus is standing on the shoulder of giants, is he? Yeah, absolutely. And of course when newton said that uh standing on the shoulders of giants that is a medieval idea that newton is repurposing so newton knew how well embedded he was in medieval foundations although there's a little bit of false modesty there with newton i think but absolutely copernicus depended first of all on the kind of early summaries that were made of late medieval achievements by people like reggio montanus and poyerbach german astronomers of the 15th century and going back earlier copernicus depended on the observations and analyses of late medieval astronomers a whole

army of them who just observed and wrote down and calculated and he's also dependent on the achievements of is astronomers, astronomers from as far west as Spain, as far east as Central Asia, who are working out really refined geometrical methods of making the planets move in the right way to accurately model their observed motions. And so that's one of the things I wanted to do in my book, was to show that when we tell the history of science as a parade of great men, a few isolated geniuses that were, quote, ahead of their time, we're just completely misrepresenting it. In fact, there was just this army, this battalion of unknown, often completely anonymous scholars,

who were making observations, who were coming up with ideas, who were improving instruments, who were tinkering and tweaking and inventing, and all of them worked together to lay the foundations for visionaries like Copernicus, like Newton. And one of those is the guy in my book, John Westwick, who's this kind of anonymous monk that I just picked out as being representative. He had this fantastic, amazing life where he went on crusade. He got dysentery, probably. He ended up in this clifftop monastery.

You know, he did much more than you would expect a monk to do. But in many ways, I could have picked thousands of others who made their own tiny incremental contributions to the development of our knowledge and who represent this medieval interest, this medieval interest in nature, this medieval ingenuity. You know, I've never really thought about this before,

but as you're, you know, when I was reading a book and as you're talking now, I'm thinking about astronomy. I often thought it was weird why they're all obsessed with astronomy, given that modern scientists look through microscopes and look at computers. But in a way, astronomy was

the one thing that lent itself to science because it was predictable and mathematical. And in a kind of chaotic world where you couldn't look at the behaviour of atoms and you couldn't look inside the structure of the cell, what you could do is look up in the sky and find regularity. It must have been very inspiring for people of a scientific bent. That's precisely right, yeah. The basic principle, going back to Plato and Aristotle, is that everything in the heavens moves in endless perfect circles, so you can predict it. But of course, as they observe it more and more closely, they realise that those perfect circles don't quite predict what the planets do, because they move in funny ways, and particularly the planets, which get their name, planet, from the Greek word for wander for wanderer because they're wandering stars as opposed to the fixed stars that always

stay in the same position relative to each other so they observe those planets and they see them go backwards and they think well that's a bit weird how can we account for that so there's a real kind of creativity there's a real drive to coming up with better models coming up with better ways of explaining the motions of the planet so So it's something, as you say, that they can measure, that they can predict, that they can make models for. But of course, there's also that element of understanding creation as a whole. And that goes back to before Christianity, but it's something that's taken up enthusiastically by Christians as being a way of getting into the mind of God. If you can understand creation, you can understand God. So, you know, this myth, of course, that the church was anti-science is complete rubbish.

The church supported science because science was going to be a way to find out more about God. The book of nature was as valid as the book of scripture. And that's a metaphor that was used in the Middle Ages. It just makes me think more and more about the kind of traditional interpretation I got of the Renaissance when I was growing up. And what I find fascinating about being a generalist and just jumping around like a little robin red breast from period to period is i keep finding when i meet other specialists in other centuries they've got their own renaissance i'm like what do you mean there's a 12th century renaissance and then and then you've got the renaissance and then you've got the scientific revolution and then you've got the enlightenment then you've got the dust revolution and then you've

got the tech revolution the 20 guys it strikes me we're all on just one giant you know we discover bronze right and then our species just goes mental for about 5 000 years and we're still in it like maybe there is just one huge renaissance slash enlightenment that's going on and we've been a bit too weird about trying to diss certain very short periods of that millennial journey um and and sort of pick whereas in fact there are generations of our forebears have all been having these extraordinary explosions of intellectual and scientific creativity. Yeah, I mean, in my period, the big kind of buzzword is the 12th century renaissance, which is a kind of concept that was popularised 100 years ago by Charles Haskins, who wrote this book, The 12th Century Renaissance. And he argued that with the foundation of the universities, the rediscovery of ancient texts, the development of lots of new religious movements,

and indeed even artistic and literary movements, this should itself be seen as a kind of a Renaissance. But in a way, if you're kind of just saying, oh, well, the people who talked about the original Renaissance, the Renaissance of the sort of 15th, 16th centuries, were wrong, my Renaissance is better. Then along come the, you know, the Carolingians, and they say, well, what about the Carolingian Renaissance? So you're just going to push it back and back. They're a tough crowd, those Carolingian Renaissance folk. I mean, Jesus. Yeah, I mean, if you're going to just keep saying, well, the roots of this period are in that other period,

well, ultimately, you know, that's always going to be the way. But it's the classic historical question, right? What changes and what stays the same? And when we're looking for important changes, we always end up finding the roots of those changes in earlier periods. And that's just kind of what you're going to find in human history. So I think the problem is if you try and hold up a single period as being uniquely revolutionary or uniquely important, of course, human history goes in waves. I think the problem

is if we think of progress as being a constant linear improvement, that everything is constantly improving and we have to sort of try and find the moments when it improved fastest, that's when we're going to misunderstand how things work. Because a people have not always asked the same questions, so progress goes in different directions, and b of course sometimes it goes backwards, sometimes we make mistakes, and those mistakes are an important part of history. They're no less interesting than when we get it right, and my quest really is to convince people that the middle ages is far more interesting than just endless wars and marriage alliances. You know, people are inventing stuff, people are asking interesting questions, they're writing fascinating texts, and they're just having a lovely time looking at the world

around them and exploring it. Why is the traction that word medieval? I mean, do we think they're like catastrophic pandemic disease? I mean, that is something in the 14th century that's very striking about Eurasian history. But is there something there around perhaps our struggle against microbial disease? Yeah, maybe. I mean, it's impossible to explain. I think it's just one of those words that has this meaning now, that medieval means a bit rubbish, means a bit backward, and that's just a meaning of the word. And so since this period was called medieval, people assume that the period must conform to what the word says.

So it's almost being read backwards now. It's a little bit like the Black Death. You know, a lot of historians don't like to talk about the Black Death because it misrepresents A, the disease, and it also seems to define the disease down to a very narrow period of time in Europe, when actually we now know it has a much longer history and a global history. But historians will still call it the Black Death because it's just an easy term that people recognise and they can understand. So, you know, a lot of historians say, well, maybe we should ditch medieval because it's got

this negative connotation. My view is to try and reclaim it as much as possible and make people think of the amazing cathedrals and the scientific ideas and the literature and so on. But in a way, it's always going to be a bit like that because medieval now has this meaning of being a bit backward. You know, when people talk about ISIS or FGM or, you know, other things that they don't like, they describe it as medieval and they don't even really, they're not even really making a historical judgment. It just means bad. The trouble is that we call that period medieval too. So we just kind of have to disambiguate it. It's like when you go to Chicago and you have a deep dish pizza. Now that's nothing like actual pizza, but they call it pizza. Italians call it pizza. It's just the same word used for two totally different things, and everybody should make peace with it. I mean,

that's a brilliant parallel. You mentioned cathedrals there, and actually, let's just quickly talk about this, because, yeah, you know, that doesn't fit in any way the negative ideas about the medieval world, because the kind of the Gothic cathedral explosion in medieval Europe, I mean, look at Lincoln. Arguably, it overt arguably overtakes the great pyramid of giza as the tallest building on planet earth lincoln cathedral so you're sitting there thinking something's going on something is going on in this period and it's pretty wild yeah and and there's huge there's there's other really important developments in technology and agriculture plowing and crop rotation and milling and engineering like camshafts and the development of spectacles and the development of as i said already of precise mechanical clocks paper milling the universities you know huge

important developments but i think there is a different way of thinking a way of thinking in which everything is kind of holistically governed by these rules, by the power of God and by the kind of rules in which the universe is a sort of understandable whole, which does get changed slightly in the scientific revolution. And so it is kind of possible to mark it out as being a slightly different mindset. But that doesn't mean that it's a mindset that lacks ingenuity or that lacks interest or that lacks inspiration. So we just have to kind of put it, try and understand it on its own terms as much as possible and try and think, well, you know,

when we are thinking about the Hundred Years' War or the Black Death, you know, in the mid-14th century, we're also thinking that this is a time when people are making astonishingly beautiful brass astrolapes, that this is a time when people are constructing gorgeous and enormous Gothic cathedrals that are not only beautiful, but also marvels of engineering. So we kind of have to try and understand it all together which is a hard thing to do but i think if people

look at it in those terms then they can see that this is as rich and as interesting a period as any other in human history and we haven't even talked about the glory that is chepstow castle there we go um so thank you so much so what is your book called it is the light ages a medieval journey of discovery and it's out on 24th of September and available in all good bookshops. And I really hope people will read it and enjoy getting to learn about the discoveries and the science of the Middle Ages through the eyes of medieval people and through the eyes particularly of John of Westwick, this adventurous medieval monk who's the star of the book. And there is a, I wouldn't say starring role, but there is a guest

appearance by Dee Snow in the introduction. When used the term medieval in to make a little joke about steve bannon who was saying i'm gonna go medieval on someone and i made a little gag and you typical historian quoted me in context and took me to school for my stupidity so thank you very much for doing that buddy well thank you for giving me the opportunity and for your inspiring and uh provocative presence on twitter okay brilliant well thank you for coming on thank you for having me hi everyone it's me Dan Snow just a quick request it's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this but now I'm doing it I hate myself please please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps basically boost up the chart, which is good. And then more

people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favor. Thanks.