Gone Medieval - Medieval Science

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

The word 'medieval' is often used to describe backward ideas and opinions, but why is this the case? The middle ages was a time of life-changing advancements in the world of science. Cat is joined by Seb Falk, a historian, broadcaster, and lecturer at the University of Cambridge, as they debunk misconceptions about medieval science and the church.Seb Falk is the author of The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey, published by Penguin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to gone medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. In the media, we seem to be constantly told that when something is backwards and unscientific and not up to our 21st century standards, that is medieval. Many think of science as something invented very recently. But is that actually true? As you're listening to this podcast, you probably have an interest in the Middle Ages and you probably know that that's not quite the case. In fact, knowledge of so

many scientific subjects like maths and astronomy are really quite advanced even by our modern standards. Now today's guest has written a book exactly about this, that I can guarantee we'll open your eyes in so many different ways when you read it. So very warm welcome today to Dr. Seb Fork. Now, Seb is a historian of medieval science and medicine and fellow at Gertin College at the University of Cambridge. So welcome to God Medieval, Seb. Thank you very much for inviting me. Now, Seb was also one of the BBC New Generation Thinkers in 2016.

Now, Seb's book that we're going to be talking about today is called The Light Ages, A Medieval Journey of Discovery, which, by the way, when I first bought it, that was completely based on the cover, which is totally beautiful. But I'm happy to say it's very good on the inside as well. And it's now out in paperback, I believe. Yes, that's right.

out in paperback in the UK now and out in the USA in November. Fantastic. So you really get to the core of this idea, as the title very cleverly suggests, this sort of against the idea of the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages. And this concept of the medieval as something very sort of backwards and unscientific goes back some way really and hand in hand with the idea of the Dark Ages. But where does that actually begin? Is it actually recent or?

Well, the idea of what we think of as the Middle Ages, i.e. about 500 to 1,500 AD in Europe, being this backward, unremarkable, uninteresting period really goes right back to the Renaissance. And it goes back to thinkers of the Renaissance, promoting themselves as the heirs and successors to the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome. And so because they were a Renaissance,

they were a rebirth and they promoted themselves in those terms, everything between the decline of the classical world and their own rebirth of that classical world was a bit in the middle. So by being medieval, it's disparaged as being just that bit in the middle. And then along with that comes this idea of it being a dark age. And that is a bit more complicated because it's really given life by Protestant thinkers. in Northern Europe, who were trying to promote the Protestant world or the world that was not Catholic as being somehow more advanced. And everywhere where the Catholic Church ruled,

and every time when the Catholic Church ruled, as being backward and uninterested in modernity. And a certain backward approach to science went along with that. Now, I think maybe, because you mentioned this a little bit in your introduction, this idea of science, in a medieval context, in a medieval world. What do we mean by science? What was science to them? I mean, that's a great question. The word science comes from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge, and in the Middle Ages, Schientia meant any systematic branch of knowledge. So that could include theology, but it also included mathematics, astronomy, music, lots of distinct and systematically studied branches of knowledge. Now, there wasn't science in the way we think of it

as a professional discipline done by scientists in organized spaces like laboratories. But there very much was people asking questions about nature, people looking up at the stars and wondering what they were made of, people measuring the motions of the planets and the moon and the sun and predicting eclipses, and there were people studying science in the universities, which were founded in the Middle Ages, and there were technological development as well. And really, you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book was because everybody in this country's studies

medieval history and everybody studies about kings and the black death and we learn about politics and we learn about things being awful in the middle ages and it's easy to have the impression that nobody in the middle ages asked any questions nobody ever wondered anything about how the world works and that just couldn't be further from the truth as in any period people asked really interesting questions and came up with really creative answers and that's what i really wanted to tell people about in this book what are the things i really like about you but was that you're bringing out a lot of these individuals and all of those unique people's sort of experiences of this and get onto that a bit more in a moment about one particular person. But you open the book with, I think it's a really

nice description of this brilliant discovery of a manuscript that was found in Cambridge in the 1950s by a man called Derek Price. Can you tell us that story about what was found? Yeah, so Derek Price was not really a sort of typical Cambridge person. He was originally a physicist. He came from a kind of lower middle class Jewish background in East London and he'd been teaching out in Singapore, and he had this massive change of career and decided he wanted to become a historian of science. And so he came back from Singapore to Cambridge and decided he was going to just study scientific instruments. So he went through all of the college libraries and all of the university library in Cambridge looking at any manuscript dealing with scientific instruments.

And he came upon one in the library of Peterhouse, which is Cambridge's oldest college, and the description in the manuscript catalogue, which had been made about 60 years earlier, was instructions for making a scientific instrument, question mark, or making an astrolabe, question mark. And he opened it and instantly realized that this was not an astrolabe. It was some other kind of device. Turns out it was a device for computing the locations of the planets. And it was written in Middle English, and it was dated 1392.

And those two facts, the fact that it was written in Middle English and dated 1392, as well as the astronomical content of this manuscript, gave Price the idea that it might have something to do with Geoffrey Chaucer, the great English poet, because Chaucer not only had written in Middle English and had been working around that time, but also had written an instruction manual for an astrolabe, the quintessential medieval scientific instrument,

apparently for his 10-year-old son, Lewis, but really it's a kind of literary conceit. He says he's writing it for his 10-year-old son, but really it's kind of astrolabes for dummies, So it's anybody who has the intellectual ability of my 10-year-old son can read and understand this book and read and understand an astrolabe. And because it's in Middle English, not in Latin, it is particularly accessible. So Chaucer had written this thing. Price found the manuscript that sort of matched in some ways Chaucer's treatise on the astrolabe,

and he jumped to the conclusion that it must be by Chaucer. And he even found the word Chaucer buried in the margin of one of the pages of their manuscript. And so for a long time, people argue back and forth about whether this manuscript was really by Chaucer. And then to cut a very long story short, just a few years ago, Norwegian scholar by the name of Karyana Rand, discovered the exact same handwriting of this manuscript. And the manuscript is a draft, apparently in the hand of its author or translator. So it's not a copy. It's in the handwriting of the person who was in some way drafting it.

And she discovered a match for that handwriting, and the handwriting belonged to a monk named John of Westwick. So John of Westwick is kind of at the heart of my story, although, as you say, I bring in lots of other really interesting characters as well, because there are so many of them in medieval science. And that whole story, I just thought it was amazing, as a piece of detective work as well. But back when it was first discovered in the 50s, it did meet quite a lot of excitement, didn't it, because it was reported in the papers. Why were people excited about it at the time in the 50s? Well, it's a great question. I mean, I think, again, people had this idea that there wasn't really science in the Middle Ages. And the 1950s also is the time when two cultures first comes to prominence as an idea.

C.P. Snow's famous lectures and then essay on the two cultures, the idea that there's a kind of culture of arts and humanities and a culture of sciences. And I think the idea that Chaucer, the father of English literature, as he's often called, wrote this scientific treatise, really got people excited and interested. And of course, that to a historian is not really. a great reason to be excited because we know that science and literature went hand in hand in the Middle Ages. The discovery of this manuscript doesn't change that. I mean, looking even at the most artistic manuscripts you can imagine, the beautiful books of hours that you find, illustrated in any kind of exhibition about the Middle Ages,

we'll have a book of hours with these lovely illuminations and this beautiful decorated calendar. Well, those calendars have encoded within them a huge amount of astronomical information, sometimes very pioneering or groundbreaking astronomical information about the relationship between the cycles of the sun and moon, which have to be studied really in great depth, because astronomically they're incommensurable, they don't match up. So if you really want to know exactly when the full moon or the new moon is going to be, which as a Christian you need to know in order to know the date of Easter,

then you need to be on top of your astronomical cycles. So science was bound up with religious practice, but it was also bound up with a kind of artistic production of these beautiful manuscripts, and it was everywhere in literature. So Chaucer's, even Chaucer's most famous works like the Canterbury Tales, are full of astronomical data, which he put in there, perhaps for his own satisfaction, or perhaps to keep his readers interested.

But the science underlying those is really quite precise. So I think in the 1950s people were a bit surprised, although actually that shouldn't have made the headlines because, Chaucer was known to have had astronomical interests. But I suppose also the discovery of a new manuscript, possibly in the hand of this very famous person, was something that was interesting to people as well, because it's not every day.

Imagine if you found a new work by Shakespeare or something now, it would be global headlines, even in non-English-speaking countries. The discovery of any new manuscript is going to make headline news, but particularly if it's associated with someone famous, and of course Chaucer is extremely well known. And I think that's kind of one of the things that I wanted to address in my book is this idea that we so often tell histories, particularly histories of things like science,

through these parades of great men. And that's something I really wanted to challenge, that we can do it through unknown characters. So let's get into your story, really, then. And I'm very fascinated by this person that this monk called John Westwick. Who was he? And how much do we know about him? John Westwick was a monk who lived from about 13.

16, maybe late 1350s, until about 1,400, we don't know exactly. And he was born near the city of St. Orban's, which is about a day's walk north of London. And St. Orban's was one of the richest and most well-connected monasteries in England at that time. And John Westwick became a monk of St. Orban's. He was probably from a fairly middle-of-the-road background, not a wealthy background. He never rose to any kind of prominence in the monastery, but neither would he have been from a particular poor background if he was able to attend the monastery at all. And we know that he was in the monastery by 1380, but we don't know exactly when he took his vows. And we know that at a certain point, he left St. Orban's, probably in 1380 itself, and went up to the Priory of Tynemouth, overlooking the

North Sea on the cliffs down the river from Newcastle, and spent some time there. He went on Crusade to the failed Bishop's Crusade of 1383 to Flanders, where the army led by the Bishop of Norwich attacked the friendly city of Ip and had to retreat because the whole army got dysentery. So that was a catastrophic failure. And at a certain point, he turned up in London where we find him designing an astronomical instrument. So in some ways, he's atypical, because he moved around a lot. We think he was probably exiled to Tynemouth. That was a typical thing that Abbots did of St. Orban's to get rid of troublesome monks. They sent them away to other houses

that are part of the same family, daughter houses, dependent houses of the main monastery. Also, monks that were seen as up and coming, sometimes got sent to those places to prove themselves. But around the time, 1380, there was a lot of unrest leading up to what became the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and St. Albans was a real flashpoint of that. So it's quite possible that John Westwick was one of those monks

who was getting too close to the townspeople. That's usually something that led to most. monks being distanced from the monastery. As I say, he left Tynemouth pretty quickly after only a couple of years to go on this failed crusade, and then we find him in London. So as I say, in some ways, he's quite atypical, moving around a lot. But in other ways, he does what we expect of a monk. He studies, he reads, he learns, he may well have studied at the University of Oxford. We don't have any concrete evidence for that, but St. Orban's did send quite a lot of their most scholarly monks to study in Oxford, if only for a term or a year,

and he was certainly a scholarly character. He made copies of scientific texts by a former abbot of St. Orban's, Richard of Wallingford, and he wrote about instruments that were available at St. Albans. Most notably, he didn't write about this directly, but the most notable instrument that was at St. Albans was this phenomenal astronomical clock which had been invented by Richard of Wallingford in the 1330s.

And so John of Westwick, a generation later, in the 1370s, would have been able to see it and marvel at it and learn from it. And then, as I say, he invented, or perhaps translated, this astronomical instrument device for computing the positions of the planets, and he was doing that in about 1392. And then the last we hear of him is a papal indulgence, a sort of permission for him to consult whichever confessor he wants, which is dated 1397.

And those were often given to people nearing the end of their life. So it's possible that he died soon after that. We don't have any concrete evidence. So we have a sort of smattering of a paper trail for him, but I did have to join the dots a little bit, which I did, of course, by knowing and writing about what monks would typically do and the ways that a monk would typically live. But I think it was very important for me to tell the story of medieval science

through a relatively unknown character, because A, the history of science is so often told as this parade of great men, And even today, or especially today, that's not how science is done, was done. Science has always been a collaborative activity, and indeed the processes of collaboration, communication are often the most generative parts of scientific activity. And particularly for the Middle Ages, so many treatises, so many pieces of writing from the Middle Ages are anonymous. And so it was true to the spirit of the Middle Ages, I think, to focus on somebody who was

anonymous. Let's not forget this Equatorium manuscript, the manuscript at the heart of my book, discovered by Derek Price, was anonymous. He didn't write his name anywhere in it, and that is very typical of the Middle Ages. So you, very cleverly in the book, use this as sort of hopping up points for talking about so many different topics and so many different inventions, and you've mentioned some of them already, and I want to sort of go back in and dig into some of those. And I quite like this idea that you talk about right early on. So you already said in one of my first questions that this idea of astronomy being very important for the church and having to know about astronomy for reasons of telling time. But you also mentioned in the book farming, the

importance of farming, because I think we tend to quite often today think of astronomy as something a bit more sort of learned and important if you want to be very scientific about the world. But actually, that's sort of very literally down to earth aspect of it. And you sort of mentioned that perhaps John came from a farming background or peasant background. And the important of understanding what you call folk astronomy. Can you explain what is meant to that? Yeah, this is a period before the telescope. So everything that people know about astronomy, everything people know about the skies and the heavens and the motions of the heavens, they're getting with the naked eye. And I think we who, many of us live in cities, we suffer from light pollution,

we have busy lives, we don't spend a lot of time out of doors, have forgotten how to look at the heavens, have forgotten how to look at the stars. But if you were a farmer, particularly a pastoral farmer, you were looking after animals. you would spend a huge amount of time outside, often at night, and you would observe the changing seasons. Now, of course, we all know that the summer days are longer and the summer nights are shorter, and we probably are familiar with one or two stars,

but it's hardly surprising that people in the Middle Ages would have been familiar with hundreds of stars and would have noticed a lot of seasonal changes, including the changing lengths of shadows, which you could use to tell the time of day, the changes in where the sun rose up above the horizon, which might tell you the date. The word solstice, a word with which we're all familiar, comes from the Latin solstitium, meaning sun standing still.

And the reason for that is because through the year, the rising sun, the place where the sun rises above the horizon, moves from slightly north of east to slightly south of east. So in the summer, the sun rises a bit to the north of east. in the winter, the sun rises a bit to the south of east. And then when it gets to the solstice, it stops and it rises for a week or two in about the same place, and then it turns back and moves along the horizon again. And anybody who had a reasonable view of their horizon and was up at sunrise, or indeed sunset, of course, could observe those seasonal changes.

Now, of course, those seasonal changes have been observed for thousands of years. Those are exactly the same things that allow Stonehenge to be positioned correctly so that it's aligned with the midsummer sunrise or the midwinter sunset. So this is not new in the Middle Ages. But I really wanted to show people that actually you can learn a huge amount by opening your eyes and by observing the world around you. And those two things that people had in the Middle Ages, they had clear skies and time to observe

and to really see the slow, gradual changes in the world around them. They allow them to learn a huge amount. And so even if the Middle Ages was without the Hadron Colliders and the enormous observatories that are a classic feature of today's big science, that doesn't mean that science didn't take place at all. Hi, I'm Professor Sizan Elipscomb, and in my podcast, not just the Tudors, we talk about everything from sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, where. ever you get your podcasts. So we're really, I mean, you've talked about him being a monk, and you talked about

the universities, which I think we could get back to a little bit later on, but people who wanted to learn more? Who was this type of learning accessible to? You said that John didn't come from a very sort of wealthy background, probably, but who was this sort of world open to? Yeah, the kinds of folk astronomy that I've talked about, of course, are accessible to anybody. and it doesn't take a huge amount of expertise to notice, for example, the changing lengths of shadows, which you could use to tell the time of day. But in practice, to learn about science in a literary way, to read about science, was the preserve of the educated, and the educated tended to be the wealthy,

because, of course, there was no mass system of literacy, although literacy was more widespread, I think, than people often imagine. So the church, the Christian church in Europe was the main sponsor of literacy, was the main sponsor of learning. And certainly in the kind of early middle part of the Middle Ages, the curriculum was structured according to Roman systems, which laid down seven liberal arts, the three arts of the word, grammar, logic and rhetoric, and then the four arts of number, namely astronomy, geometry, geometry, geometry. arithmetic and music. And so that was a kind of very traditional curriculum and it was followed in the monasteries, in the monastic schools and all monks in theory should have had some kind of grounding in those liberal arts, although of course in practice they may not have been strictly necessary for their kind of day-to-day monastic existence, but learning of course was valued in some sense for

its own sake. And then after the foundation of the universities in the 12th century and through the 13th century, a lot of learning kind of transfers to the universities. And what we see in the 12th century is a picture of increasing production of texts, because for the first time, texts from ancient Greece, above all, which had been translated through a number of languages, but particularly into Arabic, in the great translation, the great Abbasid translation movement of the 8th and 9th centuries in Baghdad, and of course added to by Muslim scholars as well. And Muslim scholars had made their own advances and achievements. All of this storehouse of knowledge was found in Spain by scholars who travelled to Spain in order to be able to study Arabic and translate these texts and treatises and bring

them back to their monasteries, bring them back to their universities. And there was this great flow of knowledge in the 12th and 13th centuries across Europe. And along with the foundation of the universities, scholars were travelling freely. Of course, they all had a common language. They were all speaking Latin, so they were able to converse with each other, they were able to study together, they, along with the foundation of the mendicant orders, the friars, the Dominicans and Franciscans, who had houses in lots of different cities where people could travel easily, study together. This was really a very fertile environment for the spread of old knowledge and the production of new knowledge.

That was quite interesting. You had a little section in the book about the sort of life at the universities and things like books. just mentioned just now all these books coming in. But how accessible were individual books, really, to the student monk? Could they get them? Did they need to get their own books? How did that all work? Books were incredibly precious. Of course, we have to remember this is before printing. So every book was handwritten. Manuscript, of course, means handwritten. And so if you wanted to own a book, you often had to copy it out yourself. In many universities, particularly in Paris, there was some kind of system where you could borrow either a whole book or even chunks of a book

and copy them out and then bring them back. And of course, monasteries had been doing that in some way for years. Quite often if a traveller brought them a manuscript, they would make a copy of it and then let the traveller go back with his original manuscript. But the bread and butter of scholastic work was copying manuscripts. And indeed, in some senses it was kind of part of the studying process was to copy out the manuscript and you might add your own comments in the margin as you went along, but copying was a really key scholarly activity. Books, as I say, very expensive. Quite often when monks went from monasteries to universities, as particularly, well, from the late 13th century and into the 14th century, monks started to attend university. They would take books

from the monastic library with them to use at the university and then, of course, they were expected to bring them back to the monasteries because they were, you know, the property of the monasteries, not the individual property of the monks themselves, who, of course, have renounced personal property. But books being exceedingly valuable, they were often pawned. They were often used as collateral for loans. And so quite often you get monks going to university, spending too much time on the pleasures of university life, drinking, hunting, gambling, and running out of money and pawning their books in order to have more cash for the student lifestyle. And then there's a whole chain of frantic letters going back and forth to and from the monastery saying, what have you been doing with all our money? Why have you got rid of our

books? So it gets students into a lot of trouble at times. And of course, the monks aren't supposed to be doing any of that. The reason that the monks were quite late to getting involved in the universities was precisely because the universities were seen as potentially corrupting for these young monks who were supposed to be secluded in their monasteries. But despite their best effort, setting up special colleges just for the monks that were slightly outside of the town centre and posting priors to make sure that the students kept in line, of course there were always some who misbehaved. It's kind of reassuring in a way to know that student behaviour has not really changed. Student life hasn't changed very much. In fact, of course, my own university, Cambridge,

was founded after Oxford University was closed down because of a riot. I think it was an Oxford student who had committed murder and the townspeople came after him, couldn't find him, and because they couldn't find him, they lynched his housemates instead. And then the entire university of Oxford students and masters went on strike for four years. So student strikes don't last as long as that these days. But yeah, four-year strike. And during that time, several of them came across the country to Cambridge

and set up a university. here instead. And so Cambridge was founded indirectly because of student misbehaviour. That's an amazing story, isn't it? Fantastic. But let's get back to some of these inventions that you talk about quite a lot. You already mentioned this clock in St. Olvens that I wanted to ask you about. You've got some brilliant illustrations and diagrams of it. Tell me what was so special about the St. Albans' clock? So the mechanical clock was an invention of the Middle Ages. Of course, there were earlier forms of time telling, of course, sundials and so on, and there were water clocks, which used the flow of water from a container, often with a float, and the float might be attached to a little hammer,

which could ring a bell, so alarm clocks were a very early invention, and of course the float could also be attached to a pointer, which could point at a dial. So water clocks were widespread, not only in medieval Europe, but all the way to China, and it was, in fact, in China as well as in the Middle East, where they were most advanced. And there was really quite a lot of clockwork that was involved. Often it was automata, little kind of clockwork robots and things that were powered by these water clocks. But what we understand a clock, a mechanical device that beats out a constant flow of time when constant intervals using weights or a pendulum or something like that, that was the invention of the Middle Ages and it requires an escapement to regulate the flow of time.

And that was indeed invented in the Middle Ages. and clocks become really widespread across Europe very quickly from about 1270 until the end of the 13th century and then into the 14th century. And what we find with Richard of Wollingford is the world's first complex advanced astronomical mechanical clock. So it didn't just tell the time. It told the time in three different ways. It told the meantime, which is what we use today. It told the unequal hours, which were the hours where there was all. always 12 hours from sunrise to sunset and always 12 hours from sunset to the following sunrise, no matter what the time of year and how long the daylight was.

And those were extremely useful for people who lived their lives according to the seasons, whether be it in the fields or in the church, because of course candles were expensive. And it also told the true time, which is something even today most clocks don't show, which took account of the fact that the days actually vary slightly in length. There's not always 24 hours from one sunrise to the following sunrise, because, as we understand it today, of the tilt of the Earth's axis and the Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun. And that was understood in the Middle Ages, albeit in slightly different terms. So Richard of Wallingford's clock was able to show that as well. And it was incredibly advanced and incredibly expensive. There's a great story that Richard of Wallingford became Abbott of St. Orban's in a bit of a surprise election. The monks had to elect an Abbott, and he was very much. the underdog. Some monks whispered that he had shown up just in time for the abbot to die from Oxford, because he was a student in Oxford, just when the abbot died, and that he had predicted the abbot's death using his astrological knowledge. And there's some sense that he might have

bribed the monks, not secretly, but more of a kind of manifesto pledge, if you like, that he would produce this wonderful clock for them as one incentive to elect him as abbot, although, of course, one wasn't supposed to openly want to be elected as abbot. One was supposed to want to be modest about it and imagine that one wasn't really qualified for the role. But in any case, Richard of Wallingford became Abbott, and very soon after he became Abbott, King Edward III, himself only on the throne for a short time in 1327 or 1328,

came to visit the Abbey and ticked off Richard, told off Richard, because the Abbey church was in bad condition, that a bit of the church had actually fallen down in 1323. And he said to Richard, why are you spending all your time and money working on this complex clock when the church walls are crumbling? And Richard said, according to the chronicler, anybody can fix these walls, but only I can make this clock. So it was clearly, you know, an expensive and really complex process.

It involved not just him. It involved expert clockmakers who were really well paid, including extra fur coats and free meals, came down from Norwich specially to work on this, so these were clearly experts working on it. But I think the significance of the clock is more than just about timekeeping, because, of course, you don't need to know about all of these other things that the clock showed you.

It showed the tides. It showed the phases of the moon. It showed eclipses, and it may even have shown the motions of the planets, although that's not certain. What this really is, it's a kind of a model of the year, universe, right? And if it's a model of the universe, it's teaching us about how the universe worked. And why do Christians want to know how the universe worked? Because the universe is the best

evidence that we have, if you think about it from a Christian perspective of wanting to understand the mind of God. The universe is the best evidence we have of God's intentions in creation. So if you want to understand, why are we here? Why did God create the earth? Why didn't God just, you know, sit on his own and having a lovely time without bothering about creating the earth? Well, have a look around us, understand creation. And Christians were quite explicit about that in the Middle Ages, that the way to understand God was through two books, the book of scripture, of course, and the book of nature.

So this idea that there's some kind of conflict between religion and science, or that the church deliberately stifled scientific inquiry really couldn't be further from the truth. They encouraged it and they sponsored it. That's such a good point, because I think that is one of the big misconceptions, isn't it, that people have, that the church would not support it, actually, if, as you say, that's kind of demonstrating God's abilities, then that gives it quite a different perspective. Yeah, and all the universities that were founded in the Middle Ages were set up by the church.

So they set up these institutions where science was done. I mean, if they really were trying to stifle science, they did a pretty awful job of it. Yeah, yeah, not the best approach. So just finally, I think we want to get back to John, your hero, in the story, and this particular document that he left, this description. and I think you described it as some instructions for a unique computer that he had constructed. What was that exactly? So it's a computer in the sense that what a computer does in pure terms is it takes knowledge input, it processes it and it outputs new knowledge. And that's what this device does.

You put in raw data about the motions of the planets. So tables were extremely commonplace in the Middle Ages. Astronomical tables and those tables often show. you the day-by-day motion of the planets, but because, of course, the planets move in very complex ways, you know, really quite complicated models because they have to take into account not only the Earth's motion around the sun, but also the planets' motion around the sun. So there's at least a kind of two-part elliptical motion there. But according to ancient planetary theories, which medieval Europeans inherited from Ptolemy, the ancient Greek astronomer

who lived in the second century AD, and they refined those theories and they, updated the parameters, but they didn't really make any changes to the basic assumptions. Those tables showed you kind of day-by-day linear components of the theories, and you could put the data from those tables into the instrument, turn a dial or two and pull a few strings across graduated rim, a circular rim, and it would give you the position of the planet among the stars in the zodiac. And so really, what is that for? above all, that's for astrology.

Astrology, which we might think of today as a bit of fun and a bit silly and certainly not scientific, was treated very seriously as a product of and a relation of astronomy in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the two words are basically interchangeable astronomy and astrology, although conceptually they were thought of as being different. Astrology was a kind of secondary product of astronomy. And so, as I say, we think the idea that the planets influence the Earth is a bit nonsensical. But it makes a whole lot of sense, if you think about it in medieval terms. The sun clearly heats up the Earth.

The moon clearly controls the tides. People in the Middle Ages knew that, although as late as Galileo, Galileo doubted that. Galileo thought the tides were actually caused by the rotation of the Earth. But most people in the Middle Ages, certainly people who live by the coast, could see that the moon affects the tides. And if the sun and the moon affect life on Earth, well, why shouldn't the planets as well? That's the logic of it. And the logic went that the planets all have particular qualities. The sun is clearly heating, heats up the Earth.

The moon clearly has some effect on water, so it was thought of as being cold and wet. And the qualities that each planet was thought to have corresponded to the elements, the four classical elements, earth, air, fire and water, which had those same qualities, hot, dry, cold and wet. And so everything that was made of elements, including people, could be influenced by the planets. And so the planets could affect your health,

they could affect your behaviour, because if, like me, you get angry when you get hot, then it could affect your behaviour, and so predictions could be made according to the positions of the planet. So astrology was really a critic. science, not least for weather forecasting, because of course, the weather, even today we say the elements, right? So astrology was really very important in the Middle Ages. But more than that, it's about, as I've said, understanding the way the universe works, really as a devotional activity,

because the better you understand the universe, the better you get close to God. So John's sort of invention then, was that quite a unique one for the time? Well, yes and no. There were other Equatoria, so this device for computing the planets is called an Equatorium, which is sort of equation solver. Really, it's almost a translation of computer. And there were other devices that did this. In many ways, they are kind of three-dimensional movable diagrams. So if you look in my book and you look at the diagram of the instrument, it looks very similar to the diagrams of planetary motion according to Ptolemaic theory, with the Deferent and the Equint, which people might have heard of. And so in many ways,

it could be a teaching tool. And so these devices do appear in manuscripts. Often people write descriptions of a device they've invented that works to find the positions of the planets, but may never have been made because it still has kind of teaching value to invent an instrument and talk about how the instrument works and how it instantiates the planetary theories. And so there's a lot of instructions and manuals for these instruments, but the instruments themselves don't survive. And it may be that they haven't survived because they were made of wood and the wood got used for something else, or the brass got melted down and made into something else. or it may be that they were never made, and we just don't know.

But sometimes we can say this was definitely never made because it wouldn't work. So if you tried making it, it's going to fail. It's the opposite with John Westwick's instructions. John Westwick's instructions are brilliant. I have followed them myself, and I, who have zero skill in making anything whatsoever, have managed to make a working Equatorium, according to John Westwick's Middle English instructions. So the guy, whatever else you can say about him,

was extremely good at writing clear, easy-to-follow, comprehensive workable instructions. And his own design only exists in this manuscript, although it is related or similar to, and I suspect, although I'm not sure about this, perhaps directly related to an Equatorium that does survive at Merton College, Oxford, and is described in a couple of manuscripts

that survive, one in Oxford and one in Cambridge. And this is not, by the way, an exclusively English story by any means. These devices were commonly found on the continent, and also they were first invented in the Islamic world, although, as I say, they were based on ancient Greek theories. So I think really this demonstrate, and that exactly what you described just now, demonstrates why this using John,

as a sort of vehicle for explaining both how things are learned, how they've picked together, where people are learning, what they're learning. It's such a brilliant story. And I also like the fact that you found a replica made in the 50s as well in a museum, didn't you, that you described right at the end of your book? Yeah, so Derek Price, The guy who begins my book and who discovered this manuscript, who was clearly extremely gifted

at promoting himself and at kind of communicating his discoveries, had made, because he knew Lawrence Bragg, the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, who ran the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Price got Bragg to help him make a replica of this Equatorium. Full size, six feet in diameter. It's a massive thing, because the larger you make it, the more accurate it is, or the more precise it is, I should say. And this was lost. Nobody knew what had happened to it. And I went looking for it. And with the help of the curators of the Whipple Museum in Cambridge, I found it behind a cupboard in the museum storehouse. And it had sort of not been properly cataloged. And so it was in the museum all the time, but nobody knew what it was or why

it was there. And so, yes, alongside the replica I made myself, there's also this full size one that was made in the 1950s. And on the Cambridge University Digital Library website, anybody can go and play with a virtual model, which a web developer made for Peterhouse, the college that owns the manuscript and which I advised and helped him with. So you can go and you can cast your own horoscope according to the data that this instrument will provide about the locations of the planets for any time in the past or future. Fantastic. Well, I know what I'm going to be doing this afternoon and find out my future. Fantastic. That's a very good. And there's so much in your book, and it's one of these that you can really go back into and read so many times.

And I'm certainly going to do that. But I think we're going to have to wind it up. I would be here all day. But final question, really, is, it's just, I mean, why do you think that these myths of the middle age, knowing that there is so much science in this period? Why does that myth persist, do you think, today? I don't know. That's a good answer. Basically, it's because we like to feel good about ourselves.

And so disparaging the past helps us feel good about ourselves. Even though if this year has taught us anything, it's that we don't have all the answers and science, although, of course, there have been incredible achievements in producing a vaccine in record time and all the rest of it, that we are still vulnerable and there are still many, many things we don't know. But I think it's easy to imagine that human culture makes linear progress and that if we're advanced now, that people in the past must have been backward.

And of course there is an element of truth in that. They didn't have all of the technological wizardry that we have today. But that doesn't mean that they didn't have anything at all. And above all, it doesn't mean that they were stupid. It doesn't mean that they weren't inquisitive. And they didn't ask really interesting questions about the way that the universe worked. And I think it's very easy for us to, you know, pick on one example of somebody who believes something silly and say, well, everybody in the middle ages believe something silly.

But of course, you know, there's plenty of anti-vaxxers or flat-earthers today. By the way, nobody who ever studied the question in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat. That's very clear. We have all of their treatises that prove that the Earth was round. But because you might be able to find one example of one person who nobody listened to who said that the Earth was flat, well, lo and behold, we dismiss the whole Middle Ages on that basis. And so I think it is convenient for us. The word medieval has become a kind of byword for backward or barbaric. And really, if you start to look under the hood a little bit and start to investigate the question,

it just draws you into this incredible world of inquisitiveness and interest and discovery and invention and map making and exploration and everything, which just captivated me and I hope will interest other people as well. Yeah, and I think absolutely if people are interested do pick up a copy of the light ages, I'd definitely recommend it. Sov, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing all this knowledge. Thank you so much. This has been really fun. Excellent. So do have a look for Seb's book, and you're also on social media, aren't you? People want to follow you there?

Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at Seb underscore Fork, F-A-L-K. Fantastic. So thank you everyone for listening today. This brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Please press the subscribe button to make sure you catch the next episode. But thank you all very much for listening.