You're Dead to Me - Medieval Science (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

Greg Jenner and his guests look at a range of scientific discoveries spanning 1000 years of history, widely known as the medieval period. How were knowledge and scientific findings shared across a world with its countless languages and regions before the internet?Greg is joined by Dr Seb Falk and comedian Josie Long to look at some of the weird and wonderful advancements of the period which we still use today.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Research by Rosanna Evans Script by Emma Nagouse, Rosanna Evans and Greg Jenner Project manager: Siefe Miyo Edit producer: Cornelius Mendez

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a BBC Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I'm the chief nerd on the funny kids show, Horrible Histories. Today we are packing our sundials, star maps and astrolabes

as we travel back many centuries to learn all about medieval science. And to do that, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's a historian of medieval science. And to do that, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's a historian of medieval science and is an expert in the history of astronomy, navigation and mathematics. He teaches at the University of Cambridge and his fascinating book, The Light Ages, was a Times and Telegraph Book of the Year in 2020. He's a BBC New Generation thinker. It's Dr Seb Falk. Hello, Seb. Welcome to the show. Hiya. Thanks for having me. And in Comedy Corner, she's a multi-award winning comedian, writer, podcaster, broadcaster and filmmaker. You may

have heard her on the radio or seen one of her many brilliant stand-up shows or caught her on one of her countless TV appearances on such things as 8 Out of 10 Cats, Have I Got News For You, House of Games. It's the marvellous Josie Long. Hello Josie, how are you? Hi, I'm great, thank you. I feel so good about myself after that intro. You're properly smart. Where do you stand on history? I did it for my A-levels and I also was thrilled when I found out the topic of this because we did a whole module in our history GCSE on the history of medicine and so I'm like, I am GCSE level ready for this podcast, 100%. So, what do you know? And so I'm like, I am GCSE level ready for this podcast.

100%. So, what do you know? We begin, as ever, with a So What Do You Know? This is where I have a guess at what listeners at home might know about today's episode. And medieval science, it's a tricky one. I reckon you all know what science is. It's white coats and test tubes and Bunsen burners. It's dr bruce banner turning into a big green hulk but what about centuries ago perhaps you're picturing blood-sucking leeches pointy plague masks neither of which actually

were medieval at all total myth or you might be thinking about flat earth theory again myth or you might know your monty python and know that the best way to tell if a woman is a witch is to see if she weighs the same as a duck that is true that is actually a hard science but perhaps it's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone alchemy and astrology but was medieval science more sophisticated than we think was it more every day and what do we get wrong about it let's find out big question Jos. Josie, in a sentence, how would you define what science is? It's the endeavour to try to understand the universe better. Hey, that's pretty good.

Yeah, fantastic. Looking around, trying to figure out how everything works. It's very medieval. Are we allowed to use the word science for the Middle Ages? Is science not a post-Renaissance, Enlightenment concept? Is it not modern? Yeah, the word science, as we understand it as a separate discipline, is a modern concept. But it comes from the Latin word scientia, which referred in the Middle Ages to any discipline that had a system, and that could include theology. But the rules that they followed were laid down by ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. And so science, the study of nature, was part of philosophy. They had sciences like astronomy and mathematics and

geometry, but in general, they could refer to them together as natural philosophy, the systematic study of nature. So when we're talking medieval, Josie, where would you put the start date and end date on medieval, roughly? Oh, God. So I was going to ask you guys. I was going to be like, can we just clarify here? Maybe it would end in about 1500? That's spot on. And we'd say, what, 500 as a start point, maybe, Seb?

Yeah, it's a nice thousand-year period. It is a widely held trope, this idea of the Dark Ages, inverted commas, that we get when the Roman Empire is said to collapse in the late 400s. And that we get the decline in knowledge, a decline in sophistication, decline in technologies. And there is something to that a bit. I mean, we do get a population collapse. There are some technologies that do fall out of use. Right, Seb? Yeah, the Roman Empire collapses, everything's falling apart politically, economically, and science depends on wealth, science depends on communication, on education, all of these things are linked to politics and economics. But of course, the Roman Empire doesn't

completely fall because it continues in Eastern Europe, Byzantium, Constantinople. You had your programme on Justinian and Theodora. They're building Hagia Sophia, one of the greatest buildings of the first millennium AD. And this is dependent on cutting edge engineering and physics. Ideas, of course, pass to the Islamic world. And that creates a foundation for really impressive scientific development and exchange of ideas as well. If you mentioned the Islamic world, we get often what's described as a golden age of science. Quite early on, there are a couple of really quite prominent caliphs who sponsor a huge amount of translation of ancient Greek and Roman texts, but also of doing new scholarship. Yeah, that translation movement from around about the 8th, 9th centuries is a

really systematic effort by the caliphs in Baghdad. By the 8th century, the Islamic world stretches from Spain to India. So ancient Greek ideas get transmitted through Constantinople, often translated by the Christians of the Eastern Roman Empire into languages like Syriac, and then they're translated again into Arabic. And this gives amazing material for a whole range of Arabic-speaking scholars in the 9th century onwards. People like Al-Kindi, who does incredible work in optics, Al-Khwarizmi, who lays the foundation for maths. We get the word algorithm from his name, Al-Khwarizmi, and a whole range of other scholars, like rattleattle off names, who become household names

later in Europe, but in their own time are incredible contributors to the culture of the Islamic world. And we have a thing called the House of Wisdom. It's sort of been used quite a lot by historians, the library of knowledge, and in there, there are mega nerds all beavering away. It's slight misnomer, isn't it, Seb? It's not quite true. It's one of those myths that never dies because it's really useful. But the House of Wisdom is mentioned in a few sources, but the word Beit al-Hikmah, the Arabic phrase, which is translated by House of Wisdom, might just mean a library. It means a storehouse of knowledge, but what that is, whether this is kind of a research institute, whether this is a group of scholars,

is a bit doubtful. It's exciting to think of something like that going on. And I suppose you just want it to be real. They have this really interesting thing that we don't have. All we've got is troll farms. It's not the same. One of my favourite people at this period in history, he's living in the Islamic world, is Ibn al-Haytham, who I think we can call a visionary in the science of vision. He's a big deal in optics, which is a science of light and seeing the eyes, how it works, how it receives a signal. in Basra in what's now Iraq around 965. He spent most of his life working in Cairo and he basically creates a science of light. And he also does experiments. He writes things on a page and then he makes people look at them and then he gets his page and he's like, okay, so you can see this. Now, what about if I turn it around here? Can you still see it now? So Ibn al-Haytham, he is incredibly important, but he's also really influential because his ideas

are copied and spread, and there's a lot of interest in them in Europe as well. European thinkers, philosophers pick up on what he's written. So he has this kind of long legacy too. Ibn al-Haytham, very busy man. We think he writes 92 different books, which is very prolific. One of them, we only have the title. We don't know what's in it, but the title is brilliant. I love it. The title is something like the influence of music upon the souls of animals, which I like to imagine. Therefore, he spent his time just playing flute to a camel saying, how do you feel? Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel cheerful? Do you want to go for a walk? So Josie, science time. What would be your scientific hypothesis? Do you reckon you can hype up a hamster by playing

it some ariana grande tunes oh 100 i think the more the better and i feel like the my hypothesis is that there's no beast that wouldn't be thrilled by ariana grande she's a good person she's a comrade and if you hear that music the response of the beast will be akin to, thank you, next. That's what it will be, but in the animal's language. It must have been such a thrilling time to have so many fields where you could really feel like you were making world-changing discoveries in that way. Yeah, and anyone can do it. A lot of this knowledge in the Islamic world then percolates back into Europe. Of course, the Crusades means you've got obviously horrific violence, but there is still exchange and

interaction. You have the Silk Roads and ideas coming from China, but there's also stuff coming in from India, right? So our Arabic numerals, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, we call them Arabic numerals because they came to us through the Arabic world, but they are actually Indian, aren't they? Yeah, that's right. So Al-Khwarizmi, who I mentioned as coming from Central Asia before, Indian, aren't they? Yeah, that's right. So Al-Khwarizmi, who I mentioned as coming from Central Asia before, he seems to have been responsible for bringing what he thought of as Hindu numerals or Indo numerals, Indian numerals, to Baghdad. And then they make it from there to Europe in the 12th century. But the Europeans, the Latin Christians, are aware at the time that they have come from India. And this is

the 12th century in Europe, when Europe has its own translation movement to rival the one in the 8th and 9th centuries in the Islamic world. So you get this guy, for example, Gerard of Cremona in Italy, who goes to Spain to try and find the Almagest, this book by Ptolemy, the ancient Greek astronomer. And he finds it in Arabic and he learns Arabic in order to be able to read this incredibly difficult... I mean, I read it in English and I can't understand half of it. So this guy learning a completely new foreign language in the Middle Ages without Google Translate in order to be able to study this one book. And then during about a 20-year period in Toledo in Spain, translates a whole bunch of other books as well by ancient Greeks,

by Muslims, books on astronomy, philosophy, medicine, alchemy, you name it. He's doing all these things. And that's kind of in the spirit of the movement, really. But imagine if he went to all that effort and then he didn't even like the book not for me the ending is a bit derivative yeah that was what it was good the weird thing i suppose that some of our listeners might be in their heads kind of going well hang on a second greg mentioned the crusades where everyone hates each other and horrific violent holy wars between the the Christian church and Islam. And yet here we have Christians, Europeans, learning the enemy's language, reading their science, reading their ideas, taking them home, adopting them. So I suppose the obvious question is, well, was that okay? Was that accepted? Did the church, if we think

of the church as some sort of top-down singular body, was that fine? Are these ideas, are they not dangerous? So some of the ideas are potentially dangerous, like Aristotle's idea that the universe is eternal obviously conflicts with a pretty basic premise of Christianity that the universe was created. That was a problem in Islam too. Other ideas, if they work, it doesn't matter where they come from. That's where we then get some fascinating people who are both scientific and religious. Josie, have you ever heard of Hildegard of Bingen? No, and I feel so sad not to.

She's, I mean, how would we describe her? I mean, I suppose an abbess. She's quite a medical writer, isn't she? But she's also got other ideas that are more scientific. How would you summarise some of her general output? Hildegard of Bingen is probably most famous today as a composer. So people still sing the music that she wrote. But she's, as you say, Greg, she's an abbess. She's living in the sort of first three quarters of the 12th century. She is interested in everything. So as an abbess, her job is to look after not only the people in her monastery, but also the people around. So she looks at medicine, she's interested in herbal cures, but she's also deeply religious and she's a visionary and she has these incredible visions, these views of the ideas and looking after people. And she does music as well, which sounds like a kind of a weird combination. But actually, for a lot of scholars in the Middle

Ages, it was all part of the same kinds of science. Well, I was going to say universities love it if you've got a good mix as well, don't they? They don't want you just to be... On your UCAS form. Yeah, they like to have a bit of, you know, so it wouldn't have hindered it. Women in STEM is an ongoing discussion these days. STEM, if you don't know, stands for science, technology, engineering and maths. Or if we're adding medicine, I guess it's STEM. But there are women doing practical and theoretical science in the Middle Ages, right? It was much harder for women to make a living doing any of this or have any kind of official

position. Because after the universities were founded in the 12th century and into the 13th century, it was only men that could go to university. Formal professions, formal education, and increasingly you get professionally trained physicians, doctors, who again, almost entirely men. But women could practice in lots of really interesting and important ways. But the part of STEM that women are most involved in is undoubtedly the M, it's medicine. Because basically, if you want to get medical treatment, and you don't have the money to pay for a licensed physician, which, as I said, was always a man, you would go to generally a

wise woman who would probably do as good a job as a professional expensive doctor. And crucially, the one part of medicine that women were really involved in, of course, was childbirth. So we've got a sense then that science is happening in a few places. It's happening in monasteries and nunneries and in universities. Another person we should just mention who is not particularly important, but it's a fun story, frankly, Josie. So have you ever heard of Elmer of Malmesbury? No, I haven't, but what a name. He was a monk at the Abbey there in Malmesbury about a thousand years ago,

give or take, and he wasn't doing research in the library. He was doing something a bit more dangerous. Do you want to have a guess what he was up to? And clues in the up. Was he jumping off of things to test velocity? Beautifully guessed. Jumping off of things to see if he could fly. As far as we can tell, Seb, he strapped on a pair of wings on his wrists, I think, on his arms, and on a pair on his legs, and he leapt off the church tower.

Listen, he could have at least done it off a pier, you know? Give yourself a fighting chance. Another brother, not a monk, but a brother, who was doing some dangerous research was Roger Bacon. So Bacon was a Franciscan friar in the mid-1200s. He's doing work on optics. He's also our earliest source of knowledge really on European gunpowder, which suggests, Seb, there's a route into Chinese science because gunpowder is a Chinese invention.

Yeah, Bacon's taking advantage of these Franciscan networks. So these new orders, like the Franciscans and the Dominicans, are the basically international religious networks of their day. And they are transmitting ideas. So somebody like Bacon could go to Paris and speak in Latin to scholars from Germany, to scholars from Italy and exchange ideas. So somebody like Bacon could go to Paris and speak in Latin to scholars from Germany, to scholars from Italy, and exchange ideas. Bacon himself is really worried about the Mongol invasion, about the expansion of the Islamic world, and he thinks something like gun powder might be the solution to their problems. Also, he thinks that he might be able to use burning mirrors to try and direct the energy of the sun towards opposing armies.

So he's into all kinds of interesting ideas. He's again doing experiments himself. He's putting things to the test. Josie, do you remember any fun science experiments from school? Oh, I do remember we had a substitute chemistry teacher who we found out had been teaching in prisons, who taught us how to make contact explosives. Blimey! The man did not teach long at our school, but it was an incredible lesson.

Bacon, he thought that there were lots of really interesting things going on in nature, so he was keen on experimenting. But to call him an experimental scientist would be way over the top because he's not experimenting in any kind of systematic way. And one of his big interests was alchemy josie what do you know about alchemy is alchemy specifically about turning things into gold or is it just more magic in the wider sense that is a fabulous question oh thanks you have hit on the historiography of the discipline right there oh my god i'm the elmer of malmsbury of this podcast i've done very well absolutely you took

a leap of faith and you landed so seb is it is alchemy gold and elixirs of life or is it also you know transmutational chemistry and magic and the heavens so basically alchemy is about uncovering the hidden ways that the world works and because it's about uncovering the hidden ways that the world works people are really secretive about it these alchemical treatises are really hard to interpret because there's these different layers to them so there is the like i can purify metals i can make gold but there's also i layers to them. So there is the like, I can purify metals, I can make gold. But there's also, I can spiritually purify, I can understand the cosmos. But the basic concept is that everything is connected, right? So each planet is associated with a metal, and with the powers of the planets, you could purify metals. And they also wanted to

extend their lives. You've got this idea about the elixir of life or to heighten the senses. So alchemy can do a huge amount. But the key point that it gives us, alchemy is the forerunner of modern chemistry because they develop a huge suite of techniques. They're distilling, they're boiling, they're cooling, they're filtering, they're heating, they're mixing. And so it creates and develops new techniques which go into later chemistry. One famous alchemist, Josie, who we probably don't think was real, Bernard Trevisan, Italian chap supposedly, probably a fictional punchline. He was said to be squandering his family wealth on trying to make gold out of which two ingredients? Think more gross. Oh, no.

I feel like there was a lot of people using the urine of horses for things. Would it be that? You're not far off the other end of the horse. It's faeces and eggs. Supposedly, these are 16th century stories about this guy and we think they might be satire. They might be taking the mick out of alchemists as being silly people who waste their money on stuff. So Seb, you are a historian of navigation and cartography and astronomy. It's a myth that people in the medieval world thought the earth was flat. We know the Greeks knew the world was a sphere. Josie, how would you, as an ancient Greek, figure out the world was round?

Assuming you can't get in a boat and sail around the whole thing. Oh, but you could watch someone going off in a boat and be like, they've gone. Yeah. They've gone. And then you'd be like, well, two options here. They've fallen off the edge of the world or there's something going on. You'd watch the sun in the sky. Seb is nodding.

I feel like those two would be a good start. Like, it's to do with horizons. I think Josie's hit quite a lot of nails on the head there, Seb. I mean, can you give us a very quick introduction to the science of how do you figure out the world is not flat? Most common proofs are, first of all, to look at the sun and the stars. So you can see that the sun rises and gets up to different heights depending on where you are at different places. And of course, time zones.

Aristotle had some good ideas. You can look at the shape of the Earth on the moon during an eclipse. shape of the earth on the moon during an eclipse. Probably the most common explanation, when a ship sails away, a person at the top of the mast can see harbour when people on deck have already lost sight of it. So there are lots of different ways that you can prove it. How does geography work, or even cartography? The compass comes into Europe in about the 12th century. For a long time, they've understood about magnets and lodestones and the compass pointing towards north. But then people kind of experiment with it in really interesting ways. There's guys who try and use it to come up with perpetual motion machines, for example. But people do increasingly use it for navigation. So before the 12th, 13th century,

there's no need really to draw up complex maps because people just ply the same waterways they always have. And then as people go further afield, they say, you know, when I get to this harbour, if I'm going on crusade or I'm going on pilgrimage, when I get to this harbour, where's a safe place to anchor? And so, you know, they start off with these little harbour plans that show, you know, which bit of a harbour has the rocks and which bit of a harbour has the safe anchorage. And then it just kind of expands from there. The compass roses and the rum lines go together. A rum line is just a kind of straight line on the chart, sort of shortest distance from A to B. So they get progressively more complicated, but there aren't, at that time, grid lines of latitude and longitude. That's what's kind of really interesting. It's like they understood latitude and longitude, they just didn't think

it was worth putting them on a map. They were used for the sky. Josie, how are you with astrology are you into star signs i really feel like it's something that makes me feel old because i know that gen z people love star signs and believe them and care about fashion so in the middle ages astrology is predictive it is sort of magical sort of scientific what are the differences between astronomy and astrology in the medieval period? Astrology is like the practical implementation of astronomy, right? So it's a serious science. It's not just Scorpio, Virgo, Libra stuff is your sun sign, right? That's where the sun was among the stars on the day you were born. But there's

way more to it than that. And everybody in the Middle Ages pretty much believed the general concept that the planets affected what happens down here on Earth. And it's kind of logical in a way. The sun heats up the Earth, the moon clearly affects the tides, so why can't Jupiter affect things as well? They only knew about the planets as far out as Saturn, but they were well aware that they were planets. Planets each have links with elements. The Earth is made of elements. Even today, we talk about the weather as the elements. And so it's bound to affect the weather. Humans are made of matter. Humans are made of elements. So if it can affect the weather, it can also affect your health. It's a short step from astrology affects the cosmos to actually people's behaviour,

people's actions can be foretold in the stars. Josie, have you read The Miller's Tale in The Canterbury Tales? Yes, but maybe 21 years ago. The Miller's Tale is about a smug, clever young student who's got a landlord who's married a very hot woman called Alison and the student figures that the landlord's a bit thick and that he could probably seduce Alison. I mean, it's a classic Chaucer story. It's cheeky, it's naughty, it's a bit rude, it's a bit sexy. But actually, the student has used an astrolabe to fool the

landlord. But more than that, Geoffrey Chaucer actually wrote an actual book, an actual scientific treatise on how astrolabes work. So Chaucer was really interested in the science and put it into his stories. What is an astrolabe? I'm so glad you asked. Well, here is, I'm holding up an astrolabe's work so chaucer was really interested in the science and put it into his stories what is an astrolabe i'm so glad you asked well here is i'm holding up an astrolabe it's like a brass disc it sort of just about fits into the palm of my hand and it's got various moving parts it's got a kind of ruler that turns over the center of this disc and it's got a wheel in it and it's a little bit like the alethiometer from his dark materials a bit like a compass but it's the medieval smartphone it's your multifunctional gadget you can tell the time

with it you can work out which way is north when the sun's going to rise the height of a building but also it's pretty and it looks cool so in that sense it's a bit like a smartphone because it's a status symbol as well chaucer gives i think about 45 different uses for it. But some people claim that they knew a thousand. It's like a BuzzFeed article, 45 uses for your astrolabe. I must say I'm slightly disappointed because in my head, I thought it was something that you would set it running and it would spin. I don't know why. So I mean, not to do it down because it is beautiful and it must have been really stunning at the time as well. But I thought it might be something a bit more clockwork that you set into motion. Honestly, you're the first person I've and it must have been really stunning at the time as well. But I thought it might be something a bit more clockwork

that you set into motion. Honestly, you're the first person I've ever met who hasn't been impressed by it. I'll get a bigger one. Very quickly, we were hoping to squeeze some Chinese history

into this episode as well, but we haven't really got the time. So let's just do the very big headlines. Seb, there are four great technologies that come out of medieval and ancient China. One of them, of course, is gunpowder. What are the other three? Yeah, we already mentioned the compass, but the really big ones are paper and printing, which I think the big thing about Chinese history of science is it's all almost entirely very practically focused. It's like, how can we rule a country better? And so it's paper and printing enables their phenomenal

bureaucracy to function properly. Lovely. And with that, it's time now for the nuance window. This is where we allow our expert two minutes to say anything at all that we need to hear about today's episode. And what's going under the microscope today, Seb? I am going to talk about ditching Aristotle. So in 1277, the Bishop of Paris, who was working with a bunch of theologians, condemned 219 false propositions, which he said were being taught by philosophers at Paris University. And these propositions ranged from theologians talk nonsense and philosophy is the best to the universe is eternal and a vacuum cannot exist. And the Bishop of Paris said, you can't teach any of those ideas. And that sounds like a big clamp down on academic freedom. And indeed it was, but surprisingly it may have actually accelerated

the development of science, because many of those ideas were associated with Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, and he was so good that medieval scholars often didn't look beyond reading his works. Medieval scholarship was all about building on previous people's ideas, not knocking them down. But the 1277 condemnations forced medieval scholars to think outside their Aristotelian box. What does all this tell us? Well, if you take away one thing from all this, it's to have alarm bells ringing in your ears if you hear people call Roger Bacon or Ibn al-Haytham or even Newton a scientist. Because that word gives us too clear a picture of a modern professional working with specialised equipment in a purpose-built space. And motivations and methods of science have changed enormously over time. So the theologians in 1277 weren't saying a vacuum

had to exist. They were saying God could make one if he felt like it. By trying to protect the power of God, they inadvertently promoted science. So we shouldn't belittle people who don't think like we do, who have different ideas of progress, whether they lived a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or are living today. Just as those 13th century theologians who were trying to take the philosophers down a peg or two may have released them from their mind-forged manacles, who were trying to take the philosophers down a peg or two may have released them from their mind-forged manacles. So appreciating different ways of looking at the world can free us from the limitations we put on ourselves.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much. A huge thank you again to our guests in History Corner, the sensational Dr Seb Falk from the University of Cambridge. Thank you, Seb. Thank you so much for having me. And in Comedy Corner, the jolly excellent Josie Long. Thank you, Josie. Thank you so much for having me. It was great. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we put another historical hypothesis to the test.

But for now, I'm off to go and try and make the elixir of life out of hamster poo and wagon wheels. Bye. Call Jonathan Pye. I want something better than that. No. What's wrong with call Jonathan Pye? It's really boring. OK, so let's all do a brain fart. Actually, what about that? Jonathan Pye's brain fart.

It's hilarious. Jonathan Pye, off my chest. Off my chest. Chewing the fat, chewing the pie. Chewing the cud. Cud? The title for my new phone-in show is Jonathan Pye cheoses Own Sick.

I'm just spitballing. Let's just spitball. Jonathan Pye Spits Balls. Should we just stick with Call Jonathan Pye? Yes. Call Jonathan Pye. Listen first on BBC Sounds. This is the first radio ad you can smell.

The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. you