![]() Westwick greatest claim to fame is a treatise on the construction of an equatorium, a supercomputer of its day, designed to calculate the movements of the planets and the stars, which was re-discovered in 1951 by the maverick scholar Derek Price. It’s true that St Albans was unusual in its devotions to learning and what we would now call science, but that was only a difference of degree, not of kind: as Sebastian Falk has set out to prove in his fascinating new book, The Light Ages, medieval Catholicism wasn’t the enemy of progress, it was its engine.įalk’s starting point is an obscure 14th-century St Alban’s monk named John of Westwick, son of a yeoman, whose career he traces largely through the mathematical and astronomical manuscripts that Westwick worked on. ![]() But those who think of the medieval world – and medieval Catholicism in particular – as the antithesis of reason and progress, might be surprised to learn that the great Benedictine abbey at St Albans had portraits in stained glass of both Muslim and Jewish scholars adorning its cloisters. ![]() There are few easier ways to enrage a medievalist than to refer to the era they study as ‘the Dark Ages’. ![]()
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