Book Review: A bright look at the Dark Ages
1098, The battle of Antioch taking place outside the walls of the city during the first Crusade. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)
In February of last year, in the pages of the Irish Examiner, I reviewed a book about the Dark and Middle Ages called, counter-intuitively, The Light Ages. And here I am now reviewing another book about the same period of history with a rhyming title and a similar authorial intent: to get readers to think afresh about the Middle Ages, to see the bright sparks where we’ve been accustomed – and indeed encouraged by writers stretching back to Petrarch and Voltaire – to seeing nothing but the enveloping gloom of ignorance and superstition.
It shouldn’t need much reflection on anyone’s part that the standard denigrations of the Middle Ages must be, at least, in part, false. Nothing, after all, is that simple. But there are a multitude of ways in which historians might go about proving the point. In The Light Ages, Seb Falk homed in on the life and times of an astronomy-obsessed, fourteenth-century English monk called John Westwyk, living in the wake of the “clockwork revolution” and the dawning possibility of “reliable machines that could keep universally agreed time in equal hours”.
