How could there be such a thing? Didn’t science pretty much stop with Aristotle and start again with Bacon? Falk is an historian and lecturer at Cambridge, where he works as a medievalist in the history of science. Now, Christians have a vested interested in that period, because that was a time when our beliefs were apparently dominant in Western Europe were the 1300s really a time of mud and ignorance? Or is that itself a piece of ignorant mud-slinging?Įnter Seb Falk. Anything from the ‘Middle’ Ages is infested with plagues, mud, and ignorance, the low point between the twin peaks of classical Greece or Rome, and the Renaissance (‘rebirth’) of those values. Anything which is ‘like something out of the Dark Ages’, is contrasted, pretty obviously, with the rationality, modernity and secularity of ‘The Enlightenment’. Currently it’s the barbarism of the Taliban which takes the label, but it can be anything which doesn’t fit 21st Century Western liberal values – including, as you might have encountered it, orthodox Christianity. One of the laziest shortcuts in current journalism is to dismiss something we don’t like or understand as ‘Medieval’, or ‘belonging to the Dark Ages’. Seb Falk, The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery (London, Penguin, 2021)
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