James T Palmer on the Early Middle Ages and Other Things
Was there ‘scientific method’ in the early Middle Ages? This was a question posed on Twitter yesterday. It is a good question. I am also going to give a paper that addresses this at the University of Kent next week so it is hard for me to compress quite what I want to say into… Continue reading Was There ‘Scientific Method’ in the Early Middle Ages?
Putting dates to events in the Merovingian period can be a pain. AD-dates were not popularly used until well into the eighth century. What we have instead are infrequent references to years from the Passion of Christ, years from the beginning of the world, years according to the Easter table of Victorius of Aquitaine (Year… Continue reading Merovingian Dates and the Formulary of Angers (or Not)
Did the “Christian Dark Ages” suppress scientific knowledge and does it matter? You can find some great graphs on the internet that suggest so. Some even suggest that Europe managed to hit 0% science. You can imagine the argument without reading anything: people in the Middle Ages – all of them – made no technological… Continue reading On ‘Progress’ in Early Medieval Science
One of the many accepted assumptions about the end of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is that Roman science died, suppressed by belief and ignorance until at best the twelfth century and the rise of ‘reason’.[1] There were a few exceptional figures capable of relatively sophisticated natural philosophy, notably Isidore of Seville and… Continue reading Early Medieval Science is Changing
Anyone following this blog will know that I keep coming back to the subject of early medieval science and computus, and the groundbreaking recent work of Immo Warntjes in particular. Immo gave a fascinating lecture on this subject in Dublin in December 2015 which is now available on youtube, so I thought I would share:
