Reviews of God’s Philosophers in the Sunday Telegraph and the Scotsman

Unfortunately, two reviews of God’s Philosophers which have appeared in the UK press are not online. The Scotsman's review was short and positive, so much so that my usual policy of taking the rough with the smooth proved unnecessary. They wrote “The polemical note is as justified here as the fresh and easy approach is welcome. Hannam, the liveliest of guides, makes enjoyable reading out of some seriously dusty history and difficult ideas.”

At the Sunday Telegraph, they handed the book over to the tender mercies of Noel Malcolm, a reviewer widely believed to be the wrath of the heavens incarnate by writers of popular history. He took to task Tom Holland’s Millenium, a perfectly good example of fast-paced narrative history, for not being on the same scholarly level as Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe. This is about as fair as complaining that the art of the comic 2000AD wouldn't pass muster in the National Gallery.

On God's Philosophers, Malcolm said some nice things: "This book contains much valuable material summarised with commendable no-nonsense clarity… James Hannam has done a fine job of knocking down an old caricature." But he also complains that no one still believes the old story that the Middle Ages when a benighted age of faith when the Church held back progress until the Renaissance. As a result, he sometimes found my pedagogical style 'grating'. No one likes to grate, but perhaps someone should send him a copy of the The Evolving World which Humphrey noted yesterday....

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Lack of Progress

I was much entertained this week to see that the spirit of Andrew Dickson White is truly alive and well in the writings of one David P Mindell, an expert on the evolution of birds and author of ‘The Evolving World’, a book written with the laudable aim of showing how the findings of evolutionary biology are deeply integrated into our culture. Sadly he also attempts to construct a thumping anti-clerical historical build-up in the opening chapter and, despite the works of Lindburg and Grant appearing in one of his footnotes, the result is a total train wreck. This next passage is somewhat typical and reminiscent of a late 19th century positivist.

Despite our ancestors’ demonstration of the human capability for observation and logic, cultural and religious forces superseded a scientific approach following dissolution of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. Instead of reliance upon observation, experience, and experiment, attention focused on sacred documents and supernatural agencies during the Middle Ages.

Mindell continues:

Lack of progress in the sciences following the decline of Greek and Roman culture around 500 ce until the beginning of the Renaissance about 1450 is often attributed to capitulation of the Roman Empire to Christianity.

Often attributed!?!, by who?; P Z Myers?, the internet infidels discussion board?, Edward Gibbon?, Jesusneverexisted.com?. Doesn’t he wonder why one of the books in his bibliography is entitled ‘The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages’ and not ‘Ignorance, woo, superstition and woeful lack of progress in the Middle Ages’. Lets see which sources he is using to support this view?

Church censorship certainly played an important role. In his New Organon, published in 1620, Francis Bacon describes the times between antiquity and his own era as “unprosperous” for the sciences: “For neither the Arabians nor the Schoolmen need be mentioned, who in the intermediate times rather crushed the sciences with a multitude of treatises, than increased their weight.” In the eighteenth century Voltaire decried the “general decay and degeneracy” that characterized the Middle Ages, as did the Marquis de Condorcet, who remarked, “The triumph of Christianity was the signal for the complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences.

Francis Bacon, Voltaire and Condorcet!. Well that certainly trumps the last 50 years of research into medieval intellectual discourse. Next time I write something on Evolutionary Biology I’ll base it on the views of Galen, William Paley and Bishop Wilberforce.

He does at least seem to know about events such as the 1277 condemnations but thinks that they:

illustrate the inevitable conflict of that era between theologians, who claim authority on matters of revelation, and natural philosophers, who promote the explanatory powers of reason.

Notably absent is the much debated view of Pierre Duhem that ‘if we must assign a date for the birth of modern science, we would, without doubt, choose the year 1277 when the bishop of Paris solemnly proclaimed that several worlds could exist, and that the whole of heavens could, without contradiction, be moved with a rectilinear motion’, nor that of the historian of science Richard Dales, that the condemnations 'seem definitely to have promoted a freer and more imaginative way of doing science’. Nor Lindberg's more cautious view of the condemnations as a 'conservative backlash' but one which nonetheless 'encouraged scholars to explore non Aristotelian physical and cosmological alternatives'.

Towards the end of the chapter, an old favourite appears:

As recently as 1847, James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician, was denounced from the pulpit for pioneering the use of chloroform as an anesthetic in difficult cases of childbirth. HolyWrit was cited to support the argument that use of chloroform was an attempt to “avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman.” In a clever turnabout, Simpson used the Old Testament in defense of anesthetics, invoking the story of Genesis as a record of the first surgery ever performed, in which God “caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam” prior to extracting a rib for the creation of Eve.

A dastardly tale to be sure; and also complete and utter hogwash. Would it hurt to do some actual research before writing your book?.

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I find your lack of belief disturbing

In a couple of recent posts, James pointed out that the logical positivist position that statements about God are meaningless applies equally to statements that God does not exist. Some commenters suggested that this only applies to hard atheism, the assertion that God does not exist. It does not, however, apply to soft atheism, which simply means that one lacks any belief in God. See here and here including the comments.

I don't understand exactly what is meant by lacking a belief. For myself, I find my belief or disbelief isn't a simple matter, but works on a scale or field so that I believe some things more strongly or weakly than others and the same holds for things I disbelieve. In the middle area is indecision or agnosticism, where I neither believe nor disbelieve, although even here there is often a leaning towards belief or disbelief. Presumably it would be incumbent upon me to explain why I place a particular claim where it is in the scale. This is obviously a simplification, as the border areas are fuzzy, and a weakly-held belief can have some positive characteristics that a strongly-held belief lacks. Yet nowhere in this spectrum do I find anything I could accurately call "lacking a belief."

However, outside of the spectrum I do find something like this. Were someone to ask me if I believe some random concept I hadn't heard or thought of before -- like whether there is an advanced civilization of penguins on the fourth planet orbiting Sirius -- I would place my belief in this somewhere in the spectrum. But prior to having this concept presented to me, it wouldn't be true to say I disbelieved it or was agnostic about it, much less that I believed it. Here I could accurately say I lacked a belief in this concept. But to make the point clearer, once I heard the idea I could no longer claim to lack a belief in it. I either believe it, disbelieve it, or am agnostic about it.

So this is why I'm confused by people who say they lack a belief in God. They have clearly heard of the idea; they're actively discussing it. Yet they specifically distinguish themselves from agnostics who say that they neither believe nor disbelieve in God, as well as from hard atheists who simply disbelieve. So, again, I don't understand exactly what they mean by this. I find no room in myself to say I lack a belief in something I have heard of. I have to agree with James: soft atheism looks like an attempt to disbelieve in God without having to go through all the rigamarole of having any reasons for it. It looks like an insistence to believe and disbelieve whatever you want regardless of the way things actually are.


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The Family in the Early Middle Ages – Part Two

In part one we looked at the differences between Roman family practices and Germanic family practices. Over the course of the early middle ages, some Roman practices would come to dominate over the Germanic practices while some Germanic practices would displace those of the Romans. When trying to determine whether it was going to be a Germanic practice or a Roman practice that would be absorbed into Medieval Europe, the force which was most responsible was the Christian Church, which became the single most powerful influence shaping the family.

A good example of this is marital theory. By the year 1000, the Germanic theory of marriage, which had stated that you don’t need the free consent of both people, had been rejected. In its place, the Roman principle that you must have the free consent of both parties was accepted. The reason for this was that the Christian theologians of late antiquity such as Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine had decided that the Roman principle was morally superior and included it in their Theology. To a surprising degree, Church leaders and theologians took on and challenged practices which had been perfectly acceptable to both Romans and Barbarians, condemning these and trying to have them expelled from Europe. Their reasons for doing so are still controversial.

Endogamy and Exogamy were two major issues. Endogamy refers to marriage within the kingroup. Exogamy refers to marriage outside the kingroup. For Romans and Barbarians endogamy was preferable to exogamy. In general you wanted to marry your relatives and you only married outside the kin group if you really had to. This is not to say that Romans and Barbarians didn’t have incest taboos. Certain relatives were off limits; brothers, sisters and direct relatives. Anyone beyond those immediate relatives were fair game, in particular first cousins if you could arrange it. As early as the 4th century, Christian Emperors began to condemn endogamy and instead required people to marry those who were not close relatives (for an (ill-advised) modern day condemnation of endogamy see here). During the course of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the prohibited degrees of kinship - the list of relatives you could not marry- grew wider and wider. By the year 1000, this list included not just first cousins but second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth cousins. They included not just blood relatives, but spiritual relatives (godparents) and those you are related to by marriage. This would be enforced by the Church through ecclesiastical discipline, excommunication and penance.

In addition to opposing marriage within the kin group, Christian leaders also opposed other practices that were acceptable and common among Romans and Barbarians. Beforehand, divorce was not overly difficult for men and women to obtain. Church leaders opposed the practice in all but a few prescribed cases. Christians also condemned infanticide and the right of the head of household to reject a newborn child. Christianity was also hostile to adoption, which in Antiquity was a legal tool that strengthened political ties between wealthy families and created male heirs to manage estates (infant adoption was rare). Roman law was pro remarriage and encouraged people to remarry within a certain amount of time. Christian theologians took the opposite viewpoint. Concubinage was condemned and it was seen as only slightly better than prostitution.

It was one thing to condemn all these practices and declare them to be sins for which one had to do penance. It was another thing entirely to get people to accept that they should abandon them. In some cases the Church's attempts failed. By the year 1000, concubinage was still widespread in Europe. However most of the practices condemned by the Church were waning and beginning to gain a social stigma. Adoption became much rarer than it had been in the Roman Empire. Polygamy had vanished but it had taken a while to stamp this out.

Merovingian kings were quite open in their polygamous practices. One king called Chlothar I was asked by his wife to find a good husband for her sister. Chlothar said that he would be willing to do so, but added that it would be helpful if he could meet the sister and get to know her so that he would be able to find a suitable mate. After meeting her and speaking with her, he informed his wife that yes, he had someone in mind…..himself!. History does not record what his wife thought of all this. Another Merovingian ruler called Dagobert I hedged his bets by marrying three women simultaneously. By contrast, Carolingian rulers never married more than one woman at one time. Charlemagne divorced a lot of women and had quite a few girlfriends on the side, but he didn’t go as far as to resort to polygamy. Carolingian rulers who lacked the personality of Charlemagne sometimes found themselves brought to heel by the popes. For example Lothair II, tried to divorce his wife in order to ditch her and marry his mistress Waldrada, but found that the papacy thwarted his efforts, something they never would have dared to do 100 years earlier.

As regards naming practices, it was the Germanic principle of only having one name which would become the norm in Europe by the year 1000. In the case of marital property transfers, the Germanic practices won out and the dowry disappeared from Europe. Instead, the ‘bride price’ and ‘morning gift’ became standard. Both the multiple names and dowry system of the Romans would return with a vengeance in the High Middle Ages as these were revived.

Why were the Christian Churches opposed to the practices I mentioned and what motivated their drive to reshape European society?. There are a number of theories as to why they were doing this and two in particular have gained notoriety. The first has been advanced by an English anthropologist by the name of Jack Goody. Goody argues that one must not take the explanations given by contemporaries at face value, mainly because these explanations often made no sense. When marriage to your sixth cousin was forbidden (seven degrees of kinship), for example, the explanation given was that ‘we have to extend the probation to seven degrees because the world was created in seven days’. According to Goody, this is such a ridiculous explanation that you cannot buy it. Even when there is a biblical precedent (e.g Leviticus) the Christian prohibition goes way beyond it.

For Goody, there is a fairly obvious pattern. Many of the practices stamped out were ‘strategies of heirship’, a means by which families could guarantee there was a male heir around and keep the family property intact. Cousin marriage would ensure that the property would stay with relatives. Another example was the Roman practice of adoption which was often used to establish male heirship. Polygamy would increase the odds of increasing male heirs. Divorce would get rid of wives that could not produce heirs. Goody maintains that the Church were involved in an unconscious strategy to weaken family structures and increase the odds of property being left to the church.

The leading critic of Jack Goody was a medieval historian called David Herlihy. Herlihy rejected Goody’s rejection of contemporary explanations and pointed to some which were not at all nonsensical. For example, the prohibition against divorce comes straight out of the New Testament. St Augustine condemned Endogamy, because marriage served the purpose of bringing people together who would not otherwise be united in bonds of love. When you married a relative you were thwarting that purpose because you were not bringing two different families together, you were all related. Therefore as an instrument of social utility, endogamy would have to be rejected allowing the tendrils of love to spread as far though society as possible.

Herlihy extended the argument to say that social engineering and morality were central to the church's prohibitions. Infanticide was rejected along with other Roman bloodshed such as animal sacrifice and gladiator shows. Polygamy was rejected because when a few men hogged all the women it would create a large body of restless men who would be prone to violence. There is a remarkable letter from Pope Gregory the Great which explains the churches opposition to marriage within the kin group as follows:

We have learned from experience that the offspring of such unions cannot thrive.

This suggests that there was at least some awareness among contemporaries that the children of closely related individuals would suffer problems.

Neither Goody nor Herlihy gained enough evidence to support their conclusions so the redevelopment of the family in the middle ages remains an open question. Personally I like the idea of a giant church conspiracy to grab everyone's money, but if pushed I would have to plump for Herlihy.

Family Life in the Early Middle Ages - Part Two

James Hannam's 'God's Philosophers' is now available from Amazon


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The Saxon Saviour

It was not until Charlemagne’s conquests that Christianity really made any headway with the Saxons. Charlemagne’s policy was to make sure that the conquered were forced into mass baptisms at the end of a campaign, and then later to send the missionaries among the Saxons in order to explain the religion to which they had just joined. Not surprisingly the Christianity of the Saxons was somewhat on the superficial side, since they didn’t really know what they were getting into. Nethertheless Charlemagne’s and the missionaries he supported did succeed in moving the eastern boundary between paganism and Christianity from the Rhine river to the Elbe river where it would remain until the time of the crusades.

One text in particular tells us a great deal about what the conversion of the Saxons entailed and some of the ways in which the Carolingians made concessions. In the first half of the 9th century, a version of the Christian gospel was translated into old Saxon, apparently so that the Saxons had a better understanding of Christianity and could read it for themselves. This version of the gospel is called the Heliand and it presents a retelling of the Gospel story as a Germanic heroic epic.

Having been thoroughly ‘Saxonised’, Christ becomes a warrior, the towns of ancient Israel become ‘hill forts’ and the three wise men become warriors and thanes. John the Baptist is called a ‘soothsayer’ and the Lord’s Payer apparently contains ‘secret runes’. When Christ leaves the wedding at Cana, the Heliand says that

‘Christ, the most powerful of kings decided to go to Capharnaum, the great hill fort, with his followers. His forces of good men, his happy warrior company assembled in front of him’

In the passage of the Gospel of Luke regarding the arrest of Jesus of Nazareth in the garden of Gethsemane the differences between the original and the Germanic version are interesting. In the original revised edition version:

Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.” He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. “Why are you sleeping?” he asked them. “Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.”

While he was still speaking a crowd came up, and the man who was called Judas, one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”. When Jesus’ followers saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear.

But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And he touched the man’s ear and healed him.

The same scene in the Saxon Version appears under the titles ‘Christ’s deep fear before battle, his last salute in the garden’ and ‘Christ the chieftain is captured, Peter the mighty soldier defends him boldly’. The passage reads:

‘Christ’s warrior companions saw warriors coming up the mountain making a great din
Angry armed men. Judas the hate filled man was showing them the way.
The enemy clan, the Jews, were marching behind.
The warriors marched forward, the grim Jewish army, until they had come to the Christ.
There he stood, the famous chieftain.
Christ’s followers, wise men deeply distressed by this hostile action
Held their position in front.
They spoke to their chieftain, ‘My Lord chieftain’, they said, ‘if it should now
Be your will that we be impaled here under spear points
Wounded by their weapons then nothing would be so good to us as to die here
Pale from mortal wounds for our chieftain’.

Then he got really angry
Simon Peter, the mighty, noble swordman flew into a rage.
His mind was in such turmoil he could not speak a single word.
His heart became intensely bitter because they wanted to tie up his Lord there.
So he strode over angrily, that very daring Thane, to stand in front of his commander
Right in front of his Lord.

No doubting in his mind, no fearful hesitation in his chest he drew his blade
And struck straight ahead at the first man of the enemy with all the strength in his hands
So that Malchus was cut and wounded on the right side by the sword.
His ear was chopped off.
He was so badly wounded in the head that his cheek and ear burst open with the mortal wound
Blood gushed out, pouring from the wound.
The men stood back; they were afraid of the slash of the sword.

The author took a few liberties here. For a start, Simon Peter is supposed to be a fisherman, not a swordsman, and the gospel account doesn’t elaborate on the High Priest’s injury, or glorify it as the greatest head wound ever suffered as if it were appearing in a Rocky movie. Yet to gain Saxon acceptance of Christianity compromises would have to be made, after all what kind of God would not resist his arrest?.

The point of this passage is that Christ tells his followers to not resist, but in the Saxon version it is because he must undergo ‘the workings of fate’, the ultimate determinant of reality to the pagan Germanic peoples. When he is crucified, the cross is interpreted as a tree or gallows, which would have seemed similar to the hanging of Woden in the cosmic tree when he tried to learn the riddle of death and discovered the mysterious runes:

There on the sandy gravel they erected the gallows
Up on the field, the Jewish people set it up
A tree on the mountain

Once resurrected, the warrior Christ becomes greater than Woden having escaped his own fated death with his own power and ascending to the right hand of God; the old Gods have been replaced by the Saxon saviour.


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Pomo

Just in case you haven't seen it before, behold the Postmodern Generator. Every time you hit refresh, you get a brand new, completely meaningless postmodern essay. Enjoy!


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Michael F. Flynn and the Middle Ages

One of the questions thrown up by God's Philosophers is why no one did the work of Galileo in the fourteenth century. After all, John Buridan and Nicole Oresme had already cleared most of the ground. About the only important material that Galileo had that they lacked was the conic geometry of Apollonius of Perga. In the book, I suggest that the Black Death might have had a deleterious effect on medieval natural philosophy and delayed for almost two centuries the next series of significant advances.

Michael F. Flynn, the renowned science fiction writer, decided to ask what might have happened if Buridan had enjoyed just one more insight and realised how he could experimentally verify his ideas. The result was Questiones super Caelo et Mundo, an award-winning short story published in ANALOG Magazine in 2007 about a visit to Buridan, Oresme and the young Albert of Saxony in Paris from the Oxford natural philosopher William of Heytesbury. All the characters will be familiar to readers of God's Philosophers. Flynn is best known for 'hard' (that is, realistic) science fiction and in this spirit, he has ensured that his story, although fiction, avoids anachronism. The result is one of the most entertaining reads I have come across in a very long time. Since it is now available online, it is well worth an hour of anyone's time. And if you do enjoy it, you should also check out Flynn's novels, especially Eifelheim, which also deals with issues from the Middle Ages.

Timiditas et Deditio

This is just ridiculous. Jytte Klausen wrote a book about the Muhammad cartoons published in a Danish newspaper several years ago, and the rioting and violence that they provoked among some Muslims. South Park did a two-part episode about it that was extremely sacrilegious and hilarious (here's part 1 and part 2). Most newspapers and magazines wouldn't reprint the cartoons themselves, even though they were what the outrage was about, so most people never got a chance to even see them (you can see them here if you want). The book is entitled The Cartoons that Shook the World, and is to be published by Yale University Press.

Here's the kicker: the publishers decided not to include the cartoons in the book. They want to publish a book about some cartoons without including the very cartoons that the book is about. It looks like it wasn't YUP that's at fault though; apparently Yale University stepped in after the Press had thoroughly vetted the book, and decided not to include any depictions of Muhammad. Roger Kimball has several enlightening posts on this here, here, here, and here.

I wrote about the cartoons on my other blog a while ago, and made four points; please forgive me for quoting myself:

1. It's incredibly ungracious to treat something profanely when many people consider it sacred. It's morally reprehensible to do something for the sole purpose of offending others, especially when it comes to something as close to people's personal sense of identity as their religious beliefs.

2. Nevertheless, they had the right to publish these cartoons. Free speech, freedom of the press, etc. entails the right to offend. If you only have free speech until someone is offended by what you say, you don't really have free speech.

3. To respond to a handful of cartoons by threatening and committing violence is absurdly disproportionate. In fact, the cartoons themselves were pretty tame. Most had nothing offensive about them at all, except that they depicted Muhammad. Some of the cartoons even mocked the newspaper for commissioning the cartoons, or even the cartoonists themselves.

4. The prohibition against making images of Muhammad is not a universally-held doctrine in Islam. Many museums throughout the world, including the Muslim world, have paintings of Muhammad, which have been made by both Muslims and non-Muslims throughout Islamic history. Drawings and paintings and even cartoons of Muhammad have been made many times before without similar responses. As such, the rioting showed all the signs of being a contrived outrage.

Let me make a fifth point: acquiescing to bad behavior only encourages more of it. After all, it shows that it works.


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Reviews of God’s Philosophers in the Sunday Times and the Spectator

Both the Spectator and the Sunday Times have long and broadly positive reviews of God's Philosophers this week. As before, I'll gut the reviews for the main points.

In the Spectator, Dan Jones, author of Summer of Blood, a new book on the Peasants' Revolt, says,

Hannam does a good job of explaining how a few medieval scholars had come devilishly close to realising that the earth was in motion, and that the moon controlled the tides. Copernicus nailed much of it in the 16th century, but Hannam shows that some of his arguments were straight lifts from the work of much earlier scholars, such as John Buridan. Buridan suggested as early as 1350 that sunrise and sunset was caused by the earth, not the sun, moving. Standing on the shoulders of giants indeed…. this is a very useful general survey of a difficult topic, and a robust defence of an unfairly maligned age.

Conversely, he notes,

With so much ground covered, occasionally this book feels like a catalogue of scientific saints. There must be more than 150 characters, few of whom reappear after their first mention, and in places one wishes Hannam would pause longer for thought before rattling onto the next genius.

In the Sunday Times, James McConnachie, says,

In his spirited jaunt through centuries of scientific development, James Hannam tries to overthrow this cultural prejudice. He trumpets the Middle Ages as an era in which rational thought crystallised and scientific freedom flourished… We should not write off these men as "superstitious primitives", Hannam appeals. "They deserve our gratitude." He largely wins it for them…

… however,

… his plea is sometimes let down by a textbookish tone. More troubling is his overly partial stance. He is extraordinarily hostile to the Renaissance humanists, for instance, for throwing away 300 years of progress in pursuit of a dream of the classical past; "incorrigible reactionaries", he calls them. He also gives oddly little weight to the achievements of Arab scholars.

I would say that I gave Arab scholars as much weight as I honestly could. The plain fact is that in recent years, the Arab contribution to science has been somewhat overstated.

Medieval Cosmology and the Church

There is a new lecture out from the Faraday Institute entitled 'Medieval Cosmology and the Church' from the brilliant (and somewhat eccentric) Allan Chapman, author of 'Gods in the Sky: Astronomy from the Ancients to the Enlightenment'. It's a great listen and it gives a good insight into the richness of Medieval Culture. It covers the development of crucial internal structures in the Middle Ages, the universities, the town councils, cathedrals, merchant corporations and academic fellowships and highlights the role of 'personal authority exclusion zones' (such as the city of London) and the system of dual authority between the secular powers and the church. These helped create an environment in which intellectual culture could thrive and the inheritance of antiquity could be built upon.

I found two things of particular interest. One was the way in which Chapman highlights the scientific details in Chaucer, which would assume some knowledge on the part of the readership. The prologue to the physician's tale, for example, is a complete treatise on Galenic medicine. The story of the rapscallion alchemists goes into their apparatus and the texts they relied upon. The Miller's Tale features the devious student Master Nicholas and his attempts to get into bed with his masters wife. In his room this young scallywag owns a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest (probably the condensed John of Saccabosco version) and an astrolabe. Having talked about Medieval astronomy, Chapman remarks that 'the popular idea of a persecution of scientific interests simply become laughably silly at the fact that the church, the universities and the great monasteries taught this stuff relentlessly for centuries'.

Another interesting detail was how Medieval scholars thought almost proto-relativistically in certain matters. One problem was whether you might get bored in heaven; after all, singing hymns and playing the harp with the elect might get extremely tiresome after the first million years. Similarly, if you happened to end up in hell with a sentence of eternal punishment, you might get used to the heat after a while and it wouldn't be so bad. Would Satan have to keep turning up the temperature?. This wouldn't be a problem because you would be outside of space and time. Hence if you were in hell, it would always be the same instant and it would be horrible because you could only look back on what you had done in your life. In heaven, you would have no expectation of anything better because you would be in the presence of God, the elect and the apostles in one supremely glorious moment. It would be like watching Johnny Wilkinson's winning drop goal in the final minute of the 2003 World Cup on loop for all eternity.

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