My next research project attempts a global perspective of the natural sciences in the year 1000.
I have been a Research Fellow at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Girton College, an AHRC-funded curatorial intern at the Whipple Museum, a BBC New Generation Thinker, and have served as an independent expert to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art. It was shortlisted for the Hughes Prize of the British Society for the History of Science. My first book, The Light Ages, was published in 2020.
I am particularly interested in how sciences were studied and practised by non-experts, as well as the relationships between science and religion, and science and literature. I research the medieval mathematical sciences. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren’t so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.Email: sldf2 interests: History of astronomy, late medieval sciences, scientific instruments and history of the book in the Middle Ages The Light Ages offers a gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world and conjures a vivid picture of medieval life as we have never seen it before. On our way, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters: the clock-building English abbot with leprosy, the French craftsman-turned-spy, and the Persian polymath who founded the world’s most advanced observatory.
From multiplying Roman numerals to navigating by the stars, curing disease, and telling time with an ancient astrolabe, we learn emerging science alongside Westwyk and travel with him through the length and breadth of England and beyond its shores. Born in a rural manor, educated in England’s grandest monastery, and then exiled to a clifftop priory, Westwyk was an intrepid crusader, inventor, and astrologer. In The Light Ages, Cambridge science historian Seb Falk takes us on a tour of medieval science through the eyes of one fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk. As medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky, they came to develop a vibrant scientific culture. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks. Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era.
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