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Recent reading
Mar. 2nd, 2017 08:46 pmThe High Middle Ages by Philip Daileader (series of lectures from the Teaching Company)
Follows on from The Early Middle Ages. I liked this a lot! It starts with demographics (very interesting!) and then continues by looking at different social groups and how they changed during the period, then goes on with religious and intellectual history, and then political history at the end. Interesting tidbits that I learned: apparently medieval knights had live-action roleplaying games where they pretended to be King Arthur and the knights of the round table. I find this vastly amusing. Another one: Bologna, one of the first universities, was completely student-controlled, to the extent when you started a class the students decided what you'd get paid, teachers couldn't leave town without leaving something valuable as surety, etc. Aaaagh.
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 B.C. and Why It Had to Be Reborn by Lucio Russo
Wow. Woooow. This is one of those books that just blows your mind and raises a lot of questions. So fascinating. It's about science in antiquity and how it was forgotten and then found again. I knew bits of this--as a mathematician, of course I knew about Euclid and other Greek mathematicians, and I knew that important scientific works (in astronomy, for instance) survived by being translated into Arabic and then after the Middle Ages were brought back to Europe in the Renaissance. But there was so much I didn't know!
I tended to vaguely lump together Greco-Roman thinkers in my head because I didn't know enough about them, but of course that is bullshit, as anyone would realize if they thought about it. The book tells the story of a scientific revolution in Hellenistic times (during/after Alexander the Great) in Alexandria and other cities, with scientists like Euclid, Hipparchus, Eratosthenes and Archimedes. Before that, thinkers like Pythagoras and Aristotle had more of a pre-scientific mindset. And after the Romans conquered and the scientific community was dispersed, the library in Alexandria was still around for a couple of hundred years and you would get people reading and commenting on books there but not really making much original contributions. And then even later you would get Roman thinkers reading and misunderstanding scientific arguments (there are some hilarious bits here). And then Russo traces how ancient texts influenced the growth of modern science.
Some of the stuff in here is speculative and I am sure there are disagreements about it--I am treating that more as a "what if?" sort of thing. Other things seem legit, and there's certainly a ton of footnotes and references--but the history of science is so not my field, so I can't really judge it all. But in all, a very thought-provoking and enjoyable book, and it raises a lot of questions about science and technology and the scientific method and how history does not have linear progress--we have science now, but we could lose it again.
Follows on from The Early Middle Ages. I liked this a lot! It starts with demographics (very interesting!) and then continues by looking at different social groups and how they changed during the period, then goes on with religious and intellectual history, and then political history at the end. Interesting tidbits that I learned: apparently medieval knights had live-action roleplaying games where they pretended to be King Arthur and the knights of the round table. I find this vastly amusing. Another one: Bologna, one of the first universities, was completely student-controlled, to the extent when you started a class the students decided what you'd get paid, teachers couldn't leave town without leaving something valuable as surety, etc. Aaaagh.
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 B.C. and Why It Had to Be Reborn by Lucio Russo
Wow. Woooow. This is one of those books that just blows your mind and raises a lot of questions. So fascinating. It's about science in antiquity and how it was forgotten and then found again. I knew bits of this--as a mathematician, of course I knew about Euclid and other Greek mathematicians, and I knew that important scientific works (in astronomy, for instance) survived by being translated into Arabic and then after the Middle Ages were brought back to Europe in the Renaissance. But there was so much I didn't know!
I tended to vaguely lump together Greco-Roman thinkers in my head because I didn't know enough about them, but of course that is bullshit, as anyone would realize if they thought about it. The book tells the story of a scientific revolution in Hellenistic times (during/after Alexander the Great) in Alexandria and other cities, with scientists like Euclid, Hipparchus, Eratosthenes and Archimedes. Before that, thinkers like Pythagoras and Aristotle had more of a pre-scientific mindset. And after the Romans conquered and the scientific community was dispersed, the library in Alexandria was still around for a couple of hundred years and you would get people reading and commenting on books there but not really making much original contributions. And then even later you would get Roman thinkers reading and misunderstanding scientific arguments (there are some hilarious bits here). And then Russo traces how ancient texts influenced the growth of modern science.
Some of the stuff in here is speculative and I am sure there are disagreements about it--I am treating that more as a "what if?" sort of thing. Other things seem legit, and there's certainly a ton of footnotes and references--but the history of science is so not my field, so I can't really judge it all. But in all, a very thought-provoking and enjoyable book, and it raises a lot of questions about science and technology and the scientific method and how history does not have linear progress--we have science now, but we could lose it again.
