An excellent book, well researched, well written and interesting.
The author is an excellent storyteller and delivers a gripping and highly entertaining book that could have been quite dull.
This is the best way to learn and I loved this book as I'm fascinated by Middle Age.
It's strongly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren't so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to colour how we see the world today. Written in an engaging tone and in an accessible fashion, this is one of the nonfiction reads of 2020 for me as it crackles with interesting information and fascinating stories illustrating exactly how we reached the level of modernity at which we currently find ourselves. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Allen Lane for an ARC.

If you are of a certain age, like me, you might as well forget just about everything your teachers told you about the Middle Ages. They got it all wrong!
Nowadays we may all think we know a thing or two about just about everything and providing we are literate enough to enter the details in Google, or another search engine, we can come up with the answers.
Can you believe back in the day - all those centuries before the internet - there really were people who knew an awful lot more than you or I. We've even had the cheek to say they were living during the Dark Ages.
Seb Falk challenges that whole concept and his book tells us all about the Light Ages. Apparently they even knew the Earth was round! You need to read this book at least twice to fully appreciate it. I'm just going to sit down and read it for the third time ... I've still got so much to learn.

The Light Ages is a beautifully annotated and layman accessible survey of astronomy, mathematics, engineering, science, and learning in the middle ages viewed through the lens of a real 14th century monk called John of Westwyk. Due out 24th Sept from Penguin UK on their Allen Lane imprint (November in North America), it's ca. 320 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats (other editions possibly available in other formats).
I love reading history, especially of the middle ages. I spent a lot of time in my past, dressed up in medieval garb (or as close as I could get), recreating and demonstrating the nicer parts of the 15th century with my fellow history nerds. I'm also an engineer (day job), and a calligrapher (hobby), so finding this book, which is an intersection of the venn diagram of my life, was a delight.

Dr. Seb Falk has taken what could've been the tweediest, driest, most academic treatise and made it both accessible and human. The subject matter is admittedly academic, there's enough annotation and chapter notation and bibliography to satisfy the staunchest pedant but at the same time, there's a clear and compelling biographical narrative. I'm amazed that there's enough period record to reconstruct the story of Brother John's life in a cold monastic cell in Hertfordshire in the 14th century, but there's enough extant record to create a rough timeline and the author has clearly noted and rigorously supported and annotated where extrapolations are made.

There were so many revelations for me in this book about medieval education, numeracy, literacy of the general population, lifestyle, and more. Throughout the book, where middle English is quoted in the book from period records, it's written verbatim, with an interpretation below it in modern vernacular. There are numerous photographs and illustrations which I enjoyed very much.

Well written, meticulously annotated and researched, with a clear and engaging narrative. The author has a rare gift with written English. Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

An interesting read. This book has obviously been very well researched. I was intrigued by all the discoveries that were made in that era. Maths was never my strong point so a lot of the maths behind the science was beyond me.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This is an in-depth account of science and math and astronomy in the middle ages.  I found the first half of the book akin to a history study/textbook, containing translations of manuscripts, formula to the science of astronomy. 

There is a good use of photos, diagrams, and poems to support detailed text and manuscripts.  The section on arithmetic and the use of a counting-board and the abacus I found of particular interest. 
I certainly enjoyed following the journey of John Westwyk during this time, how he was educated, and where he traveled. The fact that he was traceable during his life I still find amazing. 
There is an extensive list of resources within the book.

3.5 / 5 stars

This book seeks to address the idea that the Middle Ages were not dark times. The author, a Cambridge science historian, opens the book with a discussion on this subject. While this is something of an overview he quickly looks at the particular too. In the course of this book Seb Falk manages to bring in many aspects of medieval science and discovery.

The author considers a manuscript from 1392 which appears to be possibly from Chaucer about an unknown scientific instrument - the Equatorie or Equatorium. After detailed investigation during the latter part of the last century the Chaucer theory seemed unlikely. However eventually the path led to a Brother John of Westwick (or Westwyck) as being the likely author. For a time he was a monk at St Albans. The book then uses what information that can be gleaned about this monk and, more generally, the lives of other people around that time.

This book manages to be very wide ranging in the topics it covers. From looking at the importance of agriculture the book then considers that in the context of lunar and solar positions and seasons. From seasons and planting it is but a short jump to the history of numbers! I found the information about Hindu-Arabic, Roman and more recent numbering systems fascinating. This in turn leads to clocks, saints days and calendars. The importance and complexity of clocks in that era was remarkable.

Another area that fascinated me was the birth of universities and their development. The fact that books and text books which were emerging were copied but at the whim of the person who was doing the copying was again interesting. Among a number of other subject maps, magnetism and medicine make an appearance and that is in just one chapter! I really enjoyed the information on maps and navigation. At the end the book returns to the subject of the Equatorie or Equatorium and gives a round up of the Middle ages generally.

I'm a little conflicted in my views on this book. I may well not be the target audience for this book - the science I did was a long time ago. Even the history that I studied is a fair way back. That said I really did find parts of this book truly fascinating and I learned a lot from it. Sadly some subjects went into too much depth to retain my interest to any real degree and there were parts that I found myself skipping a little. For me it is quite an academic book and on that level should work fairly well I imagine. I guess that might not be the case for a more casual reader. That said I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone with a real interest in the subject.

I am just loving this book as it has given me a headache! Seems a contradiction I know but Light Ages is stuffed so full of amazing information that brings a whole new light to the ways of the Medieval world. As my opening sentence suggests, I am still reading the book not because it is boring (far from it) or because it is incomprehensible but because I am savouring every fact and want to give them all the chance to lodge in my memory.

If you have an interest in the way that Medieval science and mathematics developed to provide the foundations for the world that followed, you do need to read this book. I hope your journey and headache will be as truly enjoyable as mine and be prepared to be inspired and totally amazed.

Too much #scientific detail for this reader. The parts about the monasteries was interesting. The medieval monk certainly knew a lot about astronomy and must ha e had amazing memories.

An interesting, but sometimes heavy going, read that illuminates an underappreciated area of history. There’s a heavy focus on medieval astronomy, which was surprisingly central to life in those times. This dominates the book a little too much to my taste, at the expense of some of the fascinating monastic history, which I could happily have read much more about.
Even in a period often dismissed as ignorant and brutish, the scope of human ingenuity and inquisitiveness impresses.

Some people would dispute the very existence of science as a discipline during the Early Middle Ages; not Seb Falk. He takes as his starting point a manuscript giving detailed instructions for the manufacture of an astrolabe. At one time thought to have been written by Chaucer, it was subsequently attributed to a monk called John Westwyk.

Falk uses Westwyk's work as a way of focusing on the astronomy and mathematics underlying the use of astrolabes. In the process he explains how the observation of the stars and the movement of the sun were used for navigation, for time keeping, for measuring distance, for determining the liturgical calendar, for deciding when to administer medical treatment, for choosing the auspicious time to set out on an expedition – in fact for just about everything of any importance in the medieval world.

What is fascinating is to see how completely embedded so much of this knowledge was in the society of the time. Nonetheless, I have to admit that I struggled as I got further into this book because the maths was, frankly, quite difficult. There was rather a lot of trigonometry involved and I frequently got lost. (I shall never scoff at the middle ages again.)

Moreover, if, like me, you are not especially good at visualisation, the task gets steadily harder. We don't spend our time observing the stars in the way that medieval folk did – for one thing, we can't really see them – so it gets harder and harder to remember whether we are talking about an angle in relation to the equator or the ecliptic, or why exactly the difference between the tropical year and the sidereal year mattered.

Despite these reservations, I found this an extremely interesting book, wonderfully well-researched and, true to its title, highly enlightening. I'm just not convinced it's pitched at the general reader. You have to be quite mathematically minded to follow it properly. Of course, there's still a lot in here if you're not (for example, I now know how to tell the time using an astrolabe) but it's by no means an easy read. Those monks put in a lot of hours of observation and calculation; if you want to meet them on equal terms, you need to be prepared for a certain amount of hard thinking.

An Excellent Read with one major qualification.

Mr Falk takes us on a wonderful journey in medieval science, religion, discoveries, and knowledge, through the life on of one English monk, John of Westwyk.
The discoveries for the lay reader like myself are many. The myth of the belief in a 'flat earth'. The origin of numbers and our measuring systems. The mechanics and creation of medieval astrolabes. The development of science, particularly astronomy and horology. And most importantly, Mr Falk finally puts to bed the persistent myth that this was a 'dark age' and that history only really begins at the Renaissance.
A wonderful book with virtually a new discovery on every page.
The one caveat I have, and I do understand I was reading a pre-release copy, was the shocking and woeful quality of the ebook. None of the footnotes were linked. Typos abounded. The formatting was dire with explanations of pictures interrupting the text and pages sometimes finishing half way down.
However, not of that attracts from the Author's achievement. It is simply an enlightening book of the period well before the Enlightenment.

Thank you to net galley and the author for the opportunity to read this book and provide an unbiased review.

Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks, proving that the Middle Ages were home to a vibrant scientific culture.

Turning on its head the concept of the 'Dark Ages', Falk's The Light Ages is a revelation. Following the life's work of one John of Westwyk, we learn through his work about the extraordinary level of mathematical sophistication and natural science knowledge found among the learned brethren of England, Europe and the Middle East and the extent to which this knowledge was shared openly and without judgement with peers. I already knew that Astrology and Astronomy were viewed as equally valid sciences, but I never really understood why before. This book answered this and many other questions I had about this period.

This was a fascinating read - although I wish I had paid more attention in my school maths classes when working through some of the calculations that medieval scientists could apparently do in their sleep!

What an amazing trip through mediaeval times. This book is so full of history, facts and figures. I’m not scholarly but I still found it a fascinating read. What incredibly learned people they were. and they did it all without the assistance of the technical stuff we have now. I think anyone with an interest in history would gain a great deal from this book.
Even the typing up of all of the dozens of references is a masterpiece on its own and deserves a mention.
Thank you Net Galley for allowing me to read it in exchange for an honest review.

A thoroughly detailed and rivetting read about aspects of life essentially in 14th century England, although bringing in a whole range of global thoughts of the time. The NetGalley description says it all. I especially like the way that the story is written and woven around the life of a fairly normal sounding monk, John of Westwyck, bringing in how he may have thought about mathematics, science and astrology as part of his daily devotions. The ways that science developed are fascinating and it is good to see how other cultures and religions all contributed to increased knowledge and understanding of the period. The long list of references at the end, both accessible in place and language, as well as the more hard-core academic works is an added bonus. I have to drop a star simply because the "Dark Ages" UK-style reflect the little known period from the time that the Romans left (ca AD410) to the arrival of the Normans (11th century) and I wouldn't consider the Medieval Period as being particularly dark. Those earlier Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavian centuries are dark mainly because few structural or artefactual remains survive as most were made from wood - rots and, when broken, a convenient fuel. However, a minor point and the book is well worth a read. Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

Great journey through #Medievalhistory, #science#monks, looking at many of the people whose inquisitive minds helped shape our modern world. A bit of a detective story as we follow the search for the author of Manuscript 75, originally ascribed to Geoffrey Chaucer but now possibly ascribed to an unknown monk, John of Westwick. By following John's life (as much as is known) through his time at St Albans's Abbey, we learn about the movement of the Sun, moon and stars and their affect on the growing seasons; the astronomical clock of the abbey, mathematical tables and the counting method using fingers. Many of the scholars of this time were monks, one such being Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln whose treatise, On Light, describes "explosion of light at the beginning of time" reminiscent of The Big Bang Theory of modern science. Excellent book on #sciencehistory, well worth the read #Allen Lane,,#Penquin Random House

Interesting read and I would recommend it to those that enjoys reading about the middle ages. This book focuses on the dark ages through the eyes of a fourteenth-century monk named John of Westwyk - inventor, astrologer and crusader.

I recommend this book. Thanks Netgalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review.