About Seb Falk
From Seb Falk’s website: Seb Falk is a historian, teacher, broadcaster, and historical consultant. In 2016 he was named a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.
His first book, The Light Ages, is a wide-ranging history of medieval science, told through the life of an extraordinary monk, John of Westwyk. The Light Ages follows the twists and turns of John’s life as a yeoman and novice, scholar and exile, crusader and astronomer. At each stage we learn what he learned, seeing that the Middle Ages were far more advanced than is often assumed.
Seb Falk teaches medieval history and history of science at Cambridge University, where he was a Fellow of Girton College from 2016 to 2019.
He specializes in the history of astronomy, navigation, and mathematics – theories and technologies – from their ancient origins to modern developments.
Seb Falk is a qualified teacher and a Yachtmaster. He has led mountain expeditions and run many marathons, worked in government, and served as a Special Constable. He is as comfortable sailing by the stars – while singing old sea shanties – as demonstrating ancient mathematical techniques. As a lecturer and museum curator, he makes past science come alive, using authentic historic instruments and helping participants get hands-on with replicas.
Seb Falk received his B.A. in History and Spanish from Oxford University and an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. He stayed at Cambridge for a Ph.D., completing his thesis on late medieval astronomical instruments in 2016.
He lives in Cambridge, UK, with his wife, two children, and qualified therapy dog Ridley.
The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science
An illuminating guide to the scientific and technological achievements of the Middle Ages through the life of a crusading astronomer-monk.
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 color how we see the world today.
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