光明时代：中世纪的发现之旅 英文原版 The Light Ages : A Medieval Journey of Discovery

基本信息/Prouduct Details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (10 Jun. 2021)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 014198967X

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141989679

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 2.4 x 20 cm

页面参数仅供参考，具体以实物为准

书籍简介/Book Description

被《泰晤士报》、《每日电讯报》、TLS、BBC历史杂志和平板电脑选为年度图书

令人着迷、清晰明了、写得极好，它是对另一个世界的魅力唤起。 ——伊恩·莫蒂默，《时间旅行者的中世纪英格兰指南》的作者

中世纪是一个充满奇迹的时代。他们为我们带来了大学、眼镜和机械钟，中世纪的思想家们试图了解他们周围的世界，从季节的变化到天空中的星星。

在这本书中，我们与一位真实的向导一起走过中世纪的科学之路，他是十四世纪的修士，名叫韦斯特维克的约翰——一位发明家、、十字军战士。他在英格兰宏伟的修道院接受教育，并被流放到一个悬崖边的牧师府。循着他生活的痕迹，我们学会了通过约翰修士的眼睛来观察自然界：用星星导航、乘以罗马数字、治疗疾病和用星盘报时。

我们走遍了英格兰的各个角落，从圣阿尔本斯到泰尼茅斯，并冒险远赴英国的海岸。在路上，我们遇到了一群了不起的人物：患有麻风病的英国修道院院长、由法国工匠转为间谍的人以及建立了世界上先进的天文台的波斯多面手。

《光明时代》是一个引人入胜的故事，讲述了一个普通人和一个不平凡时代的斗争和成功，为我们勾勒出一幅从未见过的生动的中世纪世界图景。

Chosen as a Book of the Year by The Times, Daily Telegraph, TLS, BBC History Magazine and Tablet

'Compulsive, brilliantly clear and superbly well-written, it's a charismatic evocation of another world' Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

The Middle Ages were a time of wonder. They gave us the first universities, the first eyeglasses and the first mechanical clocks as medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky.

In this book, we walk the path of medieval science with a real-life guide, a fourteenth-century monk named John of Westwyk - inventor, astrologer, crusader - who was educated in England's grandest monastery and exiled to a clifftop priory. Following the traces of his life, we learn to see the natural world through Brother John's eyes: navigating by the stars, multiplying Roman numerals, curing disease and telling the time with an astrolabe.

We travel the length and breadth of England, from Saint Albans to Tynemouth, and venture far beyond the shores of Britain. 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.

An enthralling story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man and an extraordinary time, The Light Ages conjures up a vivid picture of the medieval world as we have never seen it before.

媒体评价/Comments

Stunning: both exquisitely written and so very clever. By following the life of one little-known monk, John of Westwyk, Falk opens up for us the sophisticated and utterly different ways in which people in the Middle Ages thought and makes us question our assumptions about the medieval past. -- Suzannah Lipscomb ― BBC History Magazine Books of the Year

Turns our understanding of medieval science on its head ... Falk shows how scientific inquiries central to the Renaissance actually began generations earlier than we thought, and despite our perception of the church as the enemy of science, those intellectual pioneers were often monks ― The Telegraph Books of the Year

As fascinating as it is exquisitely written . . . the range of mathematics, astronomy, and engineering is impressive. More impressive still is the elegance with which Falk tells the tale -- Tom Whipple ― Times Books of the Year

Remarkable ... a book that illuminates not just the visionaries of the past but also the troubled state of anti-intellectualism in the modern world ― Financial Times

"Might it change minds?" is my criterion. The Light Ages might. Seb Falk's dazzling study of a late-medieval scientist is an uncontainably tentacular monograph, reaching from a windswept cell at Tynemouth, where John of Westwyck built an astrolabe, to penetrate unexplored recesses of the history and philosophy of science, and extending across Christendom into the cultures that surrounded and informed it. Falk excises errors about the Middle Ages without filleting their enchantment -- Felipe Fernández-Armesto ― TLS Books of the Year

Unambiguously and successfully an antidote to the cliché of the 'Dark Ages' as a millennium of stagnation and regression . . . Falk's approach is to explain the things we share with our medieval forebears and the things we differ on: to reveal how they saw the universe ― Literary Review

作者简介/Author

勒布-福尔克是一位历史学家和剑桥大学的讲师。2016年，他被评为BBC新生代思想家。

Seb Falk is a historian and lecturer at Cambridge University. In 2016 he was named as a BBC New Generation Thinker. This is his first book.