光明時代：中世紀的發現之旅 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

頁面參數僅供參考，具體以實物為準

書籍簡介/Book Deion

被《泰晤士報》、《每日電訊報》、TLS、BBC歷史雜誌和平板電腦選為年度圖書

令人着迷、清晰明瞭、寫得極好，它是對另一個世界的魅力喚起。 ——伊恩·莫蒂默，《時間旅行者的中世紀英格蘭指南》的作者

中世紀是一個充滿奇蹟的時代。他們為我們帶來了大學、眼鏡和機械鐘，中世紀的思想家們試圖瞭解他們周圍的世界，從季節的變化到天空中的星星。

在這本書中，我們與一位真實的嚮導一起走過中世紀的科學之路，他是十四世紀的修士，名叫韋斯特維克的約翰——一位發明家、占星家、十字軍戰士。他在英格蘭宏偉的修道院接受教育，並被流放到一個懸崖邊的牧師府。循着他生活的痕跡，我們學會了通過約翰修士的眼睛來觀察自然界：用星星導航、乘以羅馬數字、治療疾病和用星盤報時。

我們走遍了英格蘭的各個角落，從聖阿爾本斯到泰尼茅斯，並冒險遠赴英國的海岸。在路上，我們遇到了一羣了不起的人物：患有麻風病的英國修道院院長、由法國工匠轉為間諜的人以及建立了世界上先進的天文台的波斯多面手。

《光明時代》是一個引人入勝的故事，講述了一個普通人和一個不平凡時代的鬥爭和成功，為我們勾勒出一幅從未見過的生動的中世紀世界圖景。

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.

媒體評價/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

作者簡介/Author

勒布-福爾克是一位歷史學家和劍橋大學的講師。2016年，他被評為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.