On the Edge of Eternity: The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

ISBN-13: 9780190678890 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 320 str.

Ivano Dal Prete

Recenzje

In this erudite and elegant book, Ivano Dal Prete rewrites the history of Western views on the age of the earth. He works as deftly on ancient traditions in philosophy and chronology as on the practical culture of Tuscan miners and merchants, shows that scholars and craftsmen came into active intellectual contact, and brings lost worlds of speculation and exploration back to life. Medieval and Renaissance ideas about earth history were rich and varied, and geological evidence often supported arguments for an eternal world. Before this context, the debates of later centuries, with their multiple efforts to salvage a biblical chronology, take on a radically new meaning. The warfare of science with theology, Dal Prete argues, is not a medieval but a modern phenomenon, born of new commitments, Protestant and Catholic, to biblical authority.

O autorze

Ivano Dal Prete is a senior lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. He has published a book on the scientific culture of eighteenth-century Venice in Italian.