Australian Sky & Telescope

The not-quite-so Dark Ages

e commonly call the period of Western European history from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE to the first stirring of the Renaissance in the 15th century, the Dark Ages, as if nothing of interest was going on in science or in other intellectual pursuits. Knowledge, of astronomy and other sciences, was certainly growing elsewhere, such as in India and the Middle East, but what about in Western

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