On the Edge of Eternity
The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 14 November 2022
- ISBN 9780190678890
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages368 pages
- Size 164x241x31 mm
- Weight 644 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 16 black and white halftones 254
Categories
Short description:
This revisionist work challenges the assumption that deep time was "discovered" during the Enlightenment by showing that the possibility of an old or even eternal Earth circulated freely in medieval and early modern Europe, even in popular works intended for a large public, and that it was common to deny any geological role to the biblical Flood.
MoreLong description:
It is commonly assumed that the creation story of Genesis and its chronology were the only narratives openly available in medieval and early modern Europe and that the discovery of geological time in the eighteenth century came as a momentous breakthrough that shook the faith in the historical accuracy of the Bible. Historians of science, mainstream geologists, and Young Earth creationists alike all share the assumption that the notion of an ancient Earth was highly heterodox in the pre-modern era. The old age of the world is regarded as the offspring of a secularized science.
In this book, Ivano Dal Prete radically revises the commonplace history of deep time in Western culture. He argues that the chronology of the Bible always coexisted with alternative approaches that placed the origin of the Earth into a far, undetermined (or even eternal) past. From the late Middle Ages, these notions spread freely not only in universities and among the learned, but even in popular works of meteorology, geology, literature, and art that made them easily accessible to a vernacular and scientifically illiterate public. Religious authorities did not regard these notions as particularly problematic, let alone heretical. Neither the authors nor their numerous readers thought that holding such views was incompatible with their Christian faith. While the appeal of theories centered on the biblical Flood and on a young Earth gained popularity over the course of the seventeenth century, their more secular alternatives remained vital and debated. Enlightenment thinkers, however, created a myth of a Christian tradition that uniformly rejected the antiquity of the world, as opposed to a new secular science ready to welcome it. Largely unchallenged for almost three centuries, that account solidified over time into a still dominant truism.
Based on a wealth of mostly unexplored sources, On the Edge of Eternity offers an original and nuanced account of the history of deep time that illuminates the relationship between the history of science and Christianity in the medieval and early modern periods, with lasting implications for Western society.
Calling upon a massive reservoir of evidence that has been hiding in plain sight, this deeply researched and engrossing book not only overturns a long held historical narrative that deep geological time was discovered in the eighteenth century, but also chronicles the formation of that narrative in the crucible of intellectual and political change at the end of the eighteenth century. Dal Prete brilliantly reveals the peaceful coexistence of multiple theories about the age of the earth from the Middle Ages up through the seventeenth century, then their politicization as the new ideology of science asserted eternal war between science and religion, a fable, as Dal Prete lays bare, that has endured up to the present.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Note on Terminology
Introduction
Chapter 1 Footprints in the Dust: The Eternity of the World in the Middle Ages
Chapter 2 The Medieval Earth
Chapter 3 Vernacular Earths, 1250-1500
Chapter 4 A "Pious" History of the Earth? 1500-1650
Chapter 5 The Rise of Diluvialism, 1650-1720
Chapter 6 The Invention of the History of Deep Time, 1700-1770
Chapter 7 Political Fossils, 1740-1800
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
