One of the abiding memories of my childhood is seeing the large towers of an old Benedictine abbey nearby rise over the flat, charmless landscape west of Cologne where I grew up. Once, during an ...

In medieval and Renaissance society and culture, celestial events were not mere spectacles in the sky. Rather, they were omens, predictors of the future, and windows into the workings of the universe.

A long-standing myth about medieval history is that the Middle Ages were intellectually dark. Science supposedly took a hiatus between the demise of Rome and the rise of Copernican astronomy and ...

There is no doubt that books have the power to change how people think about the world — and the universe — around them. But what makes a book influential? Does it need to have a major impact on ...

Astronomy is a subject as vast and fascinating as the night sky itself. Humans have been charting out changes in the heavens for thousands of years. During that time, our species’ growing ...