Скачать или смотреть How ASTRONOMY Shaped Religion and Power in the Middle Ages

Astronomy was not only the science of the stars but also a language through which medieval people understood God, time, and power itself. Observing the heavens provided calendars, fixed the liturgical year, and allowed rulers to claim legitimacy by aligning themselves with celestial order. Yet astronomy was also a field of tension, where pagan legacies of Aristotle and Ptolemy met Christian theology, where Islamic advances filtered into Europe, and where the exact measurement of time became a tool of authority.

As historian James Hannam has argued in God’s Philosophers, published in 2009, the Middle Ages were not a period of scientific darkness, but of gradual accumulation and transmission of astronomical knowledge. And the cosmos was not merely a collection of stars and planets—it was a divinely ordered hierarchy. Astronomy was one of the seven liberal arts taught at medieval universities, alongside grammar, rhetoric, and logic. It shaped theology, reinforced political authority, and bridged Europe to the intellectual achievements of the Islamic world.

By the end of this video, you will fully understand how astronomy shaped religion and power in the Middle Ages, moving from monastic observatories to the courts of kings, and from cathedral schools to the streets of Baghdad and Toledo. How the combination of theology, cosmology, and politics made astronomy central to medieval power structures, and as we shall see, its influence extended far beyond the cathedral cloisters.