Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

All Outputs (71)

‘The Service of Astronomy’: European star-gazing and its implications in the Middle Ages (2024)
Journal Article
Gasper, G. (2024). ‘The Service of Astronomy’: European star-gazing and its implications in the Middle Ages. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2877, Article 012029. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/2877/1/012029

What follows is an exploration of medieval European astronomy focussing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a period of significant change in terms of technologies and learning largely via the inheritance from Greek and Islamicate astronomical... Read More about ‘The Service of Astronomy’: European star-gazing and its implications in the Middle Ages.

“In the shape of a cooking pot over the fire”: Records of solar prominences in the 1180s (2023)
Journal Article
Gasper, G. E., & Tanner, B. K. (2023). “In the shape of a cooking pot over the fire”: Records of solar prominences in the 1180s. Endeavour, 47(3), Article 100875. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2023.100875

The second half of the 1180s witnessed an unusual number of solar eclipses visible within Europe in quick succession. These were recorded or referenced in a wide range of sources, from chronicles in Latin and Old Church Slavonic to the earliest epic... Read More about “In the shape of a cooking pot over the fire”: Records of solar prominences in the 1180s.

A cooking pot lit by fire (2023)
Journal Article
Gasper, G. E. M., & Tanner, B. K. (2023). A cooking pot lit by fire. Astronomy and Geophysics, 64(1), 1.36-1.37. https://doi.org/10.1093/astrogeo/atac091

Recent research into the records of eclipses in the Chronicle of the English monk, Gervase of Canterbury, has indicated that an entry for the year 1187 C.E. may contain a description of solar prominences being visible during the total eclipse of that... Read More about A cooking pot lit by fire.

Professor Sir Richard W. Southern (1912-2001) (2022)
Book Chapter
Gasper, G. E. (2022). Professor Sir Richard W. Southern (1912-2001). In S. Niskanen, & J. Willoughby (Eds.), Routledge Medieval Encyclopedia Online. Routledge

Sir Richard Southern is famous for his biographies of St Anselm of Canterbury and Robert Grosseteste, for his long meditation on medieval universities, humanism, and scholasticism, his early and still influential The Making of the Middle Ages, a surv... Read More about Professor Sir Richard W. Southern (1912-2001).

Damascien (Johannes Damascenus). (2022)
Book Chapter
Gasper, G. E. (2023). Damascien (Johannes Damascenus). In R. Newhauser, V. Gillespie, J. Rosenfeld, & K. Walter (Eds.), The Chaucer Encyclopedia. Wiley

A Marvellous Sign and A Fiery Globe: A Medieval English Report of Ball Lightning (2022)
Journal Article
Gasper, G. E., & Tanner, B. K. (2022). A Marvellous Sign and A Fiery Globe: A Medieval English Report of Ball Lightning. Weather, 77(7), 232-234. https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.4144

We describe an entry in a twelfth century monastic chronicle, compiled and composed by Gervase of Canterbury (c. 1145–c. 1210), which gives a credible description of ball lightning. It predates the earliest known report of the phenomenon from England... Read More about A Marvellous Sign and A Fiery Globe: A Medieval English Report of Ball Lightning.

Introduction (2021)
Book Chapter
Healy-Varley, M., Gasper, G. E., & Younge, G. (2021). Introduction. In M. Healy-Varley, G. E. Gasper, & G. Younge (Eds.), Anselm of Canterbury: Communities, Contemporaries and Criticism (1-9). https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004468238_002

Magnifying Grains of Sand, Seeds, and Blades of Grass: Optical Effects in Robert Grosseteste’s De iride (On the Rainbow) (circa 1228–1230) (2021)
Journal Article
White, R. C., Gasper, G. E., McLeish, T. C., Tanner, B. K., Harvey, J. S., Sønnesyn, S. O., Young, L. K., & Smithson, H. E. (2021). Magnifying Grains of Sand, Seeds, and Blades of Grass: Optical Effects in Robert Grosseteste’s De iride (On the Rainbow) (circa 1228–1230). Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 112(1), 93-107. https://doi.org/10.1086/713724

In his treatise On the Rainbow (De iride), composed nearly four hundred years before the first known telescope, the English polymath Robert Grosseteste identified three striking optical effects: distant objects can be rendered close by; close-by larg... Read More about Magnifying Grains of Sand, Seeds, and Blades of Grass: Optical Effects in Robert Grosseteste’s De iride (On the Rainbow) (circa 1228–1230).

‘The Moon Quivered Like a Snake’: A Medieval Chronicler, Lunar Explosions, and a Puzzle for Modern Interpretation (2020)
Journal Article
Gasper, G. E., & Tanner, B. K. (2020). ‘The Moon Quivered Like a Snake’: A Medieval Chronicler, Lunar Explosions, and a Puzzle for Modern Interpretation. Endeavour, 44(4), Article 100750. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2021.100750

Despite some scepticism, the suggestion by Hartung in 1976 that the report in the chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury corresponded to a meteorite impact with the moon in 1178, creating the Giordano Bruno crater, retains considerable support, particula... Read More about ‘The Moon Quivered Like a Snake’: A Medieval Chronicler, Lunar Explosions, and a Puzzle for Modern Interpretation.