‘The Face of the World was Wretched, Horrifying, Black, Remarkable’

Abstract We are now moving on from early Asia to medieval Scandinavia and Europe — from China, India, and Babylonia to Norway, Ireland, and England. The cultural focus will be placed on sources from the Christian tradition moving over a wide geographical range from the lands of the medieval Rus’ to the Atlantic archipelago in the west, crossing linguistic, political, and religious boundaries. Christian scholars, scientists, and theologians in the European Middle Ages developed their own responses to the science, experience, and interpretation of total solar eclipses. Many medieval thinkers also held a religious office and tried to reconcile their vision and knowledge of the material world with their beliefs as well as with their theological knowledge from scripture. The description of the 1133 total solar eclipse as simultaneously ‘Wretched, Horrifying, Black, Remarkable’ goes hand in hand with the wider contemporary efforts of bridging of empirical and interpretative astronomical approaches in the Christian twelfth century.