On the Edge of Eternity: The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

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 meteorolog