In times as dark as reality, the present, and more the future we live init occupies many of our thoughts, full of worries. Shall we continue to attend shows which, if not for their world-wide or national importance, it would be convenient to class comedians from time to time, when in reality they are real, very real and dramatic as descorators? Will any more ubiquitous artificial intelligence, more organic, more viewers of social, economic and historical developments and interests have us?
yes yes “Only viewers” who helped this future emerge with algorithms and the chips were loaded by constantly scanning smartphones. If for Augusto Monterros, “when he lost the dinosaur, he was there”, for current generations it would be appropriate to say that when he lost, “the telephone will follow”.
And we don’t live with “innocent” types of artificial intelligence, and the point is that sometime in the future there will be a “pre-ChapGPT era” or so-called “Era de los ChapGPT”.
Suffocated oh best shocked by so much brutalityso much cynicism, so much denial (they say climate change is an invention of speculators or ignoramuses), so much innovation in the digital world that we seem to be a dinosaur on the way to extinction if we don’t do it as soon as possible with a new smartphone model.
For many, I will surely be an authentic dinosaur: phones, like computers, last me many years; As I write these lines now, they will accompany me longer than I can remember. I am not talking, yes, about the — admirably idiosyncratic — levels of the indelible Javier Marías, who never left this electric machine and who sent me an electronic correspondence prepared for him by another person – I believe always or always his wife Carme López Mercader – with an additional archive in which they scanned a handwritten message to contact me with what I wanted.
Asphyxiated-asqueado, I say, of all this, and though I do not forget the present, nor what seems to come, I force myself to understand it, and sometimes I try to communicate my views to you, dear readers, with some frequency I resort to the past, to the most valuable environment of historiansalthough I will summarize what the Italian political scientist Benedetto Croce wrote in his book A story as a hazaña of freedom (1938; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992): “Historical culture aims to keep alive the consciousness that human society has of its past, whether to decide on the present or to decide on the same thing; to provide it with what it needs for the path it has to discover; to be willing to know what of this part can serve you in the future”.
For a refuge from the past –sometimes “cobardes”because the present and the future are important – take a good look at the latest books: Paths of knowledge. An intellectual journey through medieval Europe (Alianza, 2025), de Franco Cardini, y In the Palace of Astronomers. The transformation of science in Northern Europe in the 16th century (Taurus, 2026), by Violet Moller, which I read from another great book, The path of knowledge. The story of how the ideas of the classical world were lost and redeemed (Taurus, 2019).
Cardini and Moller took us back to the world where we heard the basics of what real companies are
Books we look back on a world in which the foundations of what real societies were felt to be. The world in which we think in modern science — with mathematics as the chief exception; How can I ignore Euclid? – these were all cases to be made, countless phenomena and realities to be discovered and theories to be created.
It is not possible to define the same type of “general culture” that was replaced by the name in the 19th century “Renaissance” (which includes the 15th and 16th centuries), then the right, politics, education or religion, fields where this belief still persists, e.g. with the Roman right, universities or Christianity.
Cardini deals with these estates, concentrated in the Middle Ages (characters V-XV), the historical period that led to the sambenito “Edad Oscura”, when it was not, except that we are forced to think “obscure” any thought or contribution that pursues what is now commonplace. Something called an “anachronism”.
In the Palace of AstronomersMoller returns to this previous “Dark Media Dark” to deal with the XVI century in which he arranged the title “Scientific Revolution”and it was at this time that the foundations of modern science were felt in the 17th century.
But instead of focusing as usual on the great heroes of that wonderful era in the history of science, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Harvey or Newton, Violet Moller takes a very different focus, a focus in five cities: Nuremberg, Louvain, Kassel, Hven and Prague, but the London house “Mortlake” of John Dee’s novel character as in a city which, as Moller writes, “is not on any map. Only one can visit the pages of extraña and Francis Bacon’s short novel”, “Atlantis”, “an unknown and magical land and civilized people”.
The “cultivated and civilized people” of these places form a great kaleidoscope who are the protagonists of Moller’s book: rich and powerful nobles who felt attracted to the mysteries of the cosmos, such as Guillermo de Hesse-Kassel, who became an important scholar and observer of the heavens, or the great collector and lover of esotericism, Rudolf II., who welcomed Tycho Brahe in Prague, who lost favor with the observatory expelled from his new Danish island.
We also find astronomers who, at the same time as compiling astronomical tables, are engaged in enterprises related to the firm, such as Regiomontano, who is from Nuremberg in the field. And artists like Durero, who, obsessed with the study and representation of nature, exchanged their subjects for natural curiosities (a coconut from India, a trozos of coral, flechas from bamboo…).
Those were still times when scientific activity was clearly defined, and those who cultivated it, scientists, seemed to be professionals who did not need patronage from the nobility of the land. Although we need more “cartridges”not always from the “public”.
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