While Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps best known as an artist in the popular imagination, he was also scientist and engineer, and well-versed in the most up-to-date knowledge of his day in the 15th century. Da Vinci’s expertise did not spring up from nothing, but instead built upon the remarkable creativity of the previous thousand years of medieval art and science. While the Middle Ages is at times dismissed as the “Dark Ages”, this talk would instead argue that the medieval period was in fact a “Light Ages” in which foundational scientific, philosophical, and artistic ideas were invented and tested. This paved the way for the remarkable transformations of modernity in the “Age of Discovery”, in which people from across the globe encountered one another, in both positive and negative ways, in a complex web of connection, contagion, and exchange.
Dr. Courtney Luckhardt is an early medieval social and cultural historian at the University of Southern Mississippi, with a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, The Charisma of Distant Places, explored migration through an examination of religious movement to reveal the diversity of religious travel. My current research uses Digital Humanities tools, including virtual reality, to recover the histories of early medieval migrants and diverse communities in 9th century Spain to understand ideas about power, economics, identity, and mobility during the transformation of the Roman world in the global Middle Ages.
