Review : Middle-aged planets

With 60 footnotes to a chapter, confining the text to a mere 14 lines on one
page, reading Edward Grant’s Planets, Stars & Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos,
1200-1687 (Cambridge University Press, £19.95/$32.95 ISBN 0 521
56509 X) is a formidable task. But if you’re keen to understand the history of
ideas about the cosmos, then this paperback is the one. Here you can find, for
example, a debate on the implications of infinite space for the notion of God,
and whether space is a vacuum.