By Dava Sobel. An easy, informative read. I was most shocked by the incidental details of life in early 16th-century Italy. And some details of modern progress came home vis-a-vis the foundation of Quakerism just a few decades later: no gravitational theory; only recently invented pendulum clocks; and of course the Inquisition still at work in Italy declaring a heliocentric world heretical.
Kenneth Sutton's aide-mémoire