It is this question that Ayoush Lazikani – a literary scholar rather than a historian of science – sets out to address in The Medieval Moon. Lazikani draws attention to the fact that medieval attitudes to the moon have hitherto been neglected, in comparison with ancient speculations and the discoveries of the Enlightenment era. Yet The Medieval Moon delivers far more than just a thematic overview of the moon that bridges disciplinary siloes. The European occult tradition, for example, could not have existed without the lunar magic of the Islamic world mediated via Umayyad Spain. The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and BlessingAyoush LazikaniYale University Press, 272pp, £20Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)Francis Young’s latest book is Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2025).