I am well aware of who he is.
I am well aware that he also has bought into stereotypes of the Middle Ages.
I’m with you. I respect Hanson greatly on the classics, but I’ve never considered him to be a Medievalist.
Question for you:
When I was a child, I learned this stereotype about the Middle Ages: You had to think all the traditional thoughts (Earth around the sun, Aristotle knew everything about natural sciences, Galen knew everything about medicine, etc.)
As I grew older and read more widely, I have seen little real evidence for this. I think the two big cases are Giordano Bruno and Galileo. Now, Bruno’s case is very complex and his embrace of heliocentricity seems to have been a relatively minor problem. His belief in many worlds was more threatening. Galileo was clearly a heliocentrist but he was treated very lightly by the Church.
In short, the idea that free thinking was almost unheard of during the medieval period seems extremely suspect to me. Do you agree? Hanson appears to disagree.