Heilbron. J.L.. THE SUN IN THE CHURCH: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories. Harvard UP 1999

A fascinating topic - the meridians designed into church floors with openings high up (solar disks) to allow the sun's image to fall on them at precise moments. A historian of science, the author has a good grasp of the problems of calculating time and hours and the like. He mars his book by a condescension to the astronomers. ("We moderns know so much more") and what appear to be obligatory sneers at the Church. (The publisher had (possibly still has?) a fund established in the 18th Century "to confute the damnable errors of the Roman Church"). It is too bad that some Jews have picked up this Anglican virus, which serves no purpose but to denigrate.
Prof. Heilbron evidently has problems with his own background. A Jew sneering at religion is an unhappy creature. But the scientific parts are good. The book merits a place in a library with its sarcasms deleted, its errors donec corrigentur ("Bellarmine lived on garlic and water" - snicker, snicker). And its style a bit refined ("the basic qualitative conception of a planetary system ...". What does that mean? "Religiosity" - ? and the like).