The story often told about Hypatia of Alexandria was that she was a great scientist, rationalist and scholar who was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians who hated her knowledge and learning, with her death ushering in the Dark Ages. But this story is mostly nonsense and the real history is far more complex and much more interesting. Contrary to the myths, she was not a modern-style scientist, she was far from an atheist or what we would regard as a rationalist and her murder was due to the complex city politics of her day, not some hatred of science and scholarship.

Further Reading

Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Works” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy, pp. 37-80, (Oxford, 2016)

Thony Christie, “Hypatia – What do we Really Know?”, Renaissance Mathematicus, 2019

Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, (Harvard, 1995)

Peter Gainsford, “Cosmos #3 – Hypatia and the Library”, Kiwi Hellenist, 2018

Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (John Hopkins, 1997)

Spencer Alexander McDaniel, “Who was Hypatia Really?”, Tales of Times Forgotten, 2018

Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, (Oxford, 2017)

Bryan J. Whitfield, “The Beauty of Reasoning: A Reexamination of Hypatia of Alexandria”, The Mathematics Educator, Vol.6:1 (1995), pp. 14-21