Before Gravity and the -ly Disease

In trying to write historical fiction, however loosely it's based on actual history, is requiring some severe mental gymnastics on my part. A find myself, time and again, wondering just why the character thinks a certain way, and just how much of that is my prejudice. It helps to argue points with a friend, so thanks T___ for that.

So lets take one case in point. There's a fairly silly (to me and to skeptics in general) theological discussion about just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but it helps to illustrate that I'm writing in a time before the concept of gravity was even formalized. To my characters, gravity doesn't exist.

Let me reiterate that:

GRAVITY DOESN'T EXIST

Put that in your head for a moment and imagine living in a world where you don't understand why objects stay on the floor, or why the clouds, which you do not know are water vapor but are instead apparently solid objects with mass, float. Why doesn't water flow up hill? You don't understand things like species and genus and phylum. Infectious disease isn't a matter of mutating pathogens that can be isolated and engineered against, but tailored curses by a distant God with a simonist between you and him. A wolf and a dog are similar not because they're from the same stock, but because God Almighty made them that way. (I often wonder if dog breeders were the first people to speculate about natural selection.) It's a mindset so alien to me that I have difficulty imagining it.

At some point does writing about pre-enlightenment man qualify for John W. Campbell's version of an alien, that being something that thinks as well as or better than a man, but isn't one? Ah, that prompted a whole thirty minutes on the intertubes reading what people have said about Campbell, which led me to an old article by Moorcock. Politics and fiction are such happy bedmates.

Also it appears I have the dreaded -ly disease. That affliction of bad fiction writers where every possible -ly adverb is and should be used, in one case four in a single paragraph in my latest draft. Ye gods and little fishes... As much as I know I shouldn't edit while creating, just wow.

This site explains it quite well if you don't understand my cryptic reference.

Now, I must quickly turn things about and rapidly edit my work so that I may more accurately bring good prose happily to light.

Or not...