Myth of the Flat Earth

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The Myth of the Flat Earth or Flat Earth mythology refers to the modern belief that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical. During the early Middle Ages, many scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead.

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of “flat earth darkness” among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology."^[1] David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers also write: "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference."^[2]

In 1945 the Historical Association listed "Columbus and the Flat Earth Conception" second of 20 in its first-published pamphlet on common errors in history.^[3]

Note: this phrase refers specifically to claims that flat-Earth beliefs were prevalent during the medieval period. It does not address the issue of flat-Earth beliefs prior to the discovery of the Earth's sphericity by the Greeks, including references to such beliefs within the Bible and other ancient literature^[4].

[edit] Origin

The 19th century was a period in which the perception of an antagonism between religion and science was especially strong. The disputes surrounding the Darwinian revolution contributed to the birth of the conflict thesis^[1], a view of history according to which any interaction between religion and science almost inevitably would lead to open hostility, with religion usually taking the part of the aggressor against new scientific ideas.^[5] During this time, the conception of a European "Dark Age" gave much more prominence to the Flat Earth model than it ever possessed historically.

The first accounts of the legend were traced to the 1830s. In 1828 Washington Irving wrote the work of historical fiction The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. The book was confused by many as providing an actual historical account of Columbus' life. As a recourse to make his romance more compelling, Irving "...invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a 'simple mariner,' appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed, according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate." There was indeed a meeting in Salamanca, but Irving's account for what happened there was entirely fictional.^[6]

A few years later, in 1834, Antoine-Jean Letronne, a French academic of strong antireligious ideas, misrepresented the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers.^[6] Then, In 1837, the English philosopher of science William Whewell first identified, in his History of the Inductive Sciences, two minimally significant characters named Lactantius (245-325, also mocked by Copernicus' in De revolutionibus of 1543, as someone who speaks quite childishly about the Earth's shape, when he mocks those who declared that the Earth has the form of a globe) and Cosmas Indicopleustes, who wrote his "Christian Topography” in 547-549. Whewell pointed to them as evidence of a medieval belief in a Flat Earth, and other historians quickly followed him, even though it was hard to find other examples.^[1]

The widely circulated woodcut of a man poking his head through the firmament of a flat Earth to view the mechanics of the spheres, executed in the style of the 16th century was executed by Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888, p. 163).^[7] The woodcut illustrates the statement in the text that a medieval missionary claimed that "he reached the horizon where the Earth and the heavens met", an anecdote that may be traced back to Voltaire. In its original form, the woodcut included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century; in later publications, some claiming that the woodcut did, in fact, date to the 16th century, the border was removed. Flammarion, according to anecdotal evidence, had commissioned the Flammarion woodcut himself.

In Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Russell (professor of history at University of California, Santa Barbara) claims that the Flat Earth theory is a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilization, especially that of the Middle Ages in Europe.^[8]

The popularized version of the misconception that people before the age of exploration believed that Earth was flat persists in the popular imagination, and is even repeated in some widely read textbooks. Previous editions of Thomas Bailey's The American Pageant stated that "The superstitious sailors [of Columbus' crew] ... grew increasingly mutinous...because they were fearful of sailing over the edge of the world"; however, no such historical account is known.^[9] Actually, sailors were probably among the first to know of the curvature of Earth from daily observations — seeing how shore landscape features (or masts of other ships) gradually descend/ascend near the horizon.

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] See also

• Flat Earth
• Scientific mythology
• T and O map