Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
The fact that Aristotle was a "round-earther" and the Europeans of
Columbus's time were mostly "flat-earthers" says a lot about how ephemeral
such knowledge can be.
They were not! Even in medieval times, very few educated Europeans doubted
that the earth is round. This is one of my pet peeves. Only a handful of
medieval scholars are known to have believed the world is flat, and the two
most prominent ones were both considered crackpots by their contemporaries.
Not a single member of the European elite -- the kings, admirals, map
makers, and other top brass -- opposed Columbus on this basis. They all
said the earth is round but it is much bigger than Columbus has calculated.
They were right, of course. If he had not bumped into America, Columbus
would have run out of provisions long before he reached the Orient.
There is an excellent book about this subject, Inventing the Flat Earth
(Praeger, 1991) and a good review of the book in the New York Times. Here
are some quotes:
New York Times, April 25, 1992
Beliefs
Peter Steinfels
Myth turned inside out: exploring the legend of the flat-Earth theory and
Columbus.
The belief in a flat Earth is a modern invention, a myth that reveals a
good deal about the underlying dogma of an age claiming to be scientific.
Only in the last century did the idea spread that when Christopher Columbus
set sail he was challenging a belief, entrenched in theology and enforced
by the church that the world was flat. That belief, the story goes, was
questioned only by a rebellious or scientifically advanced minority.
None of the documents from Columbuss day or the early accounts of his
labors suggest that there was any debate about the roundness of the Earth.
Yet by the end of the 19th century, the drama of Columbus versus the
flat-Earth believers had become a staple of textbooks.
Even today, although many standard histories have corrected the error, the
idea that Christiandom had suppressed or forgotten the Greek philosophers
discovery of a spherical world remains a fixture in educated minds and
regularly re-emerges in the works of eminent scholars. . . .
[Does this begin to sound familiar? - JR]
How did such a palpable error arise, and why did it persist? . . .
The book, Inventing the Flat Earth (Praeger, 1991), is more than an
investigation into a quirk of intellectual history. It effectively reverses
an old question. Instead of asking why medieval thinkers so dogmatically
insisted that the Earth was flat, it says we must ask why modern thinkers,
in the face of so much contrary evidence, dogmatically insisted on a
flat-Earth consensus that never existed. . . .
Oddly enough, a major source of that mythology was the genial American
creator of Rip van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. In 1828, Washington Irving
published a novelistic biography of Columbus featuring a fictitious
confrontation between the brave explorer and Inquisition-ridden clerics and
professors from the University of Salamanca. They pelted Columbus with
quotations from the Bible and church fathers to prove that the Earth was
flat. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his biography of Columbus, calls the episode
pure moonshine. . . .
Myths frequently operate to confirm the myth-makers claims of superiority,
to lend legitimacy to their ouster of other groups from political or
cultural power. The flat-Earth mythology, it turns out, is not a case of
medieval certainty about the literal truth of the Bible. It arose as an
expression of modernitys faith in scientific progress. It dramatized the
claim that the intelligence of a religious past could be dismissed in the
name of a scientific present. . . .
- Jed
