Thomas Woods continues his sledgehammer blows against bigoted views of the Middle Ages. This time, he points out that people in the Middle Ages didn't think the earth was flat. Link. Excerpts:
David Lindberg, who is among the most accomplished modern historians of science, corrects the record:
In the usual story, theoretical dogma regarding a flat earth had to be overcome by empirical evidence for its sphericity. The truth is that the sphericity of the earth was a central feature of theoretical dogma as it came down to the Middle Ages ”“ so central that no amount of contrary theoretical or empirical argumentation could conceivably have dislodged it.
European monarchs' initial hesitation to support Columbus's proposed expedition had nothing to do with the idea that the world was flat and Columbus might fall off the edge. It was precisely the accuracy of their knowledge of the earth that made them skeptical: they correctly concluded that Columbus had drastically underestimated the size of the earth, and that therefore he and his men would starve to death before they made it to the Indies. (Thankfully for them, of course, the Americas, which no one knew about, fortuitously appeared in between.)
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The origins and story of the myth can be found in a useful little book (exclusive of notes and index, it is only 77 pages long) by Jeffrey Burton Russell called Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1991).
Russell identifies several versions of the myth. The most absurd, since it shows no acquaintance with ancient Greek knowledge at all, contends that no one believed the earth was spherical until the age of discovery proved it. Another version admits that the Greeks knew of the earth's shape but alleges that this knowledge was lost, or perhaps deliberately suppressed during ”“ you guessed it ”“ the ignorant Middle Ages. Still another version has it that practically everyone, throughout all of history, believed that the earth was flat, with the exception of a few brilliant minds here and there like Aristotle and Ptolemy.
By Boorstin's time, says Russell, the myth "had been so firmly established that it was easier to lie back and believe it: easier not to check the sources; easier to fit the consensus; easier to fit the preconceived worldview; easier to avoid the discipline needed in order to dislodge a firmly held error." When Andrew Dickson White repeated the myth in the late nineteenth century, he based his position (as we can see in his notes) not on the original sources, of which he was largely ignorant, but on secondary sources that peddled the myth themselves.
Russell identifies two nineteenth-century villains as the primary sources of the myth: the American writer Washington Irving and (more significant) the French historian and polemicist Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787”“1848). Irving's semi-historical, semi-fictional writing often blurred the distinction between fact and fiction, a distinction that was likewise unclear to his readers. Determined to portray Columbus as a romantic hero, Irving included in his History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) a fictional account of a council that allegedly lectured Columbus with the theories of Lactantius. The heroic Columbus, of course, resolutely resisted this attempt to persuade him of all this medieval foolishness.
As for Letronne, he received much of his academic training from men who propagated the standard Enlightenment canard about the ignorance of the Middle Ages. Although he conceded that a few theologians knew the earth was a sphere, Letronne put forth the idea that the vast bulk were foolish believers in a flat earth. The idea of the flat earth, he said, was the dominant one in Europe until the time of Columbus.
