Inventing the flat earth.
This book was one I heard about last year when one of our lecturers for medieval history mentioned it in passing. Being rather bored during the week, I went looking for it. It’s by a guy called Jeffery Burton Russell and the edition I have dates from 1991. It’s well worth having a look for if your into medieval history or into how myths can spread - rather in the same way as the ‘wiped off the map’ comment from the Iranian president has spread despite the way it appearently never happened. The isbn for this edition is 027595904x.
But what’s the book about exactly and is it any good?
Well, the book itself deals with the idea that says that people in the ‘middle ages’ up until Christopher Columbus believed that the earth was a disk and that you could sail off the edge. In the telling of the story, the ’superstitious, cowardly Catholic Church’ forced people into believing this idea despite the fact that the Greeks and Romans had, centuries earlier pretty much proved that the earth was a sphere. This continued until Columbus sailed to America ‘proving’ that the earth was round.
And that’s appearently what everyone believes, even though there’s no actual documents or other evidence to show that people in the ‘middle ages’ actually believed this.
The point of the book is partly to deconstruct this theory, and secondly to show how these ideas can spread when there’s a group of people pushing the idea. In this book they show you the who and why - basically humanists and scientists and darwinists who pushed this idea when science and religion came into conflict - such as when teachers were prosecuted for teaching evolution.
Whats of most interest is how this became fact - namely people not checking sources. Or, in some cases accepting others assesment of sources as fact and not checking those.
As an aside, one of our lecturers pointed out that there’s a quote from a famous person he knows that person said, but he can’t find a book with the quote. He used it in one of his books and now references his own work when using that quote. He still dosen’t know where the quote originally came from. And basically, what this book is about is a large number of people doing the exact same thing but on a much bigger scale.
The book itself is only 80 pages long, with 20 of footnotes. Obviously, I haven’t checked whether the story is right (the cardinal sin the book warns against) and I’m accepting the word of my lecturer and the author of the book that whats said is actually the case. Shows that history repeats itself I guess.