×

Myth-Busters: Essentially No One in the Middle Ages Believed the Earth Was Flat

flat-earthColumbus Day is a good opportunity to dispense with a popular myth. Thomas Woods has a nice overview about the myth here.

A more in-depth look can be found in the book, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians.

Update: Fred Sanders’s comment below is worth posting here:

A little exposure to actual medieval thought, through primary text rather than commentary, blows the flat earth myth away. On page 1 of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (that is, in the first article of the first question of the first part), he casually mentions the round earth on the way to proving something doctrinal: “the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e., abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.” Thomas died in 1274. Dante’s whole Divine Comedy only works with a round earth; Dante died in 1320.

Sophomores in the Torrey Honors Institute here at Biola read that stuff, and two lines of original text melt away years of commentary and propaganda.

LOAD MORE
Loading