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Contact:
Kerry Magruder
Email
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 Does
the flat-earth theme support a medieval
origin?
Do we use the woodcut to depict the charming
naivete of medievals who believed the Earth was
flat? So thought J.D. Bernal when he used a cropped
version to illustrate his popular survey of the
history of science (first image); and Daniel
Boorstin when he chose a colorized version as the
jacket illustration for his telling of The
Discoverers (second image).
"In medieval times there was a return
to the concept of a flat Earth and a dogmatism
about the crystalline celestial spheres, here
epitomized in a woodcut showing the machinery
responsible for their motion discovered by an
inquirer who has broken through the outer sphere
of fixed stars. Sixteenth century." J.D. Bernal,
Science in History, vol. 1 of The
Emergence of Science (4 vols)
There may be a twist to the story of our woodcut
after all. Its provenance is notoriously difficult
to track down. Despite Bernal's typical if
erroneous caption, the illustration credits at the
end of his book offer no traceable source for his
cropped-version of the woodcut.
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Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers
(dust-jacket illustration;
attributed to a 16th-century woodcut by the
Bettmann Archive)
Although the jacket of Boorstin's bestseller,
The Discoverers, attributes this version to
an "early 16th century woodcut," it cites only the
Bettmann Archive for its source (so evidently they
didn't know where the original for their image came
from either). Where did they get it? The
Discoverers does not say. This image is cropped
like Bernal's, but not with identical boundaries,
so it does not seem to have been copied directly
from Bernal and then colorized. Boorstin himself
does not discuss the picture, but he does
perpetuate the erroneous myth about medieval belief
in a flat Earth.
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So
where did this woodcut come from?
Thanks to books like Bernal's and Boorstin's,
many people still do not know that most medieval
people knew the Earth was spherical, at least
roughly spherical, and they also knew roughly how
large it was. That knowledge became part of an
academic cliche about the differences between
astronomy and cosmology, since either science could
prove the same conclusion (i.e., the sphericity of
the earth) from its own (different) principles.
Understanding of the sphericity of the earth in the
middle ages reached beyond the educated elite; it
permeated aspects of popular medieval culture such
as almanacs, feudal ceremonies, sermon
illustrations, and cathedral iconography. It is a
myth, popularized by in part by Washington Irving,
that Columbus had to debate with scholars who
thought the Earth was flat. (Columbus actually
argued that the Earth was smaller than
others knew it to be.) The modern belief that
medieval people did not know the Earth is spherical
is the real "flat-earth myth." See Jeffrey
Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth
(New York: Praeger, 1991), for a brief yet
judicious account (with penetrating questions about
the persistence of the myth today--e.g., on what
basis have most of us believed the idea that
medieval people thought the Earth was flat?).
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 documentary
evidence for medieval understanding of the shape of
the earth...
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Next: A thought experiment from
medieval physics?
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