Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians [Paperback]

Jeffrey Burton Russell (Author), David Noble (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1991 | ISBN-10: 027595904X | ISBN-13: 978-0275959043

Neither Christopher Columbus nor his contemporaries thought the earth was flat. Yet this curious illusion persists today, firmly established with the help of the media, textbooks, teachers—even noted historians. Inventing the Flat Earth is Russell's attempt to set the record straight. He begins with a discussion of geographical knowledge in the Middle Ages, examining what Columbus and his contemporaries actually did believe, and then moves to a look at how the error was first propagated in the 1820s and 1830s and then snowballed to outrageous proportions by the late 19th century. But perhaps the most intriguing focus of the book is the reason why we allow this error to persist. Do we prefer to languish in a comfortable and familiar error rather than exert the effort necessary to discover the truth? This uncomfortable question is engagingly answered.

Inventing the Flat Earth is Jeffrey Burton Russell's attempt to set the record straight. He begins with a discussion of geographical knowledge in the Middle Ages, examining what Columbus and his contemporaries actually did believe, and then moves to a look at how the error was first propagated in the 1820s and 1830s—including how noted writers Washington Irving and Antoinne-Jean Letronne were among those responsible. He shows how later day historians followed these original mistakes, and how this snowball effect grew to outrageous proportions in the late nineteenth century, when Christians opposed to Darwinism were labelled as similar to Medieval Christians who (allegedly) thought the earth was flat. But perhaps the most intriguing focus of the book is the reason why we allow this error to persist. Do we prefer to languish in a comfortable and familiar error rather than exert the effort necessary to discover the truth? This uncomfortable question is engagingly answered, and includes a discussion about the implications of this for historical knowledge and scholarly honesty.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Inventing the Flat Earth...is a jewel of a book that provides important new insights into the way historians have interpreted Columbus's achievement."-The New York Times Book Review

Book Description

Inventing the Flat Earth…is a jewel of a book that provides important new insights into the way historians have interpreted Columbus's achievement. The New York Times Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Praeger (January 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 027595904X
• ISBN-13: 978-0275959043
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.4 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #211,740 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a good statement of the obvious June 19, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

This is a neat little book, almost too short a book, in which Jeffrey Russell aims to make clear to a popular audience what professional medieval historians have known for years: that the cherished modern notion that all medieval minds thought the earth was flat is simply false. Yet setting the record straight is not Russell's only concern, for in the second half of the book he engages in a historiographical account of how nineteenth century writers invented the notion.
Anyone familiar medieval intellectual history has encountered innumerable references to the spherical earth. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Roger Bacon, writers of travel narratives like John Mandeville, and many others all assumed sphericity (Aquinas, writing around 1250, even offers the statement "the world is round" as an example of something so obvious it needs no proof). In this respect, trying to "prove" that medieval intellectuals did not think the earth was flat is a bit challenging-how does one begin? Russell does a pretty good job, beginning with the controversy over Columbus' voyage (which had nothing to do with the shape of the earth, but was about its circumference), and working backward in a vain attempt to find evidence of flat earth belief. In the process he comes across only five indisputable "flat earthers," at least two of whom were ridiculed during the Middle Ages for being so silly as to be unaware the earth was a sphere. The main culprit is Cosmas Indicopleustes, who thought the earth was flat and beneath a vaulted heaven shaped like a tent. Most people who accuse all medieval people of being "flat-earthers" rest their case on Cosmas, but he was unknown in western Europe (since there was no Latin translation of his Greek work), and at least two Greek-speaking scholars during the Middle Ages dismissed him as a quack.
After making relatively short work of the actual geographical knowledge of medieval Europe, Russell charts the progress of the myth of the medieval flat earth, and traces it from the late 18th and early 19th century to the present (with a focus on the mid to late 19th). In this section of the book the author poses some fundamental questions about how and why history is written, and about the very notion of "modernity." For the general reader, this section may hold less appeal than the opening chapters on medieval geography.
The book is not perfect. Short shrift is given to flat earth traditions outside of medieval Christianity, including the Near Eastern tradition that accounts for some language suggesting a flat earth in the Old Testament (such references would not have troubled medieval theologians, who did not necessarily privilege the literal sense of scripture). Also Russell should have made more of the association of the medieval belief in the flat earth (myth) with the medieval belief in the geocentric universe (fact). The acceptance of the idea that the Middle Ages believed in the flat earth has been abetted by the ecclesiastical opposition towards Galileo and other early modern heliocentrists, and Russell brushes this aside too quickly. Occasionally, Russell wears his own religious beliefs on his sleeve, and this will discomfit some readers.
In general, however, this is a good attempt to discuss medieval geographical knowledge and question our assumptions about modernity. For some of my friends this book has been pretty bewildering, since the myth Russell destroys is so firmly ingrained in our culture. It is nice to see more popular books, like Lies My Teacher Told Me, continue to attack the myth.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A good introduction to the history of geography August 4, 2005

By Endre Fodstad

Format:Paperback

Russel has written an excellent introduction to the history of the perception of the sphericity of earth. As most historians of medieval thought already know and agree upon, the view of the sphericity of earth was more or less common knowledge among the learned people of the middle ages (and for the reviewer who points to the Hereford mappae mundi as "proof" of otherwise, he can't have read Russels book very thoroughly - the Hereford map, a wonderful work of art, is a classical T-O mappae mundi, a map meant for religious use, not navigation. The stupidity of such statements would be similar to believe that the Rand McNally 2005 US Road Atlas shows that modern americans believe that there are no other continents because it doesn't show them in this, also very flat, map).

Some aspects of the book are lacking, though. Russel goes so much into the minority beliefs of Cosmas and Lactantius that these two atypical writers occupy more space in his book than the vast majority of medieval and ancient writers who took the sphericity of the earth for granted from their observations and corpus of learning. Also, he doesn't really discuss why modern people (post-1900) haven't revised the popular view - his hypothesis that the progressivist worldview that predominates today makes people WANT to believe medieval academics to be stupid because it fits the idea of constant development is probably valid, but he does not show this sufficiently.

On the other hand, his bibliography and source listings are excellent, and are the main reasons I had for buying his book.

While I really do not profess to know Russels' religious views - he might certainly be a christian apologist - this does not matter. Letting a foolish contrafactual myth stand in the face of all evidence in textbooks and the popular mind has little to do with apologism and more to do with correcting the prejudices of the modern age.

In the end, I'd like to quote a little tidbit from the Norse Middle ages Russel probably does not know of. The "King's Mirror", a secular book written for the education of younger sons of norwegian nobility of the 13th century, has the following to say on the shape of the earth:

"Take a burning candle and put it in a big room. Then suspend an apple from the roof near to the flame - so near the apple becomes hot. Then, it will almost put in shadow the one half of the room or even more. But if you hang it by the wall, it does not warm up, and the candle light the entire room, and the shadow of the apple on the wall is barely the size of the apple itself.

Now you must know from this that the earth's sphere is like a ball, and does not at all places come as close to the sun as others. Where the rounded part of it comes closer to the sun's path, it will be hottest. And in some of the lands that lie directly against its beams, one cannot live"

While this quote certainly shows that norwegian high medieval nobility had some incorrect ideas of the movement of the sun and the earth (as elsewhere, due to their lack of observational instruments), it cannot be disputed that they agreed that the world was a sphere.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction to historiography July 6, 2003

By Craig Schamp

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Christopher Columbus was a radical who thought that the earth was round while everyone around him believed the earth was flat. That's the history that most of us are taught, but it's wrong. The fallacy of this view and the intellectual fraud that perpetrated it are explained in Jeffrey Burton Russell's short book.

There were a few medieval "flat earthers," to be sure. Russell explains, though, that no one of any stature was influenced whatsoever by them, and especially not by Cosmas Indicopleustes, who has been given undue attention by writers eager to hold him up as typical of the period.

The ancient Greeks believed that the earth was a globe. Modern historians invented, and in some cases continue to teach, that this knowledge was suppressed by the Catholic church in the middle ages. According to Russell, the church did not stand athwart history yelling "Stop!" Augustine, Origen, and Bede, as well as other Christian intellectuals, acknowledged the sphericity of the earth.

People living in the middle ages, if they thought about such matters at all, could see that the earth was likely a sphere. After all, the hull of a ship disappeared over the horizon before the mast did. The stars also provided evidence that the world was not flat. Russell convincingly shows that the concept of a "dark age," during which the ancient Greek and Roman knowledge was lost, is pure fantasy and was promulgated by modern historians in part to make their own work at "reinterpreting" the classics seem more profound. The "Flat Error," as Russell calls it, was amplified over time as some intellectuals repeated the claim of earlier secondary sources without checking the primary sources for the evidence.