Myth of the flat Earth

"[5] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".

onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving.

[7][2] James Hannam wrote: The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching.

[9]French dramatist Cyrano de Bergerac in chapter 5 of his Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (published two years posthumously in 1657) quotes Augustine of Hippo as saying "that in his day and age the Earth was as flat as a stove lid and that it floated on water like half of a sliced orange.

"[10] Robert Burton, in his The Anatomy of Melancholy[11] wrote: Virgil, sometime bishop of Salzburg (as Aventinus anno 745 relates), by Bonifacius, bishop of Mentz, was therefore called in question, because he held antipodes (which they made a doubt whether Christ died for) and so by that means took away the seat of hell, or so contracted it, that it could bear no proportion to heaven, and contradicted that opinion of Austin [St. Augustine], Basil, Lactantius, that held the Earth round as a trencher (whom Acosta and common experience more largely confute) but not as a ball.Thus, there is evidence that accusations of Flat Earthism, though somewhat whimsical (Burton ends his digression with a legitimate quotation of Augustine: "Better doubt of things concealed, than to contend about uncertainties, where Abraham's bosom is, and hell fire"[11]), were used to discredit opposing authorities several centuries before the 19th.

[15] In Book II, Chapter IV of this biography, Irving gave a largely fictional account of the meetings of a commission established by the Spanish sovereigns to examine Columbus's proposals.

The Spanish scholars may not have known the exact distance to the east coast of Asia, but they believed that it was significantly further than Columbus's projection; and this was the basis of the criticism in Spain and Portugal, whether academic or among mariners, of the proposed voyage.

[26] As Draper and White's metaphor of ongoing warfare between the scientific progress of the Enlightenment and the religious obscurantism of the "Dark Ages" became widely accepted, it spread the idea of medieval belief in the flat Earth.

[27] The widely circulated engraving of a man poking his head through the firmament surrounding the Earth to view the Empyrean, executed in the style of the 16th century, was published in Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888, p. 163).

[30] Previous editions of Thomas Bailey's The American Pageant stated that "The superstitious sailors [of Columbus's crew] ... grew increasingly mutinous ... because they were fearful of sailing over the edge of the world"; however, no such historical account is known.

[31] A 2009 survey of schoolbooks from Austria and Germany showed that the Flat Earth myth became dominant in the second half of the 20th century and persists in most historical textbooks written for German and Austrian schools.

[32] As recently as 1983, Daniel Boorstin published a historical survey, The Discoverers, which presented the Flammarion engraving on its cover and proclaimed that "from AD 300 to at least 1300 ... Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so ... scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers.

This narrative has been repeated even in academic circles, such as in April 2016, when Boston College theology professor and ex-priest Thomas Groome erroneously stated that "the Catholic Church never said the Earth is round, but just stopped saying it was flat.

In Walt Disney's 1963 animation The Sword in the Stone, wizard Merlin (who has traveled into the future) explains to a young Arthur that "man will discover in centuries to come" that the Earth is round, and rotates.

American historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traced the nineteenth-century origins of what he called the Flat Error to a group of anticlerical French scholars, particularly to Antoine-Jean Letronne and, indirectly, to his teachers Jean-Baptiste Gail and Edme Mentelle.

Mentelle had described the Middle Ages as twelve ignorant centuries of "profound night", a theme exemplified by the flat-Earth myth in Letronne's "On the Cosmological Opinions of the Church Fathers".

[39] Historian of science Edward Grant makes a case that the flat-Earth myth developed in the context of a more general assault upon the Middle Ages and upon scholastic thought, which can be traced back to Francesco Petrarch in the fourteenth century.

Furthermore, he was a strong advocate of Darwinism, saw religious figures as the main opponents of Darwinian evolution, and sought to project that conflict between theology and science back through the entire Christian Era.

[44] White made this concern manifest in the preface to his History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom, where he explained the lack of advanced instruction in many American colleges and universities as a consequence of their "sectarian character".