The
myth of the flat Earth is a modern misconception that Earth was widely believed to be
flat rather than
spherical during the
Middle Ages in Europe.
[1][2]
During the
Early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint, which had been first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent, despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior of
Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych
The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.
[3]
According to
Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."
[4] 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".
[5]
Historian
Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. 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.
[2][6][7]
please pack your knives and go
