A science historian, specialist in the Middle Ages, and a Renaissance specialist have just deconstructed a myth concerning this period of history. The explanations of Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon.
franceinfo: Today, we dive into the Middle Ages. Two historians have just deconstructed a myth: at the time, we didn’t think the Earth was flat?
Mathilde Fontez: Oh no. It is, however, a well-established myth. And which rustles today, while a movement of “platists” defends the idea that the Earth is not round, but flat. A poll even showed last year that 9% of the French believe that it is possible.
While there is of course no doubt …
To believe that the Earth is flat in the 21st century, it takes a lot of effort: we have to reject images of space, all our travel experiences, physical theories. Not easy. But what these two researchers show, a science historian specializing in the Middle Ages and a specialist in the Renaissance, is that the evidence was there in the Middle Ages.
The idea of a round Earth was in fact already installed. This period of history had nothing of the obscurantist parenthesis that we imagine. And the researchers also show that the Catholic Church did not oppose this idea, as we often hear.
So how did the myth come about?
He began much later, with Voltaire, in the 18th century. Returning to the source texts, the researchers found that the philosopher made an amalgamation between the words of Lactantius, a Christian of the second century, who is one of the few to have left writings which affirm that the Earth is flat, but which was in the minority, and Saint Augustine, who is much more famous.
From there, Voltaire asserts that all of the Founding Fathers of the Church shared the idea that the Earth was flat. And that they have imposed this doctrine on all of Christendom. Voltaire is a believer, but he is very critical of the Church. And he creates this myth to attack it in some way. And that’s where the legend of Christopher Columbus comes in.
What is Christopher Columbus doing in this story?
It was with him that the myth really took hold, in the 19th century. Via a biography written by a Protestant American, Washington Irving, who invented from scratch a scene where Christopher Columbus would have faced the resistance of high representatives of the Spanish Church. And that, too, turns out to be completely false.
The resistance was quite simply financial. The Church has not opposed the concept of the Round Earth. She admitted it totally. There were already measurements of the radius of the Earth, at the time of Christopher Columbus. And then, all this amplified during the XIXth century: Protestants, laymen add more to denounce the hold of the Church on scientific knowledge.
The myth continues, with variations: sometimes, it is not Christopher Columbus but it is Magellan, or Galileo. All of this describes a Dark Middle Ages that would have preceded the advances of modern science, which is therefore revealed today to be completely false.
And all that, at the start, is Voltaire’s fault so …
Again the fault of Voltaire!
The Flat Earth: Genealogy of a Misconception by Sylvie Nony and Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, published by Belles Lettres (October 8, 2021).