Flattening the Medieval Earth

: The Early Modern Origins of the “Flat Error”

Abstract

A wide-spread view claims the existence of a conflict between science and Christianity, where the latter is often accused of suppressing science. To bolster this accusation, it has wrongly been asserted that until the time of Columbus Christians viewed the earth as flat. This false assertion has been termed “flat error” in the influential book by Jeffrey B. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth. Columbus and Modern Historians (1991), who attributed its roots to the novelist Washington Irving and the scholar Jean Antoine Letronne in the early 19th century.
This thesis traces the roots of this false assertion further into the past, i.e. the early 17th century, highlighting as its context intra-Christian debates about the new geographical and astronomical discoveries which challenged core pillars of traditional Christian teaching. I have been able to identify Lactantius and Augustine as the two crucial figures around whose reception the debates on these topics revolved during the Renaissance. My historical analysis shows that not all early and medieval Christians believed in a flat Earth, but that their actual concern was the existence of hypothetical antipodean inhabitants, as this raised theological problems regarding the worldwide availability of salvation.
These two aspects were increasingly conflated by later readers when the nuances and contexts of cosmographical statements by early and medieval Christians became more and more simplified and misunderstood. This resulted in a progressively negative perception of early and medieval Christians, turning them from icons of wisdom into ignorant bigots who destroyed the superior ancient science. This distorted view and the wrong, anachronistic assumptions on which it is based, together with the decontextualised misrepresentation of arguments originally meant for internal Christian debates, led to the “flat error”, which continues to be deployed in popular anti-Christian polemical literature to support an allegedly inescapable conflict between science and Christianity.

Date of Award	25 Jan 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Jon Balserak (Supervisor) & Karla Pollmann (Supervisor)