Great book. Shows how ideology and prejudice dictates most peoples view of the Middle Ages. Also traces how Protestant rhetoric inadvertantly helped to discredit Christianity for later generations.
Russell points out the the believe that people thought that the world was flat and that the "Burning Times" occured have become part of the modern cycle of myths, to the extent that they are assumed knowledge.

This was an engaging and fairly thorough (though concise) account of the Flat Error: the erroneous view that medieval European scholars thought the Earth was flat, and that Columbus somehow proved them wrong. The modern version of this myth was essentially concocted and spread in the 19th century (by Washington Irving, John William Draper, and others), but this book considers the Flat Error's roots in earlier centuries as well.

This book is about what the author calls the "Flat Error", that is: the mistaken popular perception that, at the time of Columbus, educated people in Europe thought the Earth was flat, and one of the navigator's achievements was to prove them wrong. This is, of course, not truth, and the knowledge that the Earth is spherical was never seriously questioned among educated people since the Greeks first deduced it in the fourth century BCE, not in Antiquity, not in the Middle Ages, not latter. The book describes the process by which this myth was slowly built, chiefly during the nineteen and early twentieth centuries, and the reason for it, which was basically the need to downgrade the image of religious thinkers of the past (and in the Medieval times all European thinkers were, in one way or another, religious or religious connected) by some of the intervenients in the science/religion conflicts erupting with great strength in those times due to the secularization of the Western mind and to the conflicts directly connected to Darwin's theory of evolution. A very interesting book.

Fine book on correcting the idea that Christianity ever promoted the idea of flat earth nonsense...my only criticism is the book is to short!

Cover designer unknown. Very short at 77 pages of text, and nearly 30 pages of notes. JB Russell was very nearly a mentor to me, but retired just as I sent him an inquiry to study under him. I did receive a very nice letter.

Russell was a medievalist, and so spends a great deal of time defending the Dark Ages as actually not very distinct from other ages that accused them of believing in a flat earth. He calls this the Flat Error.

There seemed to have been less than a half dozen church fathers that asserted it. Some were ignored due to unrelated charges of heresy or were untranslated into western languages until the 28th century, which means they had no impact on medieval thought.

An important distinction is that the shape of the earth was not the same argument as centric its. Nor was the religious rejection of the antipodes that is, people genetically distinct from the line of Adam, the same as the possibility of other geographic regions in the 'bottom' of the sphere model.

The Flat Error was used by progressive modernists to shore up their confidence and superiority to past civilization. As a fellow Middle Ages fan, this was a good and informative read into scientific biases over time.

You've probably read, or been told, that the church (and pretty much everyone else) believed that the earth was flat, that if you sailed too far west, you would fall off the earth, until Christopher Columbus made his momentous voyage in 1492. Turns out it's not true. With the exception of two eccentrics, the church, and everyone else, believed that the world is a sphere, from at least the 5th century BC on. Russell has done his homework and given us the well-documented results. Turns out, the flat earth myth was mostly devised and propagated by "men of science" who didn't like the church or anything it stood for. Charging the church with holding to the theory of a flat earth was a means to an end--the humiliation of religion and the exaltation of science. Recommended.

Recommended by St. Abraham's of Santa Cruz, CA
Here's a summary of the book by the author:
http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/r...