Last night I walked in to a conversation between two of my office mates. I usually pay loose attention to what they talk about and sometimes even join the conversations, especially if it gives me an excuse to take a break from working on physics homework (or simulations, or theory work, or any kind of tedious calculation). In any case, one of the post-docs remarked to on of the graduate students that it's amazing how much we think we can know about history from the barest of samples. We see a court document or an official state (or Church) summons, or the surviving remnant of a letter between friends, and then try to convince ourselves that we know what life was like during that era.

It is, of course, a bit more sophisticated than that, as there are surely hundreds if not thousands of bits of information about life in one or another era. Some are written, like these letters or documents (and yes, even books), others are archeological. But how much do we really know, and how much is lost because we are missing that other piece of the puzzle--the first letter in the correspondence to which our letter was only a reply for example? And how much do we lose because of differences in culture and perspective, or because we tend to conflate entities which really are separate? Of this latter, there is certainly no shortage.

As a single example, one might think of one of the most popular myths of about western man during the Middle Ages--indeed, a myth about the Church herself. We have all heard that men though the earth was flat until Columbus disabused them of that theory, but this myth is pure rubbish. Men knew that the earth was a sphere since the time of the Greek city-states, and the Church certainly did not forget this; it was in the east--China--in which the flat-earth myth survived until the 17th century*, for the earth had been a sphere in the west since before the Church's founding. Nor did the Church ever teach that the earth is flat, though such teaching wouldn't be binding anyway, since the shape of the earth is neither a matter of morality nor of doctrine nor dogma. The question was never so much about the shape of the earth as about how large the ocean was, for Columbus meant not so much to discover the New World but to find a safer route to a different part of the Old World (specifically, to India, if memory serves, though with a stop in Japan).

What was known is that the ocean was very large; and correspondingly, that it was difficult if not impossible for men using the technology available at the time to transverse it. There was the problem of needing supplies for sailors, for one; there was also the problem of not knowing weather conditions in the mid-Atlantic, for another. What, indeed, would a sailor do if he found that the wind and currents slowed to nothing 1000 miles from Europe, leaving him effectively stranded? In any case, Columbus did brave the voyage, and we know the rest is history, for though he himself never circumnavigated the globe, it was eventually circumnavigated by Juan Sebastian Elcano by sea; and later by air and then even by space (Yuri Gagarin and then John Glenn).

This reticence towards long oceanic voyages during the Middle Ages does not alone cause for the "flat-earth' myth to arise. Behind any given myth there is usually at least some truth. Clement, Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Isodore, Albertus Magnus and Aquinas all explicitly or implicitly state that the earth is a globe, but there are those who have fancifully written otherwise. It is not the Christians of the Middle Ages (or even earlier) who have claimed that the earth is flat, but rather the atheists of the 19th century who have claimed it for them. It was in Andrew Dickenson White's "The Warfare of Science and Theology," published in 1896--and not St Thomas' Summa Theologica--in which one might look to find religious claims of a flat earth; or in John Darper's "The history of Conflict Between Science and Religion" rather than St Albert's treatises. Then there was Washington Irving's fictitious account of Columbus's voyage of discovery, in which Columbus' journey is opposed by a clergy which clings to the belief in a flat earth; in reality, this voyage was opposed primarily by people who knew that the earth was round but also very large, and who were not expecting him to find land midway between Spain and Japan.

It is, however, easy to see that both in Irving's fictitious tale and in the reality of history, there were people who were opposed to Columbus' journey. But not all opposition springs from a common source or from common reasons. The myth that the Church believed in a flat earth comes in large part because people have conflated the fiction with the fact, for the objections of real, historical people were reasonably valid (given the sailing technology of the day). They ultimately proved to be wrong, but largely because nobody--least of all Columbus himself--expected Clolumbus to discover the New World thousands of miles from either coast of the Old.

Michael Flynn's Eifelheim certainly explores this theme of historical blending of fact with fiction a bit--though I am not meaning to write a review of that book today, good as it was. I would certainly recommend it to fans of the science-fiction and historical genres of literature. It does, in any case, ask of us what we don't know--e.g. the distinctions between Church Tradition and peasant customs. The two might easily be conflated, much to the confusion of the modern mind.

*It was, in fact, Jesuit missionaries to China who disabused the Chinese of the notion that the earth is flat.