Tag Archives: medieval books

Did Anyone Ever Believe the Earth Was Flat?

In the beginning, when people lived in growing, unorganized communities of farms and villages, they may have thought the world was a shape other than spherical. Maybe they didn’t think of it at all. Why should they?

Considering how several ancient civilizations were avid astronomers, we could easily imagine they had creative ideas about the world and maybe its shape. That the Mayans or Egyptians even asked what shape the land might be is not a given. They may have asked a thousand other questions, and if they were oriented around time or the spirit world, not space or the material world, they may not have asked the question.

Dr Josho Brouwers of Bad Ancient takes up this question, saying once people began to explore the world, it became apparent we live on a globe. By the time Plato was writing, it was a common question, the assumption being in favor of a spherical planet. Aristotle proposed the Earth and all of the heavens were fixed in spheres, each inside the other.

Brouwers writes, “This idea – that the world was spherical – became pervasive in the Hellenistic period. The work of Aristarchus of Samos [310-230 BC], the first known scholar to argue that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around, assumes that the earth was round.”

There’s even a suggestion that the educated of ancient India believed the world was spherical too. So, ancient scholars worked out and believed the world was a globe and the medieval church did not oppose them. The idea that Columbus wanted to prove the world was round (and other silliness about the medieval world believing in flatness) is something pushed by people with a beef against the church.

A Review of Lewis’s Medieval Mind

Understanding C.S. Lewis’s worldview, not as merely Christian with a British spin but as devoutly medieval, will help new readers grasp and enjoy his work. Lewis would hate social media and maybe every Internet. He disliked the mechanistic world and preferred organic nature. (I’m seeing this unfold in That Hideous Strength, which I’m reading with friends over several weeks.)

As an educator, Lewis the scholar sought to restore to students a medieval mindset capable of what Baxter calls “the right sentiments of praise and admiration for creation.” As we have lost our appreciation for that “slow, contemplative, symphonic world” that was the medieval cosmos, so we have lost our delight in the kinds of books medieval people loved, books that held up other criteria besides mere originality.

C.S. Lewis Was a Modern Man Who Breathed Medieval Air… | Christianity Today

A Bright Age for Dropouts Drinking Coffee and Reading Defunct Lit-mags

One of my daughters likes spicy food but doesn’t eat it much. She’s willing to try anything hot, and this week it was a dried Carolina Reaper, the world’s hottest pepper. I urged her to prepare for eating it by reading what she could find online, but no, she just scarfed it up and downed a milk shake as a counter measure. She told me she was going to do it but not when she would, so I didn’t know she had until she came to us at 1:30 a.m. to ask for help with sharp stomach pain. She threw up a few minutes later, which I understand is a normal response to eating these peppers.

So what are we linking to today?

Local Coffee: Some poor businessman failed to read the room when launching plans to remodel an Arby’s in Livingston, Montana, into a Starbucks. The community has a number of local coffee shops, like Chadz on N. Main and Eastside Coffee in the historic district, and the Livingston Business Improvement District don’t want Big Coffee to put a squeeze on them.

The Bright Ages: On the latest Prufrock podcast, Micah Mattix talks to the authors of a medieval history that focuses on many of the details we ignore about the Middle Ages. “It was, for the most part, seen as neither a virtue nor a vice that a city or region would contain various people from various places speaking various languages. It was a fact.”

Kudos to Mattix’s revived Prufrock newsletter, which you can subscribe to through the website of Spectator World.

Dropping Out: Hippies and drop outs were afraid, in part, of societal brainwashing and the mind-control everyone was talking about in the 60s. They wanted to know and live their true selves. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Closing Shop: Literary magazines are being shut down. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

Racism: A popular anti-racist author claims, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That’s how you fight bad discrimination, friends. You fight it with your own discrimination.

Photo: Newman’s Drugs, Lake Huntington, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

“Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…”

Are you troubled by “friends” who borrow your books and never return them? Or return them soiled and dog-eared? Atlas Obscura reports on a book that describes the drastic measures medieval librarians employed — placing curses on the heads of book thieves and mutilators.

“These curses were the only things that protected the books,” says Marc Drogin, author of Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. “Luckily, it was in a time where people believed in them. If you ripped out a page, you were going to die in agony. You didn’t want to take the chance.”

Read it all here.