Folks Who Think Medievals Believed In A Flat Earth Resemble The Flat Earthers They Think The Medievals Were, But Actually Weren't

Mark Shea:

Everybody Knows that Medievals Believed in a Flat Earth

Guess what?

Everybody is wrong.

One of the most marvelous things about Modernity is it's simultaneous ability to laugh at the small-mindedness of our ignorant medieval forbears combined with its utter inability to conceive of the possibility that it is almost preternaturally small-minded and ignorant about medievals.

Dante Alighieri was a medieval Italian poet who lived 1265-1321. Here's a map of the earth as portrayed in Dante's Divine Comedy:

[graphic]

Quick quiz: Is the shape of the earth

1. Flat?
2. Round?

Moral: A huge amount of what moderns "know" about medieval Catholicism is what various Enlightenment era types tell them and they believe with perfect, childlike faith. That's the only explanation for why an allegedly educated modern population could think of the period that gave us the hospital, the university, the foundations of Western democratic rule, the nation-state, the birth of the scientific era, and an unprecedented outburst of theological and artistic creativity the "Dark Ages".