Abstract

While the 19th Century attributed the flat world to the dark Middle Ages and its primitive believe in the edge of our earth, the 21st Century is facing a strange comeback of this image. It was the French astronomer and, a late if not a retarded romanticist, Camille Flammarion, who is to blame for the simplified view of the middle ages as the period when people believed in a flat earth. He is the probable author of an anonymous wood engraving from his 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology) depicting a missionary who just discovered the end of the world and the point where it touches the sky. This influential misinterpretation ignored the fact that the image of a spherical world was not only known to the Middle Ages – as we can see from the name and the illustrations of the famous Johannes de Sacrobosco tractate from the 13th century, De sphaera mundi – but it was actually a more prevalent model of earth.

• Denisa Kera National University of Singapore

Full text (PDF)  p. 404-410