The Round Earth

The idea that in the Middle Ages the world was believed to be flat, is disproved by the many surviving medieval astronomical and geographical texts, as well as by references to the globe in literary and historical texts. The thirteenth-century French Image du monde  by Gautier or Gossouin de Metz, and its Middle English translation by William Caxton are excellent examples. The manuscripts of Image du monde were illustrated with miniatures and diagrams demonstrating the concepts being discussed, and this decoration scheme was taken over by Caxton in his printed text. This was so popular that is continued to be reprinted well into the sixteenth century. We can observe the continuity in the representation of the roundness of the world, shown by placing walking human figures around a globe, by comparing, for instance, the manuscript illuminations of Cambridge University Library MS Gg.1.1 (14th century) with the printed version in the 1527 edition of The myrrour & dyscrypcyon of the worlde (of which the Boston Public Library copy is available to view online at Archive.org: here).

Walters Museum of Art MS W.199 (Bruges, 1489) , f. 42r image from “The Digital Walters” (Creative Commons CC0 license)

The image below belongs to the same illustrative tradition and comes from the fifteenth-century Bruges manuscript now in the Walters Museum of Art, MS W.199.

The are many discussions of of the medieval awareness of earth’s sphericity. These include:

D. Woodward, ‘The Image of the Spherical Earth’, Perspecta 25 (1989), 2-15 (available online with free registration on JSTOR)

R. Simek, Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: The Physical World Before Columbus (1996)

An early study available to read online (on JSTOR, with free registration) is: Francis S. Betten, ‘The Knowledge of the Sphericity of the Earth during the Earlier Middle Ages’, The Catholic Historical Review (1923), 74-90

Post by Natalia Petrovskaia