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Originally Posted by freebeard
The belief in a flat Earth was limited to mostly Europe for a limited time. A misinterpretation of the four corners mentioned in the Bible.
Where the modern interpretation of a disk under a dome came from I'm not sure, but I suspect James Blish's Cities in Flight.
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That is simply not true--many, many cultures across the world and throughout history have believed in a flat earth. Post-Roman Western Europe was not one of them, aside from a few individuals (similar to today). A spherical globe played directly into the church's belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, and Medieval Europeans held strange ideas about the "Antipodes"--the surface of the Earth below the equator, which many thought was a fantastical, upside-down world. For several hundred years, letters from "Prester John," an imaginary Antipodean Christian king, would periodically circulate across Europe, promising that he would invade soon from the south, crush the Muslims, end the Crusades, and restore Christian rule to the Holy Land. By the time Columbus came along, Portuguese exploration in the Southern Hemisphere had mostly laid those myths to rest, but Columbus, not to be outdone, came up with his own--that the globe was half the size it actually is.
Here's the Wikipedia summary:
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Knowledge of the sphericity of the Earth survived into the medieval corpus of knowledge by direct transmission of the texts of Greek antiquity (Aristotle), and via authors such as Isidore of Seville and Beda Venerabilis. It became increasingly traceable with the rise of scholasticism and medieval learning.[55] Spread of this knowledge beyond the immediate sphere of Greco-Roman scholarship was necessarily gradual, associated with the pace of Christianisation of Europe.
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In fact,
I just found another page that discusses this:
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The myth of the flat Earth is a modern misconception that Earth was believed to be flat rather than spherical by scholars and the educated during the Middle Ages in Europe.[1][2][3]
During the Early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint, which had been first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent, despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere. [4][3]
According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[5] Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".
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