The irony of putting together my two recent quotes, a century apart, by Francis Bacon and Jonathan Swift, is the knowledge that it was likely Bacon who circulated the idea that medieval man believed the earth was flat. That idea has been shot down so many times in my reading that I don't know if it is still commonly believed, but it was still received wisdom when I was a child. At least, it was featured in the Peabody and Sherman episode about Christopher Columbus, which is a pretty good barometer of what was popularly supposed.
The first refutation I saw was CS Lewis's.
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There were Greek scholars who understood the Earth was round, but I have to wonder how widespread that knowledge was. Our culture knows many things that almost none of our citizens does.
I was re-reading Samuel Elliot Morrison's biography of Columbus "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" It is a great book of history but also of seamanship. Morrison was a sailor and with others from Harvard was retracing Columbus's journeys in a modern sailboat. His discussions of navigation in Columbus's time is fascinating. No one on his crews doubted the earth was round or how big it was. What they didn't know was how far mainland Asia extended to the east! They had to rely on some of Marco Polo's writings for guesses.
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