FLAT EARTH HISTORY | 2006-03-15
When I was coming up historians taught us that Columbus showed the world was round.
Actually everybody knew the earth was round. Columbus's contribution was to get the diameter wrong. He thought that Asia was closer than everybody said it was. They were right. He was wrong.
In our history texts there was a map that showed how the Middle Ages pictured the flat earth. That map was actually a part of the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. It was a map from Ancient Rome. Ancient Romans never sailed the oceans.
So this silly Roman map was produced to show how the Northern Europeans, the ones who knew where ICELAND was, thought the earth was flat.
Witch-burning is another thing blames on the Middle Ages. Actually the Malleus Mallifactorm was written in 1474, under the influence of the Renaissance.
Medicine also took a giant leap backwards during the Renaissance. The Roman doctor Galen's nonsense was rediscovered and bleeding took over as a cure for disease.
Vikings didn't GET scurvy. Scurvy was another Great Leap Forward from the Renaissance.
In decades of reading, I have yet to find one single ADVANCE of any kind that came as a result of the so-called Renaissance. In math, calculus was already very advanced in Northern Europe long before the Renaissance.