What Are Examples of Things in the "Common Knowledge" about History That Historians Almost Universally Consider Incorrect? - Forbes

There are many historical myths about the Medieval Period. This is partly due to the rise of Humanism in the early Modern Period and the Renaissance movement in art and architecture. Both these movements venerated the Classical world and considered the period which followed the Classical era as degenerate and barbaric. So Medieval Gothic architecture, now recognised as being both extremely beautiful and technically revolutionary, was denigrated and abandoned for styles that copied Greek and Roman architecture. The very term “Gothic” was originally applied to this Medieval style as a pejorative: it’s a reference to the Gothic tribes that sacked Rome and was meant to mean “barbaric, primitive”.

The other reason for many of the myths about the period is its association with the Catholic Church. In the English-speaking world these myths have their origin in a Protestant denigration of Catholicism and a corresponding disdain for the period in which the Catholic faith was dominant. In other European cultures, such as Germany and France, similar myths have their origin in the anti-clerical stance of many influential Enlightenment thinkers Here is a summary of a few of the myths and misconceptions about the Medieval period that have arisen as a result of these prejudices:

1. People thought the earth was flat and the Church taught this as a matter of doctrine.

In fact, the Church did not teach that the earth was flat at any time in the Middle Ages. Medieval scholars were well aware of the scientific arguments of the Greeks that proved the earth was round and could use scientific instruments, like the astrolabe, the accurately measure its circumference. The fact that the earth is a sphere was so well known, widely accepted and unremarkable that when Thomas Aquinas wanted to choose an objective fact that is not able to be disputed early in his Summa Theologica he chose the fact that the earth is round as his example.

And it was not only the learned who knew the shape of the earth – all evidence indicates that this was commonly understood by everyone. A symbol of the earthly power of kings, used in their coronations, was the orb: a golden sphere held in the king’s left hand to represent the earth. That symbolism would not make sense if it was not understood that the earth was round. A collection of German sermons for parish priests from the Thirteenth Century also mentions, in passing, that the earth was “round like a apple” with the expectation that the peasants hearing the sermon already understood what this meant. And the popular Fourteenth Century English book of travelers’ tales, The Tales of Sir John Mandeville, tells of a man who traveled so far east that he returned to his homeland from the west, while not explaining to its audience how this works.

The popular idea that Christopher Columbus discovered the earth was round and that his voyage was opposed by the Church is a modern myth created in 1828. The novelist Washington Irving was commissioned to write a biography of Columbus, with the brief that he depict Columbus as a radical thinker who turned his back on the superstitions of the old world. Unfortunately Irving found that Columbus was actually wildly wrong about the size of the earth and discovered America by pure chance. Since this did not make a very heroic story, he invented the idea that the Medieval Church taught the earth was flat and created this persistent myth when his book became a best-seller.

Collections of famous quotes found on the internet often include a supposed quote from Ferdinand Magellan which goes “The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.” Magellan never said this, not least because the Church did not say that the earth was flat. The first use of this “quote” goes back no further than 1873, when it was used in an essay by the American freethinker and agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll. He gives no citation for it and it is highly likely that Ingersoll himself simply invented it. Despite this, the Magellan “quote” can still be found in quote collections and on t-shirts and posters sold by atheist organisations.

2. The Medieval Church suppressed science and innovative thinking and burned scientists at the stake, setting back progress by hundreds of years.

The myth that the Church suppressed science and burned or repressed scientists is a central part of what historians of science refer to as “the Conflict Thesis”. This persistent idea has its origins in the Enlightenment, but was fixed in the public consciousness by two popular works of the Nineteenth Century. John William Draper’s A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896) were both highly popular and influential works which popularised the idea that the Medieval Church actively suppressed science. Twentieth Century historians of science have since heavily criticised the “White-Draper Thesis” and noted that much of White and Draper’s evidence was wildly misinterpreted or, in several cases, totally invented.

Early Christianity in the later Roman era did initially have an issue with what some churchmen considered “pagan knowledge” – the scientific works of the Greeks and their Roman intellectual successors. Several preached that a Christian should avoid these works and rejected their knowledge as un-Biblical. The early Church Father Tertullian famously asked sarcastically “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” But this line of thinking was rejected by other prominent churchmen, with Clement of Alexandria proposing that just as God had given the Jews a special insight into spiritual matters, so he had given the Greeks a particular insight into things scientific. He argued that just as the Israelites carried off the gold of the Egyptians and put it to their own use, so Christians could and should use the wisdom of the pagan Greeks as a gift from God. Clement was later supported by the highly influential Augustine of Hippo and later Christian thinkers built on this idea, noting that if the cosmos was the product of a rational God then it could and should be apprehended rationally.

Natural philosophy, based largely on the works of Greek and Roman thinkers like Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, Archimedes and many others, therefore became a major part of the syllabuses of Medieval universities. Thanks to the preservation of these works by Arab scholars when they had been lost in the West after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Medieval scholars did not just study these texts and the works of the Arabs who added to them, but used them to make discoveries in their own right. Medieval scholars were particularly fascinated by the science of optics and invented eye glasses partly as a result of their studies using lenses to determine the nature of light and the physics of sight. The Fourteenth Century scientist Thomas Bradwardine and a group of other Oxford scholars called “the Merton Calculators” not only first formulated the Mean Speed Theorem but were also the first to use mathematics as a language to describe physics, laying the foundations of everything done in the science of physics ever since.