A medieval world map. It is spherical.
This week, I was asked an interesting question from a person I met for the first time at a work conference:
“Why do you write the time periods you do?”
Coming on the back of a fascinating post by fellow historical romance writer Nicole Hurley-Moore this week, I’ve given some thought to that question.
And this is my answer:
“To open up the doors of our past. To present factual history in a way which is engaging and exciting. To remind people that what happened in our past has a direct and measurable bearing on the world as it is today.”
Sadly some educators do students a disservice by making history a dull recitation of people, dates and places – as Nicole beautifully illustrates:
History was something that happened ‘back then’… in a time when people weren’t so civilized (as if we are now) or generally not so clever (an idea bandied about by 19th century scholars. Oh, there were a few exceptions but really no one could ever be as clever as them).Now, I have always loved history, especially the medieval kind but even my resolve was pushed. One teacher (who was a lovely woman but…) would barely speak to us. She would divide the chalk board in half and begin writing the entire lesson – 50 minutes of ceaseless writing. Oh, and once she got to the end of the board, she would rub it off and then keep writing.
Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my “chronological snobbery,” the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.
The Popular Myth:
In medieval times, people thought the world was flat. It wasn’t until Christopher Columbus shocked the world by trying to sail to India – going in the wrong direction! – that people then knew the world was round.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, false, wrong.
So where did the myth come from?
The myth came a mix of a political bastardisation of academic integrity and popular fiction.
The academic was Antoinne-Jean Letronne, a French archaeologist and author who was well known for his anti-Catholic, atheistic writings, no doubt influenced by the socio-political French Revolutionary climate of the late 18th/early 19th century:
He wrote On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers in 1834.
He deliberately misrepresented medieval Christians as being scientifically ignorant, and his supposed proof for this incorrect claim was that they believed in a flat earth. But of course they did not believe in a flat earth.
In France at the same time and no doubt influenced by the intellectual climate was the American writer Washington Irving.
Oddly enough, a major source of that mythology was the genial American creator of Rip van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. In 1828, Washington Irving published a novelistic biography of Columbus featuring a fictitious confrontation between the brave explorer and Inquisition-ridden clerics and professors from the University of Salamanca. They pelted Columbus with quotations from the Bible and church fathers to prove that the Earth was flat. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his biography of Columbus, calls the episode “pure moonshine.”
Irving the storyteller had his academic counterpart in the French historian Antoine-Jean Letronne. Letronne’s influential 1834 study, “On the Cosmographical Opinions of the Church Fathers,” was shaped by anti-clericalism just as Irving’s imagination was colored by Anglo-American anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish feeling. Letronne acknowledged evidence that appeared to contradict his thesis but promptly buried it as untypical. Church fathers and medieval Christians simply must have been hide-bound by prejudice and a literal reading of the Bible.
Well, as another late 19th American author is quoted as saying:
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”
And by the end of the 19th century it was being taught in text books to school children and perpetuated even today by renowned 20th century historians like Daniel Boorstin (whose book America: The Colonial Experience I have and adore).
The value of literary fiction to reveal aspects of human nature and reveal historical truths – I talk about it in my blog post here.
That’s why I was fascinated by the history of the Regency period and then by extension the much-maligned medieval period which, ironically, founded the era of scientific investigation and modern universities.