Man on the Renaissance street – or the galleon – could hardly avoid awareness of it all, any more than anyone can avoid awareness of evolution/creationism today.—Still less, because nobody’s going to jail/the stake for arguing the wrong viewpoint in a pub these days.

Oh, grow up…

With all that said, water vapour is entirely glorious. The two words deserve to be on her tombstone.

When I said that the average well-educated man of the period knew more about astronomy I meant the kind of practical and observational astronomy that involves things like the names of the stars, the observation of their motions, the practical uses in navigation to which such observations could be put, and so on. That’s why I said ‘astronomy and navigation’.

However, accompanying such knowledge there could also be a highly sophistcated knowledge of the mathematics of spherical geometry, of the uses of stereographic projection, etc. Such knowledge would be employed in star maps and on astrolabes, and so on.

Concerning the spherical nature of the earth this would involve not just the knowledge that it was spherical but also a fairly precise knowledge of the angle at which the earth sits with respect to the plane of the ecliptic.

The fact that such individuals knew nothing of hydrogen fusion and that their cosmology was largely wrong is neither here nor there. My point was just that the ordinary educated man of the period had a considerably more sophisticated knowledge than popular educated myth would have it and that their knowledge of astronomy was just another one of the many things which fed into their knowledge that, contra said myth, the Earth was not flat.

Of course if you want to make obtuse misreadings and interpret ‘astronomy and navigation’ as cosmology and physics, feel free…

I blame Washington Irving. And that bloody song. It did earn Alan Davies many lost points on QI some time back, though.

She writes for the Daily Mail now, yes? Where next, one wonders, since she’s done the rounds in a way that’s would make Postman Pat blush.

1) Item. The standard medieval college science text on astronomy, the Almagest of Ptolemy, dating to the late Roman empire, states at the beginning that the earth is spherical, and so small compared to the distance from us to the nearest stars that we might as well be a mathematical point. The possibility that it’s the earth spinning and not the sky rotating is discused in the early pages, but rejected because of a prototypical application of Ockham’s Razor – that’s a) not what we see, and b) common sense indicates that since if you spin a potter’s wheel, stuff on it flies off, and given how large the diameter of the earth is, how much faster it would have to be spinning, if that were so everything on the earth would be spun off into the ether.

2. Item. Nobody, but nobody, was arguing that the earth was flat at the time of Copernicus and Galileo. The argument was over whether or not Ptolemy was wrong, and the heliocentric vs terracentric models of the cosmos.

3. Item. Columbus’ radical “discovery” was to claim that all the other maps in the world were wrong, and he had discovered that the earth’s diameter was a lot shorter than every other scientist since Empedocles had come up with, and so a westward journey round the world to China and India would be much more cheap and feasible than everyone thought. As it happened, he was wrong because he had misread the scale on a foreign map, as wrong as if someone had sold the US govt in the 1930s on a special kind of rocket engine and an expedition to the moon, based on the idea that the moon was a lot closer but just looked far away due to refractive atmospheric issues, in the “objects in mirror” principle…

Memo to Melanie – Research. It’s easy, and it doesn’t cost very much, and it’s fun, too!

Shorter Melanie Phillips: We shouldn’t trust the scientific method because Galileo and Columbus used it to prove that religious views about the natural world were wrong. WTF?

Virtually every “thinking” person of the time understood and believed the world to be round. The thing about Columbus and his voyage was that he decided to take it because he thought the world was signficantly smaller than it actually was. This is why people thought he was a bit out of left-field. Indeed, his critics were actually right, as Columbus vastly underestimated the size of the world and clung to his belief that he had discovered Asia to his dying day – while others came to believe the reality of what Columbus had actually sailed into – a new continent previously unknown to Europeans.

Otto, here’s something that might help you understand. If you can, get hold of Melanie Phillips’ monthly payslip. Then look at yours. Compare and contrast.

Things clearer now?