[Dionysios]

‘The Bottom of the Universe: Flat Earth Science in the Age of Encounter’
By Professor James J. Allegro

This approximately 25-page article offers evidence that flat earthism was still alive and active in Western Europe in the 1400’s and did not decline until the decades after Magellan’s voyage in the 1500’s.

More specifically, flat earthism in Western Europe persisted longest in certain strata of the catholic countries of southwestern Europe, especially Spain and Italy. 

 Zacaria Lilio is the centrepiece of the essay. His flat earth book was published in Florence in 1496 to refute propaganda accompanying Columbus’s travels. Lilio was priest of Saint John Lateran Church in Rome and had a network of like minded individuals of which I’ll mention two.

Lilio was a personal friend of Girolomo Savonarola who was the foremost human rights activist in Europe at the time which is significant in that it makes a connection between partisans of Traditional science like flat earthers and ethics and human rights. Savonarola was the mayor of Florence when Lilio’s book was published there.

Savonarola was also a major critic of Pope Alexander III who was arguably the most corrupt pope of all time and the one who authorised the division of the far west between the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Alexander III ultimately had Savonarola put to death.

Tostado was an influential and respected monk with the Inquistion in Spain who was Lilio’s mentor. It is perhaps necessary to mention that the Inquisition was a broad institution and that Tostado was an enemy of the notorious Torquemada family. Tostado and Lilio both opposed Spanish and Portuguese colonialism as unethical. Propaganda that celebrated Columbus has ridiculed Tostado for his opposition, but Tostado was a precursor to the catholic Bishop Bartolomeo de Las Casa, the famous sixteenth century advocate of indigenous peoples’ rights in Mexico and the Americas.

Zacaria Lilio’s book ‘Against Antipodes’ is available (in untranslated Latin) for free online.

[Dionysios]

In view of the fact that some flat earthers (mostly evangelical Protestants) have ignorantly and quote wrongly claimed that the early Protestant Reformers were allegedly pro-flat earth, it should be mentioned that although they were spherical geocentrists, John Calvin’s own commentary on Genesis explicitly calls the earth “a little globe” which is very different from constituting the bottom half of the universe. Calvin’s pathetic form of geocentrism already theorised the earth as a small object in space and was therefore only a short step away from heliocentrism.

https://calvin.edu/centers-institutes/meeter-center/files/john-calvins-works-in-english/Commentary%20001%20-%20Genesis%20Vol.%201.pdf

Luther likewise wrote that the heaven is a full globe - not a half sphere above which is exactly what early Christians thought according to Saint Jerome of Bethlehem’s commentary on Isaiah 40.

[Dionysios]

James Allegro’s article on flat earthism during the renaissance concludes with a useful bibliography, but it is primarily based upon the 50 year research career of William Randles, an American scholar based in France and Western Europe.

The highlights of Randles’s career are brought together and published in 2000 in: 

‘Geography, Cartography, and Nautical Science in the Renaissance’

The outstanding lead article describes four competing views of the earth still active in the 1400’s. One of these was the flat earth view which Randles calls Homeric. The other three were different schools of globe earth thought, the idea of Crates of four continents on a globe being one of them. This first essay concludes by describing the rise of the current theory of a terraqueous globe during the 1400’s concomitant with the rise of Portuguese colonialism.

Review:
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Geography%2C+Cartography+and+Nautical+Science+in+the+Renaissance%3A+The...-a099012029

Table of Contents:
http://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_en/anzeige.php?sammelwerk=Randles%2C+Geography%2C+cartography+and+nautical+science+in+the+Renaissance

[Dionysios]

In 1999 William Randles capped his career with:

‘The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos: 1500-1760’

He devotes a chapter in this book to the union between Protestant Reformers and Renaissance humanists who both viciously attacked flat earthism and the old world culture and science of which it was a part.

Book Review:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/385085?mobileUi=0&

[Dionysios]

‘Contra Antipodes’
By Zacaria Lilio
(1496)

https://archive.org/details/ita-bnc-in2-00001445-001

[Dionysios]

‘The Christian Topography of Kosmas Indikopleustes’
Edited by Jeffrey C. Anderson

This book is a technical history of the manuscripts and influence of the book ‘Christian Topography’ by Cosmas Indicopleustes in the Christian East, particularly in the Byzantine Empire and in Russia.

Also, half of the book consists of high quality full colour illustrations from the “Florentine” manuscript of the Christian Topography - one of three extant Byzantine Greek manuscripts.

The book is marvellously summarised in this review which actually constitutes an outline history of flat earthism in the Christian East:

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014.07.23

The history broadly falls into two categories: Byzantine and Russian. The Florentine manuscript is proved to actually be a Constantinopolitan manuscript made in that city about the year 1080. It was only later after the Crusades taken to the house of a wealthy Medici which is how it became the Florentine Codex.

Cosmas Indicopleustes originally wrote this flat earth book in Egypt in the 500’s, and this proves that flat earthism was still alive in the Byzantine Empire and copies of his book were still being made 500 years after he lived.
It is also mentioned that this Constantinopitan manuscript closely follows the Sinai manuscript.

The final chapter dealing with Russian flat earthism indicates that over 90 Slavonic manuscripts of the ‘Christian Topography’ survive, and these were made from the 1200’s to the 1800’s. This means that Russia is the champion at preserving flat earthism since the Crusades.

After Peter Romanov westernised Russia in the early 1700’s, Russian flat earthism persisted among Russian Old Believers who continued to produce Slavonic manuscripts of the ‘Christian Topography’ after the Romanovs and the Russian government abandoned flat earthism.

[Dionysios]

A Slavonic copy of the ‘Christian Topography’ of Cosmas Indicopleustes (in pdf) produced by Russian Old Orthodox Christians in the early nineteenth century:

https://dl.wdl.org/16970/service/16970.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1v4pD-NZ2SsDxdn3-TaJVtvAJb0XpS6Vc07Esg5fgPnJpxjv3ljduQaaM

[Dionysios]

A brief article about the Russian preservation of the Byzantine flat earth tradition of Cosmas Indicopleustes and his book in Slavonic:

https://www.wdl.org/en/item/16970/#fbclid=IwAR0OXiNbyhSoF6UkBLNEpdRGNY4LXnL_sG9zfjgiVbepsa41eokJWUhW3GA

[Tom Bishop]

Modern Geocentric work by Walter Van Der Kamp

Airy's Failure Reconsidered

http://www.ldolphin.org/geocentricity/Kamp2.pdf

[Tom Bishop]

16 Emergency Landings Proving Flat Earth by Eddie Alencar

https://www.flatearthresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/covered16emergencylandingsprovingflatearth-191007025918_compressed.pdf

This one is interesting and is used a lot by the wider FE community. Allegedly planes have made emergency landings that make more sense if the planes are traveling according to a Flat Earth map. The sources containing links referencing the landings are at at the end of the book.

[Tom Bishop]

We don't have this one in the Library:

Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed by William Carpenter (Aka. Common Sense)

https://archive.org/details/TheoreticalAstronomyExaminedAndExpos