I'm happy to inform you that I have completed my long-term historic research on the conception of the East on the Latin West throughout the Late Middle Ages. The study has been conducted for six or seven years and its results contain the manuscript which includes dozens of articles.
At the current stage, I have started converting the manuscript into my second book. This is time to remind that my first book, Dawn and Sunset: A Tale of the Oldest Cities in the Near East, was published in 2015 as a second edition. It tells the story of the earliest urban communities on earth that mushroomed in Mesopotamia in the course of the fourth and the third millennia BCE. You may view seven chapters of this book on my Author's Page at scriggler.com
https://scriggler.com/Profile/michael_baizerman
The working title of my second book is
The Enchanting Encounter with the East:
Breaking the Medieval Ice between Latin Europeans and
the World beyond Islam
I have managed to edit the chapter titled ,What
If the Earth Is the Sphere? In this chapter the reader learns that all European well-educated people conceived the Earth as an immobile globe, visualizing it in different shapes. I upload an extract from this chapter:
“Thus when the God,
whatever God was he,
Had form’d the whole
and made the parts agree,
That no unequal
portions might be found,
He moulded Earth into
a spacious round."
-Ovid, Metamorphoses
(1)
"Of what importance is it to know whether the Earth is
a sphere, a cylinder, a disk, or a concave surface?" -Basil of Caesarea (2)
The term “geography” would fall out
of use among medieval European scholars. This subject never pertained to the
canon of “liberal arts” worthy to become part and parcel of the university
curriculum. The western literati would not recognize the “earth description” in
its own terms, treating it as a handmaid of Cosmography at best or as a
concubine of Theology at worst.
Geographic ideas that held and
refined medieval intellectuals originated in Ancient Greece. By adhering to
these old-fashioned and partly erroneous tenets, western academics followed the
path of “universal wisdom”, pouring the old wine into new wineskins.
In compliance with their classical
mentors, Latin disciples unanimously adopted the image of the spherical Earth.
They perceived our planet as a tiny anchored eyeball inside an enormous socket
of the heaven; the globe surrounded by a number of concentric circles-the
orbits of the revolving planets.
The geocentric vision of
cosmographers placed the immobile Earth at the heart of the universe whose
rotating celestial spheres (3) were spinning around non-stop, endowing the
“Blue Marble” with an ability of constant innovation and improvement. This
stationary center was protected by concentric circles of water, air, and fire.
In a renowned illustration to a
Latin poem, Vox Clamantis ("The voice of the one crying out"), its
author, John Gower, is shown shooting arrows at the sinful world. The poet
blasts humankind for their wickedness at the backdrop of the Earth fashioned as
a sphere with compartments for air, earth, and water.
Image 1: The author as a shooter raining his satirical
arrows on the wicked and sparing the righteous (4)
This
image of the spherical Earth would not surprise an “extraterrestrial” onlooker,
for whom the convexity of our planet was an undeniable fact. However, all human
observers were “insiders” and based their assumptions on circumstantial
evidence such as…
