Do you ever encounter those maddening people who insist that medieval folk thought the world was flat? There’s really no telling them of the swathe of evidence (eg Columbus’s calculation of the distance from Europe to Asia westbound) that shows different. In fact they were happy with a spherical Earth, albeit one that was rather static for our tastes.
But .. here’s another line, thanks to a talk by Dr James Hannam, whose book God’s Philosophers is the go-to tome on all this.
Speaking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, at the excellent Spring Meeting of the Society for the History of Astronomy, James told us that when the monarch is crowned, in England or in other European nations, a symbol of their Earthly power is placed in their hand. Is it a dinner plate, he asked? No, it’s the orb.
Case closed.
