Johannes Hartlieb and flying potions…

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Following my recent post on modern per-degree astrology, Rene Zandbergen very kindly left a comment here pointing to online scans of a 15th century German translation of some of Pietro d’Abano’s works on astrology. While idly flicking through that, I noticed (starting on folio 132r) a short book by Johannes Hartlieb on ‘Namenmantik’ (onomancy, using names to tell fortunes). Dating right to the middle of the 15th century, this shows circular volvelle-like things that remind my eye of Alberti’s speculum (his rotating code wheel):-

hartlieb_132r_cropped

Cod. Pal. germ. 832 Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch, folio 132r

Given that this kind of thing was in the air round that time, was it mere chance that Alberti happened to devise it first? It’s true that Hartlieb’s ones (like the one for Ptolemy above) probably didn’t rotate at all… but all the same, I do honestly think it wouldn’t have involved a vast leap of mid-Quattrocento imagination to make them do so.

But the mention of Hartlieb reminded me of another research strand I’ve been meaning to blog about – flying potions. You see, it was Hartlieb who first wrote (in 1456) about witches’ flying potions, in his puch aller verpoten kunst, ungelaubens und der zaubrey, i.e. on “forbidden arts, superstition and sorcery”.

Reading up again on this subject just now, I was somewhat disappointed to discover that Ioan Couliano’s colourful account of how the handles of broomsticks were used to administer the hallucinogenic unguent turns out to be only supported by a single (and fairly unreliable) source. Mainly, the ointment seems more likely to have been administered to the armpits and absorbed into the bloodstream from there. Still, it probably beats flying cattle class on a charter flight, right?

To me, the bizarre thing about the historical sequence is that in the early Middle Ages it was heretical to believe witches’ descriptions of flight (because they were clearly delusional), while during the Early Modern period it became heretical to disbelieve witches’ descriptions of flight (because they were clearly possessed by the Devil). So much for the continual march forward of knowledge! 😮

For much, much more on this fascinating subject, I heartily recommend Shantell Powell’s set of pages on flying potions. Enjoy!

Mercantesca, Leonardo, and the Voynich Manuscript…

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A new day dawns, bringing with it a nice email from Augusto Buonafalce in response to my post on Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘x’-like abbreviation for ‘ver‘ (as recently mentioned by Edith Sherwood).

buonafalce_verbuonafalce_ver_normal

Augusto points out that if you remove the plain diagonal line in the reflected version, what remains appears to be similar to a ‘b’… but isn’t. In the 15th century “mercantesca” script, this particular ‘b’-like shape was used to denote ‘v’: Leone Battista Alberti suggested (in his Tuscan grammar) that this shape should be more widely employed to help tell ‘v’ apart from ‘u’. Specifically, Alberti’s ‘b’-like shape looked like this:-

buonafalce_b

Now, mercantesca hasn’t really been discussed in the context of the Voynich Manuscript before (Google returns no useful hits, while even the old VMs mailing list archives appear to be silent), which is something of a shame – for if arch-Florentines such as Leonardo, Alberti, and even Michaelangelo used it, mercantesca must surely have been as close to the beating heart of the Quattrocento project as the much-touted (but very different) ‘humanist hand’.

(The ‘humanist hand’, you may recall, is an upright, formal script that was a conscious revival of an earlier script – which is why dating the Voynich Manuscript based on supposed similarities with the the humanist hand alone is so contentious.)

While the formal humanist hand was used mainly for writing in Latin, the informal mercantesca (which flourished from 1350 to 1550, peaking around 1450-1500) was used mainly for writing in the vulgar tongue: when written well, it is sometimes called ‘bella mercantesca’.

There’s a reasonable literature on this which a Voynich researcher with palaeographic leanings ought to have at least a reasonable look through.:-

  • Orlanelli, G. ‘Osservazioni sulla scrittura mercantesca nel secoli XIV e XV’, in Studi in onore di Riccardo Filangieri (Naples 1959) I, pp.445-460
  • Irene Ceccherini (Firenze): La Genesi della Scrittura Mercantesca. (summary of 2005 poster session)
  • Albert Derolez, The palaeography of Gothic manuscript books (2003)

Having said that, it is perhaps the 45 volumes of the CMD (the Catalogue of Dated Manuscripts) produced over the last 50 years that need checking here, particularly the CMDIt (the Italian section), I suspect. A proper palaeography research challenge is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while: but that’s definitely a job for another day…

Stuff to be thinking about! 🙂

The cipher mystery of “Esio Trot”!

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Poor old Roald Dahl, remembered more or less entirely for his plucky parentless pawpers propelled into beastly circumstances (but who somehow come good in the end). Apart from bookish Dahl completists patiently working their way through the library shelf to find hidden gems to read to their son/daughter (errrm… like me), whoever would end up reading Dahl’s “Esio Trot“?

It’s a nice (if slightly mawkish, compared with Dahl’s normal writing) little story: it concerns a plot contrived by a lonely retired gentleman (Mr Hoppy) to gain the attention of the attractive widow (Mrs Silver) living in the flat immediately below him, despite her obsession with a puny tortoise called Alfie. I’d like to point you to the Wikipedia article here, but as it does nothing but summarize an already short story, that would be a mean-spirited waste of link ink. 🙂

But does this book contain a cipher mystery? Why… yes! Mr Hoppy pretends to Mrs Silver that he had been told a tortoise-enlarging secret by a Bedouin tribesman – and writes down a special chant for her to whisper to Alfie each day, which begins…

ESIO TROT, ESIO TROT,
TEG REGGIB REGGIB!

Speaking as a collector of Quattrocento letter transposition ciphers (such as Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio Averlino used, and which Alberti also described), I have to say that it came as quite a surprise to me to find a modern example with illustrations by Quentin Blake. (Though given that Dahl was employed by MI6 for some years, his interest in cryptography is perhaps not totally unexpected?)

So… can you read “Esio Trot” yet? Or are you not as backwards as a tortoise? 😉

The Oera Linda Book: a right proper hoax, I say…

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I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough to cover both historians posing as outsiders and outsiders posing as historians. 🙂

Yet probably the most dispiriting thing about nearly all the novel freethinking theories thus constructed (by either camp) is how boringly similar they tend to be, oxymoronifying the phrase “free thinker”. Did Alberti really write the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili? [Hint: no.] Was Leonardo da Vinci really a Grand Master of the [insert made-up name] Secret Society? [Hint: also no.] Read (as I have done) a fair few of these and you’d rapidly come to the conclusion that most trains of thought out there run along well-oiled rails, with nary a point in sight. Point-less stuff, indeed.

Of course, if you try to revisit something / someone particularly well-documented, you face a dauntingly uphill challenge from the start: which is why oddly nebulous objects and obscure people attract the most attention (from both revisionist camps) – because for these, there’s that much less that needs to be explained away from the start before you can really go to town & have some fun.

In this general vein, here’s a nice (2000) article by Mark Newbrook from The Skeptic magazine (it’s on pp.42-47), which brings together literally dozens of fringe historical revisionist communities (Velikovskyists, Saturnists, Afrocentrists, Dravidian- / Mayan- / Latvian- / Hungarian- / Basque-/ Etruscan-centred histories of language, Dogon, etc) to highlight their common traits – most of which seem to centre on a misplaced faith in the fallacies of eighteenth-century linguistic / etymological thought. It has to be admitted that the devotion shown to following through these mad ideas is sometimes quite extraordinary. Did Jesus on the Cross really cry out in Mayan? [Hint: don’t even go there.]

It’s no great secret that most hypotheses floated to explain the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex, and the Phaistos Disc match this overall template (i.e. of a simple linguistic misunderstanding taken to massive lengths). Even when top-drawer outsiders (David Icke, Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna etc) throw their lizard-skin top hats into the ring, the same tired old rabbits limp out… ‘Roger Bacon‘, ‘it’s the aliens wot dunnit‘, ‘hoax!’ and so forth.

Of all these , though, it is the “hoax” theorists that are stupendously annoying – not because they happen to be right or wrong (which is another question entirely), but because for the most part they use the idea as a kind of intellectual trick to sidestep the entire evidence corpus, preferring instead to revel in schadenfreude, poking fun at other researchers as they lock intellectual horns with the mute rhinoceros of meaninglessness (and lose the battle, of course).

In all these cases, the correct question to be asking is simply what kind of material, physical evidence would amply demonstrate the presence of a hoax – merely proving the possibility of a hoax (as Gordon Rugg famously tried to do for the Voynich Manuscript in 2004) is both hard work and vacuous. Or, if you prefer to stick with Popperian falsification, how can we actively disprove the notion that artefact X is ancient?

And so it all swings round to a resoundingly 19th century hoax, the Frisian Oera Linda Book (which I picked up on from Lady Goodman’s blog page). This describes all kinds of odd things (such as “Atland”, a 17th century revisionist Atlantis), and claims to have been written in 1256, but copied from texts some of which dated back as early as 2194 BC. Errrrm… “zeker niet, mevrouw“, methinks.

If you absolutely have to sample its purple faux historical prose, there’s an English translation here. To me, it all reads like a ‘worst-of‘ compilation of creative writing courses’ historical modules: but perhaps you’ll find some hidden depths there to which I’m blind. But is this a hoax? [Hint: for sure!]

Is Dorabella a rotating pigpen…?

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Spurred on by a blog comment left this morning, I wondered whether the Dorabella cipher might actually (because of the symmetry of its cipherbet shapes) be some kind of rotating pigpen cipher, where you rotate each of the positions around after each letter. This would be a bit like a “poor man’s Alberti cipher disk”… just the sort of thing a self-taught cipher hacker such as Elgar might devise.

And so, I decided (being a programmer) to code it up. Of course, it didn’t appear to solve it (these things never do), but I thought I’d post my C code here anyway. Enjoy!

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
char dorabella[] =
 "BLTACEIARWUNISNFNNELLHSYWYDUO"
 "INIEYARQATNNTEDMINUNEHOMSYRRYUO"
 "TOEHOTSHGDOTNEHMOSALDOEADYA";
#define ELEMENTS(N) (sizeof(N) / sizeof(*(N)))
#define DORABELLA_SIZE (ELEMENTS(dorabella) - 1) // trim the trailing zero!
void dorabella_encipher(int c, int *row, int *column)
{
 if (c >= 'V')
  c--;
 if (c >= 'J')
  c--;
 c -= 'A';  // c now equals 0..23
 *column = c % 8;
 *row    = c / 8;
}
int dorabella_decipher(int row, int column)
{
 int c = (row * 8 ) + column;  // space inserted to stop smiley being inserted!
 c += 'A';
 if (c > 'I')
  c++;
 if (c > 'U')
  c++;  // c now equals 'A'..'Z'
 return c;
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
 int i, j, c;
 int row, column;
 int step_size = 1;
 if (argc > 1)
  step_size = atoi(argv[1]);
 for (i=0; i<8; i++)
 {
  printf("C%d: ", i);
  for (j=0; j<DORABELLA_SIZE; j++)
  {
   dorabella_encipher(dorabella[j], &row, &column);
   column += i + (j / step_size);
   while (column < 0)
    column += 8;
   column %= 8;
   c = dorabella_decipher(row, column);
   printf("%c", c);
  }
  printf("\n");
 }
 for (i=0; i<3; i++)
 {
  printf("R%d: ", i);
  for (j=0; j<DORABELLA_SIZE; j++)
  {
   dorabella_encipher(dorabella[j], &row, &column);
   row += i + (j / step_size);
   while (row < 0)
    row += 3;
   row %= 3;
   c = dorabella_decipher(row, column);
   printf("%c", c);
  }
  printf("\n");
 }
 return 0;
}

All about the Chaocipher…

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I’m getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google’s hits are for ghastly sites listing “Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries” or “10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes“. Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I’m not getting “Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips” and its tawdry ilk.

Realistically, there is only one uncracked code/cipher listing on the web from which all the rest get cut-and-pasted: Elonka’s list of famous unsolved codes and ciphers. But Elonka Dunin has long since moved on (coincidentally, she went from cryptography into computer game production at about the same time that I made the reverse journey), which is perhaps why all of these lists look a bit dated. Perhaps I should do my own list soon (maybe, if I had the time).

Happily, Elonka did manage to nail most of the usual suspects: the Beale Papers, the Voynich Manuscript, Dorabella, Zodiac Killer, d’Agapeyeff, Phaistos Disk, and so on… each typically a piece of ciphertext which we would like to decipher in order to crack a historical mystery. However, one of the items on her list stands out as something of an exception.

For John F. Byrne’s 1918 “Chaocipher”, we have a description of his device (the prototype fitted in a cigar box, and allegedly contained two wheels with scrambled letters), and a fair few examples of both Chaocipher ciphertext and the matching plaintext. So, the mystery isn’t so much a whodunnit as a howdunnit. Though a small number of people are in on the secret mechanism (Lou Kruh, for one), Byrne himself is long dead: and the details of how his box of tricks worked have never been released into the public domain.

Was Byrne’s Chaocipher truly as unbreakable as he believed, or was it no more than the grand delusion of an inspired cryptographic outsider? This, really, is the mystery here – the everything-or-nothing “hero-or-zero” dramatic tension that makes it a good story. Yet hardly anybody knows about it: whereas “Voynich” gets 242,000 hits, “Chaocipher” only merits 546 hits (i.e. 0.0022% as much).

Well, now you know as well: and if you want to know a little more about its cryptography, I’ve added a Chaocipher page here. But the real site to go to is Moshe Rubin’s “The Chaocipher Clearing House“, which is so new that even Google hasn’t yet found it (Moshe emailed me to tell me about it, thanks!) Exemplary, fascinating, splendid – highly recommended. 🙂

OK, enough of the raw factuality, time for the obligatory historical riff. 🙂

I’m struck by the parallels between John Byrne’s device and Leon Battista Alberti’s cipher wheel. Both men seem to have caught the leading edge of a wave and tried to harness its power for cryptography, and made high-falutin’ claims as to their respective cipher systems’ unbreakability: whereas Alberti’s wave was mathematical abstraction, Byrne’s wave was (very probably) algorithmic computing.

Circa 1920, this was very much in the air: when J. Lyons & Co. hired the mathematician J.R.M. Simmons in 1923, the company was thinking about machines, systems, and operational management: mathematical calculators were absolutely de rigeur for them. The first Enigma machines were constructed in the early 1920s (and used in a commercial environment), and there were doubtless many other broadly similar machines being invented at the same time.

Do I think that there was anything unbreakable in Byrne’s box? No, not really: the real magic in there was most likely a programmatic mindset that was cutting-edge in 1918, but might well look somewhat simplistic nearly a century later. But I could be wrong! 😉

What is a ciphertext?

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Essentially, a ciphertext is a piece of text where the individual letters have been transformed according to a rule system – substitution cipher rules replace the shape of the letters (as if you had just changed the font), while transposition cipher rules manipulate the order of the letters.

THIS IS A CIPHER —> UIKT KT B DKQIFS  (substitute each letter with the one after it in the alphabet)

THIS IS A CIPHER —> SIHT SI A REHPIC (transpose the letters, writing each word back-to-front)

So, as long as (a) you know [or can crack!] the rules by which the “plaintext” (the original unenciphered text) was transformed, and (b) those rules can be played out in reverse, then you can decipher the ciphertext.

OK so far… but if you’re looking at historical ciphers, there’s a problem.

Prior to 1400, transposition ciphers were extremely rare, partly because words themselves were rare. Many documents were written without spaces – and without spaces, where do words begin and end? Effectively, this meant that in-word transposition ciphers (such as reversing syllables, as the Florentines Antonio Averlino and Leonardo da Vinci both used) would only happen in those few places (such as Florence) where people had a modern concept of what words were. A well-known modern example is “Pig Latin“, a (20th century) humorous in-word transposition cipher: and there’s the 19th century “loucherbem” in French, too.

Round about 1465, these flowered into some kind of complex system (by an unknown practitioner, and now apparently lost forever): Alberti, writing in Rome during 1465-1467, mentioned a number of ideas for a complex transposition system, though he recommended his own cipher wheel in preference to them.

Yet after 1500, these basically disappeared into the historical footnotes of cryptographic works. What replaced them (circa 1550) was the “rail-fence” Renaissance notion of transposition cipher: this was instead grounded in the print-centric culture of movable type. This saw messages as sequences of characters tick-tocking away to a metronomic beat (i.e. one per tick), and transposition ciphers not as a way of disrupting word contents, but instead as a way of disrupting (& subverting) the metronomic pulse of letters – a very different beast indeed.

THIS IS A CIPHER --> ISTHAY ISYAY AYAY IPHERCAY   (Pig Latin cipher)

THIS IS A CIPHER ---> T I I A I H R    (Railfence cipher)
                      H S S C P E X

It is this latter (16th century) two-dimensional transposition cipher that is widely used in modern cipher-systems, not the late medieval ‘anagrammatical’ transposition cipher.

cipher-timeline

Older histories of cryptography tended to situate all these cipher techniques within what I call a  “progressivist mythology” – the mistaken notion that every new idea not only flows out of all previous ideas, but also improves and refines them. In practice, of course, that’s not how things work : many brief local flowerings of ideas (basically, all the cipher varieties marked in italic above) made almost no impression on contemporary cryptographic practice. Even Vigenère’s autokey cipher (taught on every modern cipher course) did not get picked up by cryptography practitioners for more than two hundred years!

And now for the punchline of this post: if you discard the progressivist mythology, the range of possible local enciphering strategies for a given ciphertext is sharply constrained by the date and position of a document.

I argue that the Voynich Manuscript ciphertext is likely a prime example of this: its internal evidence dates it no earlier than 1450 and no later than 1470 – right at the time of the brief flowering of the kind of syllabic and interline transposition ciphers mentioned by Alberti in his De Componendis Cyfris (1467).

And so, if we seek to apply “pure” modern substitution cipher analytical techniques to something built around an unknown transposition cipher system, we would surely fail to make any sense of it – and this is, I believe, what has happened in the case of the VMs… why it has remained a “cipher mystery” for so long.

Apollo vs Dionysus, the eternal grudge-match…

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Here’s another post inspired by the book I’m currently reading, Joscelyn Godwin’s “The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance”.

Whereas 15th century Renaissance art was largely orderly, linear, a lot of Mannerist late 16th-century art is disorganized, curvilinear, riotous – this has led to the label of antirinascimento, the “Anti-Renaissance”. But to someone like Godwin with both feet in the iconological trenches, this speaks of a deeper dichotomy – between the ordered Apollonian meme and the disordered Dionysian meme. Godwin pitches the austere, Roman-loving Quattrocento humanists’ dry perspective against the carnal obsessions and pagan thematics of corrupted Cinquecento cardinals – an extended Apollo vs Dionysus grudge-match in an art historical arena.

All of which is quite cool, in an iconological sort of way. 🙂

But once you start looking at things in this way, you begin to see echoes everywhere: in my own research area of Quattrocento ciphers, you could view Alberti’s über-ordered cipher wheel as a quintessentially Apollonian solar device, and then compare it with the apparently disordered, fragmented Voynich manuscript cipher statistics (that I link with Antonio Averlino, AKA Filarete) – Roman austerity against Greek cunning.

Yet does this kind of dichotomistic model really give us a real insight into the kind of secret history that iconologists believe lurks just beneath? Or is it just a modern quasi-thermodynamic meta-narrative (historicizing the universe’s eternal battle of order vs disorder) being stamped over the top of something that is no more significant than a difference in personality?

Reading anything to do with iconography makes me feel like I’m watching a renegade episode of the X-Files, where Mulder and Scully are arguing the toss over something foolishly marginal. Though occasionally I have brief moments where I think “Yes, that does make sense”, you simply cannot infer from the existence of a debate that any of the mad theories being proposed has to be correct. Oh well!

Update: Dennis Stallings points out off-list that the Apollo vs Dionysus grudge-match as an art-historical thema only really kicked off with Nietzsche’s (1872) “The Birth of Tragedy”, which is entirely true – here’s a nice 1996 paper showing (basically) how you can use the A. vs D. dichotomy as a way of blagging your way through literature studies. 🙂

Alberti circa 1465…

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Though I have six (!) book reviews queued up, I simply can’t resist posting about what I’ve just read in Joscelyn Godwin’s “The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance” (which, strictly speaking, should be #7 in the review backlog).

On pp.11-13, Godwin (who you may remember from his epic translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) writes about the Roman Academy, a group of humanist scholars in mid-Quattrocento Rome with a shared obsession with Ancient Rome, and who held “the opinion that there is no other world than this one, and that when the body dies, the soul dies, too: and that nothing is worth anything except for pleasure and sensuality” (according to the Milanese ambassador to the Vatican, Agostino de’ Rossi).  Pretty radical stuff for the time, wouldn’t you say?

The unofficial leader of the Academy was Bartolommeo dei Sacchi, A.K.A. “Platina”: when, in March 1468, the Pope had had enough of the Academy’s quasi-pagan heresy, Platina was one of the first to be seized and (so says Platina) tortured, even though ultimately none of the Academicians got convicted of anything. As an aside, Godwin mentions that Platina had already had a run-in with Paul II in 1464, when the Pope had dismissed the Papal Abbreviators, a a group of salaried Papal scholars, including Leon Battista Alberti.

This is the point where I say – hey, hold that thought. If Alberti had been kicked out of his scholarly Vatican job in 1464, and didn’t resume his architect work until S. Andrea in 1470, that would mean that he may well have been thrown the cryptography challenge as a kind of lifeline by a former Vatican boss. That is, that cryptography wasn’t just a spare time gig for Alberti, but rather that he must have seen it as a full-time career change. In “The Curse”, I reconstructed from De componendis cifris what I believe was the meeting between Alberti and Filarete (Antonio Averlino) in Rome in Autumn 1465 discussing their two very different conceptions of cryptography: but now, the knowledge that they were not only both ex-pat Florentine architects in their sixties but also both equally out of favour with their former set of patrons raises the stakes. Given the goldfish bowl-like nature of Roman society, it would have been rhetorically necessary for Alberti to dismiss Averlino’s competing cryptographic system – that is, Alberti couldn’t just ignore it and hope it would go away.

Alberti also worked on astronomy with the Florentine Paolo Toscanelli, who in turn was connected to Hellenophiles such as Filfelfo and George of Trebizond: so why is it such a surprise for people when I link Alberti and Averlino, when the two men were connected in so many ways through the dense network of lives, astronomy, architecture, and cryptography criss-crossing Quattrocento Northern Italy? Oh well…

Review of "Inventing The Flat Earth"…

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It’s a mystery: when there is abundant evidence that people in the Middle Ages knew for sure that the earth was basically spherical, why has the myth persisted until the late 20th century that Columbus had to argue against Flat Earth proponents to gain backing for his voyage? And where did this whole mythology come from?

In his fascinating (if all too brief) “Inventing The Flat Earth” (1991), medieval historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traces the faulty arguments and ideologies across the centuries that contributed to this nonsense. As an immediate cause, he points to a small coterie of 19th century writers (specifically William Whewell (1794-1866) and John W. Draper (1811-1882)) who decided to start an agitprop war between “religion” and “science”, essentially by building opposing false idols of both “sides” and getting people angry enough about it to join in the fight.

For “religion”, the caricature they constructed was one of superstition and medieval backwardness: and what (thanks to multiple careful misreadings of the sources) could be more retrogressive than the notion of the flat earth? Disregarding the fact that just about everyone at that time believed in a spherical earth, Church or not. *sigh*

Yet for retrogressivity to be of interest as something to avoid, someone had (logically) to be promoting progressivity: Russell traces this back to Hegel, Auguste Comte, and to Jules Michelet, the last of which dubbed medieval scholastics “valiant athletes of stupidity” (hugely unfairly, of course).

But Jeffrey Burton Russell goes back further still: calling the Middle Ages “the Middle Ages” is a way of implicitly saying that it sat inbetween the (glorious) Classical Era and the (glorious) Renaissance – that it was a Tweenie era, that was more than just a bit disappointing and dull. And similarly with the Dark Ages, which would appear to have been so hugely disappointing that some extreme revisionist historians are trying to excise it completely!

Ultimately, Russell points the finger at Renaissance myth-makers: it was they who essentially invented the whole “medieval = rubbish” mythology which used to annoy Lynn Thorndike so much (though perhaps he should have been angrier with Alberti & his chums than with Jacob Burckhardt), in order to justify their own glory, as if fama was a zero-sum game. What did those Renaissance brainiacs ever do for us, eh?

Rewind to 1492, and the basic history is that Columbus never had to argue against a flat earth. His main point of disagreement was with those scientifically-minded people of the time who argued (completely correctly!) that his estimate of the distance East West to the Orient was far too low, and that he and his crew would die of starvation before they reached there. And they would have done, had another continent not happened to be in the way… but that’s another story.

Some may have heard of this book via the recent short article by Mano Singham (Phi Delta Kappan, 1st April 2007, available online) that was built almost entirely around a high-speed precis of Russell’s book: on HASTRO-L (2nd December 2007), Michael Meo criticized Singham’s presentation, but I think the inaccuracies there were in the summarizing, not in the original.

As far as the intellectual history goes, the seed of the myth/error seems to have been specifically sown by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus preface (not the one Osiander added!). There, he says:-

For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the earth’s shape, when he mocks those who declared that the earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me.

Copernicus was trying to play to the Church audience here, as the spherical earth was so well-believed as to be a point of faith. Yet because Lactantius’ opposing view (of a flat earth) had been deemed heretical, the papacy ordered in 1616 that this passage be censored from Copernicus’ book – but this order came too late for the 3rd edition of 1617, and the subsequent edition came along only in 1854.

And so the final irony here is that if De Revolutionibus had indeed (as Koestler asserted) been “The Book Nobody Read”, the flat-earth myth/error might never have flowered.