The Earth is a Globe

 Since the "flat earth" delusion seems to be making a comeback on social media, it's time to reiterate:  people in the Middle Ages knew the earth was a globe.

Okay, most of the population probably never thought much at all about the shape of the planet. But the learned certainly thought about it and knew it was a globe.  It was in fact obvious.  During a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth falls on the moon, and it is certainly round.

It couldn't just be a flat circle, because the earth's curvature is clear on both land and sea.  If you watch a ship sail out of harbor into the open ocean, it goes "hull down," disappearing from the bottom up as the ship goes over the earth's curve.  On land, as you travel toward distant mountains they appear to grow, at first you just see the top peaks, then more and more as you get closer, as less is hidden by the earth's curve.

The earth in medieval thinking also had to be a sphere because the heavens were a sphere.  Look at the sky on a clear day. It's a sphere (actually a hemisphere), and we're standing looking up at the inside of a globe.

Ancient people had also known the earth was a globe.  Aristotle in fact set out to calculate the size of the earth.  He underestimated, but it was a good effort.  Unfortunately for Columbus, he not only used Aristotle's estimate, but figured that because he would be sailing west well north of the equator, the distance around the earth was smaller yet, plus he seems to have forgotten to carry the 2... (or the equivalent).  But he and the Spanish court certainly  knew the earth was a globe, just thought the distance from Spain to the East Indies was thousands of miles shorter than it actually is.

(The idea that the Spanish court expected Columbus to fall off the edge of the earth is a complete canard, dating not from 1492 but from the nineteenth century and a "hilarious" anti-Spanish fictional story, written by Washington Irving, better known to us for the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.)

Where medieval people had their astrophysics messed up was the shape of the solar system.  Rather than seeing the earth and the rest of the planets rotating around the sun, they had the sun and all the planets (all of them globes) rotate around the earth.  Explaining their orbits was really tricky, as they seemed to go backwards sometimes as well as forward.  But they tried.

In addition, they generally assumed that as one went further south one would get progressively hotter, so that as the North Pole was cold, the South Pole was assumed to be hot.  There was also concern about how the people who were thought to live in the southern hemisphere could stay attached to the planet, given that they were (from the point of view of the northern hemisphere) upside down.

Sometimes these southerners were depicted with giant feet and toes, to grip the earth so they wouldn't fly off.  They were also bent 180 degrees at the waist, so that their head was still "up."  Yet other medieval thinkers had it right, that "down" was not an absolute direction but rather toward the center of the planet, wherever one was on it.  Dante, in describing a descent into Hell, said that once you got into the center, where Satan sat frozen in ice, you had to turn around, head where your feet had been, to continue up to the other side of the planet.

 Flat earth folks today have major problems explaining things like, if there's an edge to this flat earth, why has no one ever seen it?  How can planes fly around the world just as if it's a globe, if they argue everything is actually laid flat in two dimensional space?  If you go west from California, how do you suddenly end up on the east side of the planet, next to Japan?

One of the sillier arguments I've seen recently is that we must be a flat, unmoving space, with sun and moon and everything else rotating around us, because if we were actually on a swiftly rotating planet we'd fly off into space.  (Try this analogy: how can we drive along at 60 mpg in a car without being thrown from the front seat into the back seat and out the back hatch by the speed?)

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval understanding of the world, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

 

Too Many Clothes

 Pretty much all of us have too many clothes.  (Yes, I'm looking at me here.). It's hard to avoid. We needed something for a special event and got it.  We have a favorite outfit that's gotten stained and threadbare, but we can't bear to get rid of it.  We saw something really nice on sale.  We have work responsibilities where it seems appropriate not to wear the same outfit too many times close together.

We have some perfectly good clothes we might wear again if we ever lost a few pounds or they came back into style.  We have clothes we would certainly wear if we ever went to a dude ranch/went on a fancy cruise/took up tennis/needed to clear brush (gotta be prepared!).  We have clothes that we don't really like, but they were a gift, so it seems we ought to wear them sometime.  We have clothes we forgot we have.

 Needless to say, this was not a problem in the Middle Ages.  The only people who had what might be considered "too many" clothes were the extremely wealthy, and even they would be put to shame by the number of outfits in a modern teenager's closet.  Party this was because clothes were a lot more expensive and slow to produce than the "fast fashion" one sees today.

(Fast fashion is called that both because it's like "fast food," relatively inexpensive and ultimately unsatisfying, and because new styles are constantly being introduced to keep customers constantly buying the latest fashion.)

Today clothes are sewn by machine, usually in the southern hemisphere, rather than sewn by hand (even home sewers use sewing machines—even the Amish use foot-pedal-driven machines).  And the cloth is all machine-woven today, not woven by hand.  All that hand labor drives up the cost and means one cannot pop up to the mall and come home a couple hours later with several new outfits

 Probably the majority of the medieval population had two everyday outfits, one to wear and one to wash. They might also have a third special-occasions outfit.  (The well-to-do might have two special-occasions outfits.)  These clothes would be worn until they were pretty thoroughly worn out, extensively patched and sewn back together.

The wealthy would pass a worn cloak or tunic down to a servant or someone of lower social status, as an act of generosity, so even a poor person might get to wear silk or velvet at some point, even if stained and threadbare.

At some point clothes just couldn't be worn any more.  At this point they would become rags.  Rags were useful.  They were used for scrubbing.  They were used for diapers.  They were used in the latrine.  They were used for feminine hygiene.  They were used to stuff comforters.  They were used for patches to make another outfit last a few months longer. Rags would get dirty, so just wash and use again until they literally fell apart.

As all this suggests, disposing of old clothing was not a concern.  It is however in the modern West.  Some clothing is just tossed into the garbage.  Other unwanted clothing may be dropped off at Goodwill, but Goodwill will toss anything too stained and threadbare to attract a buyer.  In the US something like a quarter of everything in the landfill is clothing that's been thrown away.

Some worn-out clothing can have its fabric recycled, especially pure cotton and pure wool.  It is however difficult to recycle the strands of a cotton-poly mix fabric, because the different kinds of strands require different processes, and it's nearly impossible to separate them.  This is why the amount of used clothing in the landfill continues to grow, in spite of recycling efforts. (Medieval people, with no polyester, did not have this problem.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on clothing and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!