It gives me no pleasure to take issue with Professor Chris Higgins, one of my ultimate employers and the son of very good friends of mine. But on Radio Four yesterday, he suggested that people had previously believed that the earth was flat. He did not say who those people were.
The suggestion that this was the Mediaeval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of "Gotham" to refer to New York.
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