Good video, my favorite thing about it is the frequent citation of “Galileo Goes to Jail.” That encourages people to read the book, where they can get more details. As somebody who likes details, I would have appreciated more quotations from medieval writers (quotations from their actual writings) demonstrating that they believed in a round earth. It’s one thing to just claim, gratuitiously, “Thomas Aquinas believed in a round earth.” It’s a lot more powerful (in my opinion) to show them his words on the subject: “the astronomer and the physicist…[both] prove the same conclusion - that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer proves it by means of mathematics, but the physicist proves it by the nature of matter.” These are very nearly the first words of the Summa Theologiae, his greatest work:
newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm And also notice: he gives that as a “for instance,” which means he expected his readers to already know this as a given. This is very good evidence that medieval Catholics knew the world was round.
I also think it’s noteworthy that the round earth appears on early Catholic imagery. For example,
this coin is from the time period when Rome was Catholic, and it depicts a cross intersecting a round globe (next to the emperor’s head). We’re talking the mid-to-late 300s here, and Catholics knew so well that the earth was round, it showed up on our coins!
