Does the flat-earth theme support a medieval origin?
Do we use the woodcut to depict the charming naivete of medievals who believed the Earth was flat? So thought J.D. Bernal when he used a cropped version to illustrate his popular survey of the history of science (first image); and Daniel Boorstin when he chose a colorized version as the jacket illustration for his telling of The Discoverers (second image). “In medieval times there was a return to the concept of a flat Earth and a dogmatism about the crystalline celestial spheres, here epitomized in a woodcut showing the machinery responsible for their motion discovered by an inquirer who has broken through the outer sphere of fixed stars. Sixteenth century.” J.D. Bernal, Science in History, vol. 1 of The Emergence of Science (4 vols) There may be a twist to the story of our woodcut after all. Its provenance is notoriously difficult to track down. Despite Bernal’s typical if erroneous caption, the illustration credits at the end of his book offer no traceable source for his cropped-vers
