THE DISCARDED IMAGE by C,S. Lewis, 1964
The erroneous notion that the medievals were Flat earthers was common enough till recently. It might have two sources. One is that medieval maps, such as the great thirteenth-century mappemounde in Hereford cathedral, represent the Earth as a circle, which is what men would do if they believed it to be a disc. But what would men do if, knowing it was a globe and wishing to represent it in two dimensions, they had not yet mastered the late and difficult art of projection? Fortunately we need not answer this question. There is no reason to suppose that the mappemounde represents the whole surface of the Earth. The theory of the Four Zones taught that the equatorial region was too hot for life. The other hemisphere of the Earth was to us wholly inaccessible. You could write science-fiction about it, but not geography. There could be no question of including it in a map. The mappemounde depicts the hemisphere we live in.
The second reason for the error might be that we find in medieval literature references to the world's end. Often these are as vague as similar references in our own time. But they may be more precise, as when, in a geographical passage, Gower says: ‘Fro that into the worldes ende Estward, Asie it is.’ But the same explanation might cover both this and the Hereford map. The 'world' of man, the only world that can ever concern us, may end where our hemisphere ends. A glance at the Hereford mappemounde suggests that thirteenth-century Englishmen were almost totally ignorant of geography. But they cannot have been anything like so ignorant as the cartographer appears to be. For one thing the British Isles themselves are one of the most ludicrously erroneous parts of his map. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of those who looked at it when it was new, must at least have known that Scotland and England were not separate islands; the blue bonnets had come over the border too often to permit any such illusion. And secondly, medieval man was by no means a static animal. Kings, armies, prelates, diplomats, merchants, and wandering scholars were continually on the move. Thanks to the popularity of pilgrimages even women, and women of the middle class, went far afield; witness the Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe. A practical knowledge of geography must have been pretty widely diffused. But it did not, I suspect, exist in the form of maps or even of map-like visual images. It would be an affair of winds to be waited for, landmarks to be picked up, capes to be doubled, this or that road to be taken at a fork. I doubt whether the maker of the mappemounde would have been at all disquieted to learn that many an illiterate sea-captain knew enough to refute his map in a dozen places. I doubt whether the sea-captain would have attempted to use his superior knowledge for any such purpose. A map of the whole hemisphere on so small a scale could never have been intended to have any practical use. The cartographer wished to make a rich Jєωel embodying the noble art of cosmography, with the Earthly Paradise marked as an island at the extreme Eastern edge (the East is at the top in this as in other medieval maps) and Jerusalem appropriately in the centre. Sailors themselves may have looked at it with admiration and delight. They were not going to steer by it. A great deal of medieval geography is, none the less, merely romantic. Mandeville is an extreme example; but soberer authors are also concerned to fix the site of Paradise. The tradition which places it in the remote East seems to go back to a Jєωιѕн romance about Alexander, written before 500, and Latinised in the twelfth century as the Iter ad Paradisum. This may underlie the mappemounde, and Gower (vn, 570), and also Mandeville who puts it beyond Prester John's country, beyond Taprobane (Ceylon), beyond the Dark Country (xxxiii). A later view puts it in Abyssinia; as Richard Eden says 'in the East side of Afrike beneath the red sea dwelleth the great and mighty Emperour and Christian King Prester John ... in this province are many exceeding high mountains upon the which is said to be the earthly paradise '. Sometimes the rumour of a secret and delectable place on those mountains takes another form. Peter Heylin in his Cosmography (1652) says 'the hill of Amara is a day's journey high, on the top whereof are thirty-four palaces in which the younger sons of the Emperour are continually enclosed'. Milton, whose imagination absorbed like a sponge, combined both traditions in his 'Mount Amara' 'where Abassin kings their issue guard ... by some suppos'd True Paradise' (P. L. IV, 280 sq.). Amara is used by Jolmson for the Happy Valley in Rasselas. If it also suggested, as I suspect it did, Coleridge's 'Mount A bora ', this remote mountain has deserved strangely well of English readers. Side by side with these stories, however, the geographical knowledge of the medievals extended further East than we always remember. The Crusades, mercantile voyages, and pilgrimages - at some periods a highly organised industry-had opened the Levant. Franciscan missionaries had visited the Great Khan in 1246 and in 1254, when the meeting was at Karakorum. Nicolo and Maffeo Polo came to Kublai's court at Pekin in 1266; their more famous nephew Marco long resided there, returning in 1291. But the foundation of the Ming dynasty in 1368 largely put an end to such intercourse. Marco Polo's great Travels (1295) is easily accessible and should be on everyone's shelves. At one point it has an interesting connection with our literature. Marco describes the Gobi desert as a place so haunted by evil spirits that travellers who lag behind 'until the caravan is no longer in sight' will be called to by their names and in some well-known voice. But if they follow the call they will be lost and perish (1, xxxvi). This also passes into Milton and becomes‘those airy tongues that syllable men's names
On Sands and Shores and desert wildernesses.’ (Comus, 208-9.)An interesting attempt has recently been made1 to show that some real knowledge of the Atlantic islands and even of America lies behind the legend of St Brendan. But we need not discuss the case for this theory since, even if such knowledge existed, it has no general influence on the medieval mind. Explorers sailed west to find rich Cathay. If they had known that a huge, uncivilised continent lay between, they would probably not have sailed at all.B. BEASTSCompared with medieval Theology, philosophy, astronomy, or architecture, medieval zoology strikes us as childish; such zoology, at least, as they most often put into books. For, as there was a practical geography which had nothing to do with the mappemounde, so there was a practical zoology which had nothing to do with the Bestiaries. The percentage of the population who knew a great deal about certain animals must have been far larger in medieval than in modern England. It could not have been otherwise in a society where everyone who could be was a horseman, hunter, and hawker, and everyone else a trapper, fisher, cowman, shepherd, swineherd, goose-girl, hen wife, or beekeeper. A good medievalist (A. Carlyle) once said in my hearing, 'The typical Knight of the Middle Ages was far more interested in pigs than in tournaments '. But all this first-hand knowledge appears very seldom in the texts. When it does - when, for example, the poet of Gawain assumes in his audience a familiarity with the anatomy of the deer (1325 sq.) - the laugh turns not against the Middle Ages but against ourselves. Such passages, however, are rare. The written zoology of their period is mainly a mass of cock-and-bull stories about creatures the authors had never seen, and often about creatures that never existed. The merit of having invented, or the disgrace of having first believed, these fancies does not belong to the medievals. They are usually handing on what they received from the ancients. Aristotle, indeed, had laid the foundations of a genuinely scientific zoology; if he had been known first and followed exclusively we might have had no Bestiaries. But this was not what happened. From Herodotus down, the classics are full of travellers' tales about strange beasts and birds; tales too intriguing to be easily rejected. Aelian (second century B.c.) and the elder Pliny are storehouses of such matters. The medieval failure to distinguish between writers of wholly different kinds was also at work. Phaedrus (first century A.D.) was, in intention, merely writing Aesopic fables. But his dragon (rv, xx) - a creature born under evil stars, disiratis natus, and doomed to guard against others the treasure it cannot use itself - would seem to be the ancestor of all those dragons whom we think so Germanic when we meet them in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. The image proved so potent an archetype that it engendered belief, and, even when belief faded, men were unwilling to let it go. In two thousand years western humanity has neither got tired of it nor improved it. Beowulf's dragon and Wagner's dragon are unmistakably the dragon of Phaedrus. (The Chinese dragon, I understand, is different.) Many conductors, no doubt, not all of them now discoverable, helped to transmit such lore to the Middle Ages. Isidore is one of the most easily accessible. In him, moreover, we can see actually at work the process by which the pseudo-zoology grew up. His sections on the Horse are particularly instructive.'Horses can scent battle; they are incited to war by the sound of the trumpet' (xrr, i, 43). A highly lyrical passage from Job (xxxix. 19-25) is here being turned into a proposition in natural history. But we may not be quite out of touch with observation. Experienced cavalry chargers, especially stallions, probably do behave in some such way. We reach a further stage when Isidore tells us that the adder (aspis), to protect herself against snakecharmers, lies down and presses one ear to the ground and curls her tail round to stop up the other (xu, iv, 12) patently a prosaic conversion into pseudo-science of the metaphor about the adder who 'stoppeth her ear ' in Ps. lviii. 4- 5.There is lots more. PDF available on Google..
Topic: C. S. Lewis and Flat-Earth and Beasts (Read 920 times)