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Post by ignorantianescia on Jul 15, 2015 17:18:58 GMT
Thanks for the translation and your post. I'm glad I now know how the last two dependent clauses should have gone. My opponent is not giving in just yet though. He has just informed me that my analysis of what Tostado says above is "not tenable" , as he will "demonstrate" though only when he "gets time". Er, yup. It shall be entertaining to see how that person will try to dodge the text's implications. The first sentence already states that the earth is spherical in a matter-of-fact way, so he/she has quite a challenge ahead.
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Post by timoneill on Jul 17, 2015 13:54:34 GMT
Thanks for the translation and your post. I'm glad I now know how the last two dependent clauses should have gone. My opponent is not giving in just yet though. He has just informed me that my analysis of what Tostado says above is "not tenable" , as he will "demonstrate" though only when he "gets time". Er, yup. It shall be entertaining to see how that person will try to dodge the text's implications. The first sentence already states that the earth is spherical in a matter-of-fact way, so he/she has quite a challenge ahead. My opponent's repy. See what you think: "I don't find it plausible that Tostado would really be principally concerned with contradicting some unnamed "ignorant men" who thought that there were no mountains at all before the Deluge. That would be something quite different from any Creationist "flood geology". No one who takes the Bible seriously enough to believe that the Deluge happened would also ignore the fact that that very same text refers to the Flood as "surpassing the tallest mountains of the earth by fifteen cubits, and that the Ark sat on Mt. Ararat". It's clear that Tostado is attacking a straw man there, particularly since Pliny and Bede (whom he must have read), had explained in what sense the Earth may be said to be spherical, despite there being mountains. On the other hand, it's not hard to see why Tostado, as a Biblical literalist, would be troubled by the account in Genesis 1:9 of how God commanded "the water under the sky" to be "gathered into one place". To the ancient Hebrews that simply meant the Mediterranean Sea. But to a Medieval European this was problematic, even aside from the question of whether the Earth was round or not. According to your own translation, Tostado writes of the waters originally "spreading out over the entire spherical surface of the Earth", but also of how later, when the dry land emerged, "God made certain great hollows and depths in the earth, so that, if the earth were flat, water would not flow off over the entire earth." I'd say this is more than ambivalent: it's downright confused, and the product of a mind torn between a commitment to the literal sense of the Bible and deference to the authority of Aristotle and his followers. In my response to your comments on this and my other posts related to the "flat Earth myth", I've mentioned several times the work of William G. L. Randles [ editions-ehess-fr/ouvrages/ouvra... ], which is significantly entitled "From the Flat Earth to the Terrestrial Globe: A Rapid Epistemological Mutation (1480-1520), and which Russell calls "brilliant" in Inventing the Flat Earth. What Randles argues is that until the 15th century, many Christian scholars compromised by conceiving of the dry, habitable land (the oikoumene) as a disc (with mountains and a hollow in the middle for the Mediterranean), surrounded by a much larger ocean to make up Aristotle's sphere. Randles finds that even after Columbus returned from America, Zacharia Lilio, a canon at the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome, was writing against what Lilio himself termed the "roundness of the Earth" on such grounds. So my guess is that Tostado is proceeding along similar lines to Lilio, also in an ambivalent and confused way. I imagine that Russell understands this, but preferring to avoid a protracted explanation that would only distract from his intent in what's essentially a brief polemic directed to the general public (rather than a work of scholarship like Randles's), contented himself with mentioning Lilio and Tostado as "anomalies". Moreover, I find it immensely unlikely that, as you claim, Bernard de Montfaucon would've cited Tostado without actually having read him, and in a way totally contrary to what you claim was the "common knowledge" of a millenium. Montfaucon was a world-class, professional scholar. He was also a devout Catholic monk in early modern France, with no motive whatsoever to libel Medieval Catholic scholarship. The passage that I provided and which you cited is merely the one to which Google Play directed me upon searching to "spherica" (well, actually, "fpherica", due to the old-fashioned typesetting). If I were competent as a Latinist, I'd try to read chapter I of Tostado's Commentaries on Genesis in full, in order to form a clearer picture of its attitude towards the problem of the Earth's shape. But I'm not a competent Latinist, and I've too many other obligations, so I don't expect that I'll get to do that in the near future. On the other hand, unlike what I've seen you do here many times, I treat the opinions of experts with respect and circumspection. Unless I see either a full translation or a detailed commentary by a professional, I'm afraid I can't add much more on Tostado's views regarding the shape the Earth. Finally, note that Randles's analysis makes it very clear why rejecting the possibility of an inhabited antipodes was the key to the viability of the pre-15th century compromise between Aristotle and the Bible. But it's not the case that this was "based on a knowledge of a round earth". What St. Augustine wrote in his City of God is that the Earth might be spherical, but that, even if it were, it'd still be absurd to expect that humans would live in the antipodes, with their feet pointing upwards. It's not clear to me at all that Tostado's rejection of people living "beyond the equinotial regions" (in the passage just after the one that you translated) is based on any knowledge of a spherical Earth, even in the compromise sense of Randles. His argument against antipodal humans is purely Biblical." "
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Post by domics on Jul 17, 2015 15:20:57 GMT
My opponent's repy. See what you think: "... particularly since Pliny and Bede (whom he must have read), had explained in what sense the Earth may be said to be spherical, despite there being mountains. ... Moreover, I find it immensely unlikely that, as you claim, Bernard de Montfaucon would've cited Tostado without actually having read him, and in a way totally contrary to what you claim was the "common knowledge" of a millenium. Montfaucon was a world-class, professional scholar. He was also a devout Catholic monk in early modern France, with no motive whatsoever to libel Medieval Catholic scholarship. " As Bernard de Montfaucon, in the same introduction to Cosma's Topography, in a passage just above the screenshot given by this user, makes reference to Bede as advocate of a flat earth I would not rely on his autority in this topic. As he was wrong on Bede so he could be wrong on Tostado. In this Commentaria in Deuteronomium, writing about antipodes it is very clear that Tostado knows that the earth is round ('centrum terrae est infimum in toto orbe') and that every man in a point of the earth could be the antipode of someome else. In Qaestio IV Cap. VII: "...Illi homines qui a seipsis distant per diametrum terrae, ut ponatur aliquis homo in quaecumqae parte orbis voluerimus, et a pedibus illius protrahatur diameter terrae transiens per centrum, terrae, et transibit ad aliam extremitatem terrae, homo autem existens in illa extremitate, quam tangit alias pars diametri, vocaretur antipos alterius. " In a flat earth this does not happen! books.google.it/books?id=8iBolsB3QRoC&pg=PA57&dq=antipodes+inauthor:%22Alfonso+de+Madrigal%22&hl=it&sa=X&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAGoVChMI8uGTm8TixgIVQ3g-Ch2yXA9E#v=onepage&q=%22quia%20centrum%20terrae%20eft%20infimum%20in%20toto%20orbe%22%22&f=false
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Post by timoneill on Jul 20, 2015 9:11:07 GMT
My opponent's repy. See what you think: "... particularly since Pliny and Bede (whom he must have read), had explained in what sense the Earth may be said to be spherical, despite there being mountains. ... Moreover, I find it immensely unlikely that, as you claim, Bernard de Montfaucon would've cited Tostado without actually having read him, and in a way totally contrary to what you claim was the "common knowledge" of a millenium. Montfaucon was a world-class, professional scholar. He was also a devout Catholic monk in early modern France, with no motive whatsoever to libel Medieval Catholic scholarship. " As Bernard de Montfaucon, in the same introduction to Cosma's Topography, in a passage just above the screenshot given by this user, makes reference to Bede as advocate of a flat earth I would not rely on his autority in this topic. As he was wrong on Bede so he could be wrong on Tostado. In this Commentaria in Deuteronomium, writing about antipodes it is very clear that Tostado knows that the earth is round ('centrum terrae est infimum in toto orbe') and that every man in a point of the earth could be the antipode of someome else. In Qaestio IV Cap. VII: "...Illi homines qui a seipsis distant per diametrum terrae, ut ponatur aliquis homo in quaecumqae parte orbis voluerimus, et a pedibus illius protrahatur diameter terrae transiens per centrum, terrae, et transibit ad aliam extremitatem terrae, homo autem existens in illa extremitate, quam tangit alias pars diametri, vocaretur antipos alterius. " In a flat earth this does not happen! books.google.it/books?id=8iBolsB3QRoC&pg=PA57&dq=antipodes+inauthor:%22Alfonso+de+Madrigal%22&hl=it&sa=X&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAGoVChMI8uGTm8TixgIVQ3g-Ch2yXA9E#v=onepage&q=%22quia%20centrum%20terrae%20eft%20infimum%20in%20toto%20orbe%22%22&f=falseFantastic - thank you. I've just smacked him between the eyes with that one, so let's see what he tries now. It will be fun to watch him try to argue that a flat earth could somehow have a "diameter" and a "centre". For those without Latin, the translation of the above is: "If we put a man in any part of the world, and we draw the diameter of the earth passing from his feet to the other extremity of the earth, and through the center of the earth, and if there is another man in that extremity which is touched by the other part of the diameter, those men, who are the diameter of the earth distant from themselves, are called the antipodes of each other."
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Post by MedievalGirl on Oct 10, 2015 15:34:11 GMT
'Newfangled idea' that Medieval people did not believe the earth was flat? C.S.Lewis was saying it way back in the '40s. Clearly some folk were not listening.
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Post by MedievalGirl on Oct 10, 2015 15:38:33 GMT
As Bernard de Montfaucon, in the same introduction to Cosma's Topography, in a passage just above the screenshot given by this user, makes reference to Bede as advocate of a flat earth I would not rely on his autority in this topic. As he was wrong on Bede so he could be wrong on Tostado. In this Commentaria in Deuteronomium, writing about antipodes it is very clear that Tostado knows that the earth is round ('centrum terrae est infimum in toto orbe') and that every man in a point of the earth could be the antipode of someome else. In Qaestio IV Cap. VII: "...Illi homines qui a seipsis distant per diametrum terrae, ut ponatur aliquis homo in quaecumqae parte orbis voluerimus, et a pedibus illius protrahatur diameter terrae transiens per centrum, terrae, et transibit ad aliam extremitatem terrae, homo autem existens in illa extremitate, quam tangit alias pars diametri, vocaretur antipos alterius. " In a flat earth this does not happen! books.google.it/books?id=8iBolsB3QRoC&pg=PA57&dq=antipodes+inauthor:%22Alfonso+de+Madrigal%22&hl=it&sa=X&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAGoVChMI8uGTm8TixgIVQ3g-Ch2yXA9E#v=onepage&q=%22quia%20centrum%20terrae%20eft%20infimum%20in%20toto%20orbe%22%22&f=falseFantastic - thank you. I've just smacked him between the eyes with that one, so let's see what he tries now. It will be fun to watch him try to argue that a flat earth could somehow have a "diameter" and a "centre". For those without Latin, the translation of the above is: "If we put a man in any part of the world, and we draw the diameter of the earth passing from his feet to the other extremity of the earth, and through the center of the earth, and if there is another man in that extremity which is touched by the other part of the diameter, those men, who are the diameter of the earth distant from themselves, are called the antipodes of each other." Indeed, clearly someone has not read Bede. His reference to the round earth is a useful one. I was once able to quote it to a blog follower who seemed to believe Western Europeans only learned about the correct shape as a result of contact with Islam from the twelfth century onwards.
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Post by wraggy on Oct 11, 2015 6:26:44 GMT
Welcome to the forum MedievalGirl.
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jonkon
Master of the Arts
Posts: 111
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Post by jonkon on Oct 11, 2015 17:46:35 GMT
'Newfangled idea' that Medieval people did not believe the earth was flat? C.S.Lewis was saying it way back in the '40s. Clearly some folk were not listening. Welcome to the forum. The flat earth myth appears to have originated with Washington Irving in a fictional account of Columbus's discovery of America. Martianus Capella's discussion of geometry in his "The Marriage of Philology and Mercury" preserves Eratosthenes's calculation of the size of the Earth, so this was known throughout the aftermath of the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire.
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