![]() ![]() Yet its geography was essentially that of the late Roman period, a world view which was now about to be exploded in the Age of Discovery. Its secular, mathematically planned world map was revolutionary when compared to the religious mappa mundi. In the early 15th century the Greek geography of Ptolemy was translated into Latin for the first time and returned to the mainstream of European intellectual life after a thousand years of neglect. The medieval view of the world and cosmos was eroded, then destroyed, through a series of physical and intellectual discoveries, reshaping first the map of the world, then the model of the universe. In both astronomy and geography, science was in harmony with faith, and we see here an echo of the cosmic diagrams of pre-scientific cultures, whose aim was to place man in a scheme of time, place and eternity. This precisely parallels the image of Christ and his angels dominating the medieval map of the world. Ptolemy’s spheres centred on the Earth and became a rational celestial mechanism, while Aristotle’s prime mover could be seen as the divine controlling power. This type of world map became elaborated into a visual encyclopaedia of beliefs about the world and of the place of man and God within it.ĭante’s great poem The Divine Comedy embodies a vision of the cosmos consistent with the science of Aristotle and Ptolemy / British Library, Public Domainīy the 12th century, Greek science was rediscovered by Western scholars from Arabic sources, and Christian thinkers found in the classical cosmology a structure that exactly suited their theology. The division of the Earth among the three sons of Noah (Genesis 9 & 10) became associated with the three known continents, and the diagram of the circular world subdivided into three became a characteristic medieval image. Alongside this political disintegration, a new empire – Western Christendom – was taking shape, in which all knowledge was defined in religious or biblical terms. ![]() With the decline of Rome, knowledge of much of Greek culture, including astronomy and geography, was lost to the West. The Middle Ages: Science and the Religious Imagination The sense that the universe was a rational whole, capable of being understood, described and mapped, was a characteristic insight of Greek thought. In essence, the places of the world and the stars in the sky were understood to stand in a precise relationship to each other, as parts of a system. This technique coincided with the empirical discovery that the earth was a sphere, so the same geometric method of measurement could be applied to map the earth. Using spherical geometry, it was now possible to map the stars, creating a coordinate system equivalent to latitude and longitude which fixed any point on the sphere. The apparent daily rotation of the heavens convinced Greek philosophers that the structure of the cosmos was a series of spheres centred on the earth. It was Greek science that first enabled the structure of the cosmos to be rationally modelled and mapped. Ptolemy himself left no surviving maps, but rather a set of texts from which his world map was reconstructed possibly over 1000 years after his death / British Library, Public Domain The Ancient World: Visions and Calculations Since the Renaissance, scientific techniques have yielded ever-greater precision in the measurement and mapping of the earth and heavens, and now – in the era of remote sensing and deep-space photography – the age-old impulse to understand the world and the universe through maps and images is as strong as ever. This medieval world view was shattered in the Renaissance: the age of discovery redrew the world map, and the Copernican Revolution opened the possibility of an infinite cosmos. These classical methods of mapmaking were lost to the West throughout the middle ages, although preserved by Islamic scientists, and it was the religious imagination that shaped medieval maps of the world and cosmos. Using logic and geometry, Greek mathematicians were able to measure the earth and map the stars and planetary paths. These models were originally symbolic or poetic, until, in Classical Greek thought, the crucial step towards modern science was made. People have always sought to construct conceptual models of the earth and heavens, in order to locate themselves in space and time. Peter Apian’s Heart Map: This Renaissance fantasy – the globe transformed into the human heart – is also an attempt to represent a known world enlarged from old Ptolemaic maps / British Library, Public Domain ![]()
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