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A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

economist.com

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Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#21

Post by btilly »

namenotrequired wrote: post #9

How likely is this to be real? If real, was this work originally widely read in its time?

This is certainly real.

An unfinished and unpublished work in an era before the printing press is guaranteed to not have been widely read.

But the voyages to Vinland went from Greenland. And Greenland had a bishop who wrote to the church. And priests sent letters to each other. It is hardly surprising that one seeking to write a book on distant history and lands would have encountered information from so far afield.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#22

Post by tootie »

frupert52 wrote: post #17
Thorentis wrote: post #11

There are probably many discoveries thought to be more modern, that were actually made earlier than we realise but were never written down. Word of mouth stories are often lost during mass population upheavals like war and famine.

And pandemics?

Pandemics would be pretty unlikely in the days of such low population density. Epidemics definitely happened pretty routinely though.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#25

Post by tootie »

jmchuster wrote: post #19

> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void. I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since…

Given that nobody knew about this book for centuries, it seems pretty unlikely that Columbus saw it. Let alone, saw it and believed it and discounted the giants and also didn't mention it to anyone.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#26

Post by ummonk »

namenotrequired wrote: post #9

How likely is this to be real? If real, was this work originally widely read in its time?

According to the paper (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...), it wasn't widely known (or at least believed) in Italy at the time (since Genoese maps didn't reflect North American lands).

There is no reason to suspect this isn't real - it's hard to fabricate a convincing forgery of a medieval Latin manuscript. And this manuscript itself is perfectly plausible - all it's really showing is that one Italian friar somehow (perhaps via Genoese sailors) learnt about what Viking sailors already knew about the New World.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#27

Post by blfr »

tootie wrote: post #25
jmchuster wrote: post #19

> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void. I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since…

Given that nobody knew about this book for centuries, it seems pretty unlikely that Columbus saw it. Let alone, saw it and believed it and discounted the giants and also didn't mention it to anyone.

I think the idea is that he heard the same tales because he was in the same milieu, not that he read that book.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#28

Post by tokai »

namenotrequired wrote: post #9

How likely is this to be real? If real, was this work originally widely read in its time?

From the research article:

«The Cronica universalis is thought to be one of his later works, perhaps the last one, and was left unfinished and unperfected»

So I would guess only few read it. But the friar would have had the information from other sources available to him, and presumably others. The provenance of the manuscript sounds pretty solid to me.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#29

Post by krapp »

jmchuster wrote: post #19

> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void. I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since…

> and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since the Caribbean was where he wrongly thought Asia was going to be.

... which is why Native Americans have been referred to as "Indians," because Columbus was certain he'd reached the Indies.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#30

Post by jbay808 »

hprotagonist wrote: post #18
exdsq wrote: post #15

And even if they were written down, the Catholic church sure did love to burn books back then!

Quite the opposite: you have copyist monks to thank for the survival of the vast majority of written material that remains from pre-christian antiquity.

I thought that was mostly due to Islamic scholars. Weren't the monks mostly erasing and repurposing old scrolls to make copies of the Bible?
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