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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

#201

Post by ethbr0 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #199
ethbr0 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my perspective (from watching struggles with public health & vaccine development information during early COVID-19) is that modern intellects aren't well exercised with respect to uncertainty. Our predecessors lived in a culture suffused with unreliable information. There weren't even "alternate" facts, because there were few accepted ones to have alternatives to. On the one hand, we know more than they did (…

> On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly handle uncertainty. No, we're actually (thankfully) a lot better at that than 15th Century Europe.

Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed.

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

#202

Post by dragonwriter »

ethbr0 wrote: post #201
dragonwriter wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly handle uncertainty. No, we're actually (thankfully) a lot better at that than 15th Century Europe.

Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed.

> Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed.

I wasn't picking out a local minims on either end (well, not intentionally); I was picking out the times being compared (that of Columbus vs. now) from the context of the discussion.

But really, the same applies to the whole of history from the ancient period up through and including all of the early modern period vs. say, any time from the mid-20th century on, to avoid any problems with overspecificity on either end.

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

#203

Post by fuzzfactor »

sebws wrote: post #89
tootie wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the topic was pandemics we don't know about because they weren't written down. The bubonic plague was written about pretty extensively. Even earlier disease outbreaks were written about.

I think the topic was how pandemics would cause word of mouth stories to be lost, not the story of pandemics.

It could be worse, it could be pestilence of biblical proportions.

Oh wait . . .

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

#204

Post by ethbr0 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #202
ethbr0 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed.

> Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed. I wasn't picking out a local minims on either end (well, not intentionally); I was picking out the times being compared (that of Columbus vs. now) from the context of the discussion. But really, the same applies to the whole of history from the ancient period up through and including all of the early modern period vs. say, any time from the mid-20th centur…

History renders comparisons murky and imprecise, but my point was more contingent on the availability of quality information than behavior.

Now, we know many things. Then, we did not know many things (although we perhaps believed more).

So an every-person (I'm talking generally, not only of the most scientific), plucked from a more ignorant time of history, would have a more developed method of dealing with confusion.

I don't quite buy the counter-argument (if this is yours?) that we're a more scientific society. I would have before COVID, but not now...

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

#205

Post by Chris2048 »

throw0101a wrote: post #34
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…

> 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. In the late 1400s people thought the Asian continent was larger than it is in reality. So when Columbus et co saw islands they thought they had hit Japan†… roughly where all the best maps of the day said it would be. See Toscanelli's 1474 map, wh…

Ireland looks pretty big there compared to the British mainland, and Scotland pretty diminished.

Funny how those parts are also disproportioned.

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

#207

Post by amanaplanacanal »

mongol wrote: post #102
ezekiel68 wrote: post #101

There isn't much to go by here. I mean -- if they could embellish with large stone tablet buildings and "giants", we may reasonably surmise that the whole tale is a stand-in for simply uncharted/unexplored territory. The Norse equivalent of "Here be dragons".

I think the surprising news is that the norse explorations of North America was known in southern Europe. Until now I had thought it was a quite isolated event.

I’m not sure of the timeline, but Vikings ships were known to sail all the way to Venice.

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

kitd wrote: post #119
CryptoPunk wrote: post #39

Intriguely, Columbus claimed that in 1477, after visiting Bristol, England (which is confirmed), he visited Iceland, where the stories of Markland would have predominated.

And Bristol fishermen were known to fish Icelandic waters and beyond. A major backer of their voyages was Welshman Richard ap Meryk, sometimes elided to Ameryk. There's a theory that the fishermen established a processing station in Newfoundland and called it Ameryka in his honour, associating the left-hand side of the pond with that name in voyagers and cartographers minds.

[deleted]
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