The Discarded Image

Medieval writers had their own ways of conceptualizing the people, animals, and plants that live on Earth. They understood that Earth is a sphere, and they imagined that Fortune, a personified virtue, is responsible for ensuring that the Earth continues to rotate. Fortune was envisioned to be an egalitarian presence; along with rotating the Earth, she would ensure that in time, each of the Earth’s peoples would get the opportunity to have a reigning empire. 

Although people were aware that the Earth was a sphere, they tended to make highly inaccurate maps, even based on the knowledge available to them at the time. According to Lewis, their maps were stylized and were not intended to be accurate. Instead, they were meant to communicate certain important ideas about the world; sailors would never have used them to navigate. For instance, one medieval map places England and Scotland on different islands. Maps often reverted to classical ideas about the Four Zones, even though many people in western Europe knew about lands as far east as China. References to the end or edge of the world were likely poetic or metaphorical; people did not, on the whole, actually believe that the Earth was flat.