We're in the time of the French Revolution now, a time where revolutionaries break with superstitions from the past. They will only be guided by reason. You have this extremely decorated French historian and geographer that's on a mission. A mission to fight the church. 00:07:15 He published this book on the cosmographical opinions of the Church Fathers, and he really goes for it. He writes how until recently, all science has had to be based on the Bible, and geographers were forced to believe Earth was a flat surface. According to him, this was all because of three irresistible arguments persecution, prison and the stake. I

there is this French scientist that introduced the idea that medieval people thought the earth was flat, and he believes religion was to blame. He was influenced by an age old movement that created the idea 00:04:30 of dark ages and the rule of the church and suppressing knowledge. If you go all the way back to the 1300s, we find one Italian poet that was quite sure of himself. Petrarch identified two times in history. The time of the Greeks and Romans that was an enlightened age. And basically everything after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was a dark age

Manguel, Alberto. A history of reading. 2014.

The earliest survivingauthor’s manuscripts date from late eleventh- century Italy and include somemanuscripts of Petrarch from the fourteenth century, but large collections ofpapers by scholars first survive from the fifteenth century and in increasing num-bers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.