CURRENT LITERATURE
• GEOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES By G, H. T. Kimble
Our age, which has witnessed a set- back in politics and morals, cannot ridicule the middle ages for being, -as far as geography was concerned, less enlight- ened than the second-century Ptolemy and his school. Mr. Kimble's very able treatise (Methuen, 15s.) shows that the Christian West for centuries ignored Ptolemy and other Greek writers and drew its geographical ideas mainly from Genesis and Pliny. A narrow orthodoxy discouraged enquiry. Mean- while in our "Dark Ages" Moslem geographers' who knew Ptolemy, went ahead and developed their science so that in the eleventh century they could fix latitudes, while they accumulated much topographical infqrmation. Turk- ish intolerance ended this movement, of which Christian scholars knew little. Until Greek studies revived in the fifteenth century, geography made scant progress. But the growth of trade by sea caused the rough charts to be gradually improved, and the sailors' practical knowledge at last penetrated to the philosophers' studies. Mr. Kimble confirms the general belief that the Portuguese seamen knew much more about West Africa than they would admit, even in the fourteenth century, as the trade was a valuable monopoly. He devotes special attention to the evolution of world maps and gives many examples among his well-chosen illustrations from unprinted sources. Whether the average mediaeval European believed that the world was round seems to him extremely doubtful.
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