Abstract
When the man we came to know as Christopher Columbus sailed westwards from Spain in 1492 in order to find a short way to Asia, he had — by the standards of his time — a well informed view of the geographical world. He had studied both the mythical medieval maps that depicted countries as monsters or biblical images, and the Ptolemaean maps that described the known world and pointed out the ‘terra incognita’. He knew the most current charts, that showed accurate coastal features but left the interior blank. He had scribbled notes in the margins of his geographical literature, and calculated distances on the basis of what he thought he knew. His explorations were based on false premises, yet his travels laid the basis for a completely new view of the world, mapping the location of continents and oceans and the relation between them.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Sharples, M., van der Geest, T. (1996). Introduction. In: Sharples, M., van der Geest, T. (eds) The New Writing Environment. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1482-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1482-6_1
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