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    Beda was hugely influential. Pretty much all medieval chronicles use him as a source in one way or another, so claiming that his work "was not as widespread" sounds fishy. Also, even if six centuries later, Dante Alighieri unambiguously stated that the Earth was round in his Comedy, and he certainly was claiming to be reporting a consensus opinion. Commented May 17, 2018 at 9:05
  • 14
    The "scholars believed in a flat earth* idea is trivially wrong, as the earth is obviously round to anyone who does a bit of observation. Ships appear and disappear at the horizon from the bottom up, for example, and if the world were flat, there could be no twilight; day would transition to night, and night to day, instantaneously. Just off the top of my head, these two examples both easily show that the world is round, with essentially no room for controversy. There's little to nothing to suggest scholars have ever taken a flat-earth model seriously. Commented May 17, 2018 at 13:12
  • 43
    @jamesqf That is not only blatantly false as all the answers demonstrate, but ironically probably also the same mentality that gave rise to flat earth myth in the first place. Commented May 17, 2018 at 19:34
  • 17
    @jamesqf - The Bible absolutely does not claim that the earth is flat. To the contrary: "It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:" - Isaiah 40:22 (KJV) For the record, they also don't teach a geocentric model of the universe. Commented May 17, 2018 at 20:49
  • 12
    Please do not use the terms round vs flat. circles and spheres are both round. Spherical vs flat or spherical vs circular are best Commented May 18, 2018 at 0:33