Andrew Dickson White

Andrew Dickson White became the first president of Cornell University in 1866, at thirty four, in partnership with the businessman Ezra Cornell. The new institution was to be nonsectarian, admitting students without a religious test and giving no denomination control of its chairs, at a time when almost every American college was the property of one church or another. The reaction was fierce, and it came from pulpits and from the religious press.

White answered in 1869 with a public lecture called The Battle-Fields of Science, in which he set out a series of episodes where, as he read them, ecclesiastical authority had obstructed enquiry and lost. He expanded it into a small book in 1876 and finally into the two heavy volumes of A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896.

He was careful, in every preface, to say what he thought he was doing. His enemy was dogmatic theology, the attempt to settle questions of fact by ecclesiastical authority; religion itself, he wrote, was purified rather than damaged by the process he described. He remained an Episcopalian all his life. The care was wasted on his readers, and the word in the title did the work: what the book delivered to the twentieth century was warfare.

White's volumes are far better documented than Draper's and far more damaging, because the footnotes gave the argument an authority that outlasted the checking of them. Several of the stories he put into general circulation are now known to be false, and the most famous concerns the shape of the earth.

The claim is that medieval Christians believed the earth to be flat on scriptural grounds, and that Columbus had to overcome churchmen who told him he would sail off the edge. Educated Europeans had known the earth was a sphere continuously since antiquity; the dispute with Columbus was about its circumference, which his opponents estimated correctly and he did not. The flat earth story appears to have entered popular history through Washington Irving's romantic life of Columbus of 1828, and it was White's account, with its apparatus of references, that fixed it as established fact for the following century of textbooks.

Other set pieces have gone the same way, including the picture of a church that forbade human dissection and the picture of universal ecclesiastical resistance to anaesthesia in childbirth. The pattern is consistent: a real incident, a real objector, and then a generalisation from one hostile cleric to an institution and an age. The atlas records the warfare literature as a historically important position with identifiable authors and identifiable errors, which is what it is, rather than as a description of the past.