It’s interesting that Altman can assign a reason for what seems like a great mystery to me, one which I had originally explored through tracing the ancient/medieval climatic concept of the “torrid zone”, commonly referred to as the “theory of the torrid zone” today by most historians (Nicolás Wey Gómez has a fantastic book on the topic, The Tropics of Empire, MIT Press 2008). Most secondary literature since the seventeenth-century essentially holds that this was an “opinion” or “belief” (later on, a “theory”) shared among most ancient and medieval writers that the Earth’s equatorial region was so hot that it was literally uninhabitable (the degree varies…Seneca in the Naturales Quaestiones talks about how silver in Ethiopia, on the edge of the torrid zone, melts during the day…the word “Ethiopia” itself is generally believed to come from aithein + ops, or “burn face” in Greek). This “theory” was then shattered when Europeans began sailing to the tropics in the fifteenth century, which they found populated and verdant.

At least, that’s the established narrative. Looking carefully at the original untranslated ancient texts, I found that there was never one set phrase like “the torrid zone” used by all authors, let alone a single definition, let alone a theory. Yet the torrid zone was still palpably there, there was no denying it, and it plays different roles under different names across all the texts I read. For instance, sometimes it would serve as the phenomenon being described (e.g., Seneca’s description in the NQ), at other times as the explanation of phenomena (e.g., the ocean’s salinity in Aristotle’s Meteorology), and still at other times as evidence for an explanation of a phenomenon (frequently found in various gemological treatises). Things change after Ptolemy (at least, his is our earliest extant record), who gives the torrid zone a name and a set definition. This suits later scholastic methods well, and so it becomes propagated, which brings about the torrid zone’s death as a critical component of Greco-Roman science, but also gives it a new lease on life: for a definition, even when contradicted, is hard to put down. So even fifty years after the Portuguese entered West Africa, we still have Genoese authors writing on the impenetrability of the torrid zone though a certain professor in Cracow (!) was simultaneously publishing treatises with the latest data and accepting the torrid zone’s falseness; two hundred years later, some British writers still spoke of the torrid zone’s impenetrability. (Just a few months ago as I was explaining this to a friend, I gave the analogy of how some people are still unaware that smallpox has been eliminated for the past thirty years, to which she was surprised since she “knew” that her aunt had just contracted the disease.)

Historians since have dismissed such exceptions with a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with counter-reform Catholicism and defending Biblical authority, since certain passages in the Bible had become tied up with the debate (specifically, that the gospel had reached all ends of the Earth, since the discovery of heathens unexposed to the Gospel could only have made sense with the torrid zone in place; teaching the existence of “Antipodeans” living on the other side of the torrid zone belt was accordingly prohibited in the Condemnations of 1277). And so it’s become a whipping boy, an example of the errors in unscientific thinking, when in fact today’s understanding of the torrid zone has nothing to do with how it was originally conceived. This was the observation that informed this post, and I see the “Internet” as a modern day torrid zone, critical to so many questions and problems yet without even having a set name or scope.

BTW, I took a quick look at your blog, and I should add that although I don’t recall the torrid zone in Blake (where one might expect it), it does show up in Milton’s Paradise Lost once or twice, not to mention a few English Renaissance travel plays. To use your/Altman’s words, it is an idea that can and has fit into innumerable contexts.

I hope you keep reading!

Great post — so glad I found the blog!

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