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Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

There are probably many discoveries thought to be more modern, that were actually made earlier than we realise but were never written down. Word of mouth stories are often lost during mass population upheavals like war and famine.

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It may be even worse, as history was eventually established, competing narratives were probably dismissed and neglected as weird tales without foundation or merit, and eventually suppressed. For which they eventually weren't retold anymore and eventually forgotten.

A relevant case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas#Literary_influence

(I linked to where he's getting dismissed as a liar centuries later, but the main story about the voyage is way more interesting.)

This works both ways, compare the "Germania" by Tacitus, which was really about a fictional foil to contrast with the Julian dynasty, but became a historic document and origin story for a few centuries. (Sad to say, but humanists had a decent share in this.)

Related literature: Chrisopher B. Krebs, "A Most Dangerous Book. Tacitus' Germania from Roman Empire to the Third Reich", W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 2011.

And pandemics?

Pandemics would be pretty unlikely in the days of such low population density. Epidemics definitely happened pretty routinely though.

There was a bubonic plague pandemic (1346-1353) right after the time this book was wrtten (1339-1345 according to OP).

Sure, but the topic was pandemics we don't know about because they weren't written down. The bubonic plague was written about pretty extensively. Even earlier disease outbreaks were written about.

I think the topic was how pandemics would cause word of mouth stories to be lost, not the story of pandemics.

It could be worse, it could be pestilence of biblical proportions.

Oh wait . . .

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