Serendipities: Language And Lunacy - Tapa dura

* Serendipities is an iconoclastic, dazzlingly erudite and witty demonstration, by one of the world's most brilliant thinkers, of how myths and lunacies can produce historical developments of no small significance. In Eco's words, 'even errors can produce interesting side effects'.
* Eco's book shows how:
-- believers in a flat earth helped Columbus accidentally discover America
-- how the medieval myth of Prester John, the Christian king in Asia, assisted the European drive eastward
-- how the myth of the Rosicrucians affected the Masons, leading in turn to the widespread belief in a Jewish masonic plot to dominate the world and other forms of paranoid antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
-- how the fruitless quest to discover the language used by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden helped shape the modern science of linguistics

'Umberto Eco is a polymath to an extent most will regard as practically inhuman.' Frank Kermode, NYRB