SERENDIPITIES PB – PROF UMBERTO ECO

The extraordinary historical consequences of errors and fictional inventions. 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 — the medieval myth of Prester John, the Christian king in Asia, assisted the European drive eastward — 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 anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries