According to wikipedia, which is always suspect, reflecting telescopes were invented in the 16th c. But I suspect various types of aberration in the lens of the human eye could account for as much of this as you wanted to attribute to it.

Coincidentally, yesterday I was just reading about tunable wearable optics (http://www.cvs.rochester.edu/williamslab/r_contacts.html) for correcting higher-order aberrations of the lens. Interesting stuff.