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Title details for The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller - Available

The Map of Knowledge

A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found

by Violet Moller
Susan Duerden
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
“The Map of Knowledge is an endlessly fascinating book, rich in detail, capacious and humane in vision.”
—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

After the Fall of Rome, when many of the great ideas of the ancient world were lost to the ravages of the Dark Ages, three crucial manuscripts passed hand to hand through seven Mediterranean cities and survived to fuel the revival of the Renaissance—an exciting debut history.
The foundations of modern knowledge—philosophy, math, astronomy, geography—were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed.
     Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean—rare centers of knowledge in a dark world, where scholars supported by enlightened heads of state collected, translated and shared manuscripts. In 8th century Baghdad, Arab discoveries augmented Greek learning. Exchange within the thriving Muslim world brought that knowledge to Cordoba, Spain. Toledo became a famous center of translation from Arabic into Latin, a portal through which Greek and Arab ideas reached Western Europe. Salerno, on the Italian coast, was the great center of medical studies, and Sicily, ancient colony of the Greeks, was one of the few places in the West to retain contact with Greek culture and language. Scholars in these cities helped classical ideas make their way to Venice in the 15th century, where printers thrived and the Renaissance took root.
     The Map of Knowledge follows three key texts—Euclid's Elements, Ptolemy's The Almagest, and Galen's writings on medicine—on a perilous journey driven by insatiable curiosity about the world.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 14, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781984891631
      • File size: 252828 KB
      • Duration: 08:46:43

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Susan Duerden smoothly paces this thousand-year history of scholarly ideas that were lost and then rediscovered. The plethora of historical figures and intellectual works, especially from the medieval Arab world, at once sets this audiobook apart and makes it maddening. It unfolds a history of ideas from 500 to 1500, with attention to Muslim scientific achievements that have been long overlooked. The author reveals how much was accomplished by the scientists and scholars who lived in Muslim-ruled medieval cities like Alexandria and Cordoba, Baghdad and Palermo. Duerden keeps the work fresh and enlightening, but the listener can get lost amid the many names of scientists, doctors, and scholars. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 1, 2019
      In this unusual and well-crafted intellectual history of the medieval “dark ages,” when most classical mathematical, medical, and scientific knowledge was at the time widely believed to be lost, British historian Moller extols the roles of seven cities, largely near or along the Mediterranean basin, in the storage (via libraries, monasteries, or private collections), translation, discovery, and transmission of that knowledge. She looks at Alexandria (“the capital of the intellectual world for over a millennium”), Baghdad, Cordoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo, and Venice, which had in common “political stability, a regular supply of funding and of texts, a pool of talented... individuals and... an atmosphere of tolerance and inclusivity towards different nationalities and religions.” She introduces readers to a host of now-largely-unknown intellectual giants, such as the remarkable 12th-century Italian scholar and translator Gerard of Cremona, who was “a major conduit for the transfer of knowledge of the Arab world to the European.” In felicitous style, Moller unearths such fascinating developments as the origins of the dissection of cadavers and existence of women doctors in late medieval Italy. With so many figures and ideas to discuss, some movements, such as Muslim Mu’tazili theology, are referenced without much explanation. But overall, this is an impressive, wide-ranging examination of what might be called premodern intellectual and cultural geography.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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