The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found - Hardcover

Moller, Violet

 
9780385541763: The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385541767 ISBN 13: 9780385541763
Verlag: Doubleday, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

“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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

VIOLET MOLLER is a historian and writer based in Oxford, England. She received a PhD in intellectual history from Edinburgh University, where she wrote her dissertation on the library of a sixteenth century scholar. She has written three pop reference books for the publishing arm of the Bodleian Library. The Map of Knowledge is her first narrative history.

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Preface

In early 1509, the young artist Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520) began painting a series of frescoes on the walls of Pope Julius II’s private library, deep inside the Vatican. Next door, in the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s great rival, Michelangelo, lay on his back on a huge scaf­fold, hundreds of feet in the air, painting onto the ceiling a monu­mental image of God giving life to Adam. The Renaissance was in full swing in Rome and, under the patronage of Pope Julius, the great city was being returned to the glory of its ancient imperial past. Raphael’s frescoes on the four walls of the Stanza della Segna­tura illustrated the four categories of books that were shelved below them: theology, philosophy, law and poetry. In the philosophy fresco, which we now call The School of Athens, Raphael painted three huge vaulted arches receding into the distance, with statues of the Roman gods Minerva and Apollo on either side and broad marble steps leading down to a geometrically tiled floor. The architecture is decidedly Roman—bold, imperious, monumental—but the culture and ideas represented by the fifty-eight figures carefully grouped across the painting are emphatically and almost without exception Greek; it is a celebration of the rediscovery of ancient ideas that were central to the intellectual milieu of sixteenth-century Rome. Plato and Aristotle stand in the very centre, under a huge arch, silhouetted against the blue sky, which Plato points up to, while Aristotle ges­tures to the earth below him, neatly representing their philosophical tendencies—the former’s preoccupation with the ideal and the heavenly, the latter’s determination to understand the physical world around him. The full scope of ancient philosophy as inherited by Italian humanism is triumphantly rendered in glowing colour.

No one knows exactly who all the other figures in the fresco are, and arguments over their identities have kept scholars occupied for centuries. Most people agree that the bald man in the front right, busy demonstrating geometrical theory with a compass, is Euclid, while the crowned man next to him, holding a globe, is certainly Ptolemy, who at this point was far more famous for his work on geography than astronomy.* All the figures identified lived in the ancient world, at least a thousand years before Raphael began paint­ing the fresco—except for one. On the left of the painting, a man wearing a turban is leaning over Pythagoras’ shoulder to see what he is writing. He is the Muslim philosopher Averroes (1126–1198)—the single identifiable representative of the thousand years between the last of the ancient Greek philosophers and Raphael’s own time, and the single representative of the vital, vibrant tradition of Arab scholarship that had flourished in this period. These scholars, who were of various faiths and origins, but were united by the fact that they wrote in Arabic, had kept the flame of Greek science burning, combining it with other traditions and transforming it with their own hard work and brilliance—ensuring its survival and transmis­sion down through the centuries to the Renaissance.

I studied Classics and history throughout my time at school and university, but at no point was I taught about the influence of the medieval Arab world, or indeed any other external civilization, on European culture. The narrative for the history of science seemed to say, “There were the Greeks, and then the Romans, and then there was the Renaissance,” glibly skipping over the millennium in between. I knew from my medieval-history courses that there wasn’t much scientific knowledge in Western Europe in this period, and I began to wonder what had happened to the books on mathemat­ics, astronomy and medicine from the ancient world. How did they survive? Who recopied and translated them? Where were the safe havens that ensured their preservation?

When I was twenty-one, a friend and I drove from England to Sicily in her old Volvo. We were researching Graeco-Roman tem­ples for our third-year dissertations. It was a great adventure. We got lost in Naples, hot in Rome, we were pulled over by the police and asked out on a date, we gaped at Pompeii and ate milky balls of buffalo mozzarella in Paestum, and finally, after weeks on the road and a short ferry trip across the Straits of Messina, we arrived in Sicily. The island immediately felt different from the rest of Italy: exotic, complicated, compelling. Its layers of history enveloped us; the marks left by succeeding civilizations, like strata in a rock face, were striking. In Syracuse Cathedral, we saw the columns of the original Greek Temple of Athena, built in the fifth century bc, still standing 2,500 years after they were erected. We learned how the cathedral had been converted into a mosque in 878, when the city came under Muslim control, and how it became a Christian church again two centuries later, when the Normans took power. It was clear that Sicily had been a meeting point for cultures over hun­dreds of years, a place where ideas, traditions and words had been exchanged and transformed, where worlds had collided. The focus of our trip was the relationship between Greek and Roman religion and architecture, but the contribution of later cultures—Byzantine, Islamic, Norman—was remarkable. I began to wonder about other places that had played a similar role in the history of ideas, and how those places had developed.

These questions resurfaced when I was researching my PhD on intellectual knowledge in early modern England, viewed through the library of Dr. John Dee (the man Elizabeth I called her philosopher). A strange and captivating character, Dee was my constant companion for several years. He took me on an unforgettable journey through the intellectual world of the late sixteenth century. During his extraordinary career, he amassed the first truly universal collec­tion of books in England, helped plan voyages of discovery to the New World, initiated the concept of a British Empire, reformed the calendar, searched for the philosopher’s stone, attempted to conjure angels and travelled all over Europe with his wife, servants, several children and hundreds of books in tow. He also wrote extensively on a wide range of subjects: history, mathematics, astrology, navigation, alchemy and magic. One of his most significant achievements was helping to produce the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements, in 1570. But where had this text been and who had looked after it in the 2,000 years between Euclid writing it in Alexandria and Dee publishing it in London? Studying the catalogue Dee made of his library in 1583, I noticed that a great many of his books, especially those that touched on scientific subjects, were written by Arab schol­ars. This tied in with the things I had seen in Sicily and gave me a taste of what had been going on in the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, expanding my view of history beyond the traditional Western scheme. I began to realize that the history of ideas is not constrained by boundaries of culture, religion or politics, and that, in order to fully appreciate it, a more far-reaching approach is necessary.

These ideas remained at the back of my mind, gradually crys­tallizing into a plan for a book that would follow ancient scientific ideas on their journey through the Middle Ages. As it is an enormous subject, I decided to concentrate on a few specific texts and plot their progress as they passed through the major centres of learn­ing. With my focus on the history of science and, more precisely, “the exact sciences,” three subjects were clearly delineated: mathematics, astronomy and medicine. Within them, three geniuses stand out: in...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385541767
ISBN 13 
9780385541763
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
312
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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