I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Fellow half-educateds of similar proclivities will doubtless recall that scene in the third chapter of Our Mutual Friend, when Gaffer Hexam shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn the handbills of the missing persons that he has pasted all over his wall:
He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his scholarly intelligence. ‘They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I know ’em all. I’m scholar enough!’
For Gaffer’s handbills, I have my copies of books by Niall Ferguson, Tristram Hunt, Neil MacGregor and the like, which I proudly flaunt in my bookshelves, in the vain hope that they might somehow illuminate my dim understanding of history, culture and the great wide world beyond my teeny tiny and immediate grasp. Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge is another such lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.
Moller’s simple, massive aim is to show how the works of Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen in mathematics, astronomy and medicine spread throughout the Islamic world and in medieval Europe. She follows the fate of The Elements, The Almagest and Galen’s vast corpus as they are variously translated, transported and disseminated through Alexandria, to Baghdad, Córdoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo and on to Venice.
The book is an ambitious work of popular history, and not unaware of its contemporary relevance and themes:
Each of the cities we have visited in this book had its own particular topography and character, but they all shared the conditions that allowed scholarship to flourish: political stability, a regular supply of funding and of texts, a pool of talented, interested individuals and, most striking of all, an atmosphere of tolerance and inclusivity towards different nationalities and religions.
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