Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.
I was ultimately let down by this one. Its unfortunate because my area of interest intersects so strongly with what the author was attempting to describe and redefine. I might have used this in some capacity during my undergrad work, but the bias of the author left a bitter taste in my mouth. There is very much a difference between explaining faults of the Catholic Church during this time and the bigotry that underlies her description.

This book was interesting and the perfect length (it went into enough detail without droning on), but the writing felt a little bit disjointed/repetitive at times so that why I’m giving it 3 stars. I would recommend it if the subject matter interests you, though!

After reading the Introduction I was really excited about reading this book. Unhappily the book did not deliver on the promise of the Introduction. It has many faults.

The biggest fault is that her plan on winnowing down the places and books she discussed didn't entirely help her to make a book that was focused. Her chapters, each about a city, were mostly about that city but tended to cover a large a somewhat diffuse amount of time. I'm sure she thought she was making these not-well-known periods of history clear to the general reader but it just ended up being confusing. I'm sure she also thought that by concentrating on the cities and a few books that was enough, but she tells us far too much about other tangential people, books and events. At times it seems the books she wants to write about are an afterthought to the chapters.

Another fault is that she's biased against the contributions of the monasteries and the Catholic Church to knowledge in the period. While shedding light on the important contributions of the Muslim world to preserving the thought of the Greeks she is too quick to portray the Church as all the old untrue canards of being ignorant, intolerant, and against knowledge. The book would be better if she had not let her prejudices get in the way.

These are the biggest faults and they both contribute to making the book unfocused and biased. The smaller faults of a convoluted writing style and poor grammar don't help. Often her grammar was so confused, especially her use of pronouns, that I would have to go back several paragraphs to figure out what she was talking about.

I'd pass this one by.

Tbe author chose three ancient texts and tracks their survival from Ancient times to modern. It takes to the Library of Alexandria and to the Caliphites of the Ancient world. I learned a lot from this book and recommend it to all history buffs.

I would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

In The Map of Knowledge, Violet Moller traces the transmission of knowledge from the ancient Mediterranean, via the Abbasid and Umayyad caliphates and centuries of scholars and translators, from 500 CE to the European Renaissance. This summary might sound a little dry, but Moller’s semi-conversational style and the content made her overview of a thousand years of history highly readable. Outside of academia, I don’t know that many people know how much of a debt we Westerners owe to the ancient world. The ancient Greek and Graeco-Egyptian scholars gave us (again, Westerners) our start on the scientific method, philosophy, geometry, medicine, and so many other topics. We would have lost so much if it hadn’t been for medieval Arab scholars and translators. At the same time, however, I lament what we lost anyway to time and deliberate destruction.

Moller was inspired to write this book while working on her dissertation. She visited the library of Dr. John Dee, an Elizabethan polymath, who helped create an English translation of a hugely influential book: Euclid‘s The Elements. She started to think about the long journey the text had taken for the centuries and dug into the historical and bibliographic history of The Elements; The Almagest, an astronomical text by Claudius Ptolmey; and the physician Galen‘s enormous body of work. Even though Ptolemy and Galen have been subject to heavy revision since the Renaissance, these three books represent the ancient foundation of a lot of Western science and thought. Moller begins her chronology in Alexandria, an early center of scholarship and learning—as well as a particularly aggressive book acquisition program that makes me, as a librarian, blush.

From Alexandria, which collapsed as a place of scholarship by 500 CE, Moller begins her historical journey around the Mediterranean and the Middle East. She charts the rise and fall of what she begins to call, Houses of Wisdom, after the name of a loose confederation of scholars and scientists in her first stop after Alexandria: Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. Moller takes us from Baghdad to Córdoba, the Umayyad capital; to Toledo; Salerno, Italy; Palermo; and finally Venice. As she jumps time and place, Moller gives us the names (as far as we know) of the people who made it possible for us to have as much as we do of our ancient texts. She finishes up with the European invention of moveable type and printing, a critical innovation that helped fuel the Renaissance.

As she makes her way through time and space, Moller develops her thesis of what is needed to create new knowledge on the scale of ancient Alexandria. She argues that tolerance, political stability, and a strong support for learning are vital to create communities like what is now called La Convivencia, a period of time when Córdoba flourished under the Umayyads. Sadly, these convivencias seem to last shorter and shorter periods of time (at least in this account) as outside invaders or internal strife tear it all down. I wondered more than once where we would be now, as a species, if these cultures hadn’t been interrupted all the time or if later translators hadn’t erased the new knowledge and corrections Arab scholars had added to the ancient texts.

The Map of Knowledge may not be for everyone. For bookish folk with a historical bent, however, this is a wonderful read. Even for me, who fits that bill, I enjoyed this book more than I expected. I appreciated that Moller doesn’t talk about these texts as objects for book hunters—who tend to value books because they are old or rare. Instead, she very much keeps her focus on the value of the content. It shouldn’t matter what language they’re in or if they in a beautiful binding or not; the words are the most important thing because they are what transmit knowledge through time and make it possible for us to “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

As a child I learned of the great Library of Alexandria and the wonders it contained. The idea that two thousand years ago people knew that the earth was a planet that travelled around the sun only to have that knowledge and so much more, lost for more than an aeon because of ignorance, fear and what would become Christianity was tragic. How much more would we know today, how many diseases would we have cured, how much more compassionate and wise might we have been? Moller explore these questions and more as she chases three ancient texts that managed to survive the fall of Rome, the loss of the Library and the Dark Ages to bring light back to the world 1500 years after it had been extinguished. This is a fascinating story of how a few people and places throughout the world held on to the remains of a great civilization. It’s also a cautionary tale of what fear and ignorance can and will do to silence people and destroy repositories of knowledge