Violet Moller

There was a program on PBS when I was in middle or high school that was, I think, produced in the UK...like most really good science programs. The program was called Connections and it would take a subject and connect all the historical dots as to how it came about and sometimes the connections between historical figures, objects, cities, places, concepts and moments would be really obscure. Who knew, for example, that there was a connection between the modern concept of credit and show more Napoleon's problem of feeding a large army and the development of refrigeration.

The Map of Knowledge is like this.

I found myself riveted.

I, and I think many of us in the public school system in the US, got basic world history in high school. This was usually a discrete set of historical moments that were never really connected for you in the classroom except to know that these things happened in chronological order, usually from some arbitrary oldest topic to some point closer to the present day. There was ancient Greece, Rome, the Crusades, the Dark Ages, Rome again and the rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, etc...

But what you didn't know and were never taught, was how these different historical subject areas were connected and what connected them and why they happened. I will bet few of us had any notion that, but for Islam and the Arab world, much of ancient Greek and Roman history might have been lost and the Renaissance in Europe may have been long delayed.

A very interesting book and well worth taking the time to read. Violet Moller did a huge amount of work for this as evidenced by the bibliography and she really opened my eyes to an area of history I knew little about. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/inside-the-stargazers-palace-the-transformation-...

As a lapsed historian of science, especially astronomy, I always like to keep an eye on things in that domain; this book, published last year, looks at astronomy in the immediate aftermath of Copernicus, through the focus of seven northern European locations, telling a story which is unfamiliar to most people from a slightly different angle. The chosen locations include Leuven (here ‘Louvain’), so it was show more of particularly local interest to me; also Prague, which we visited last year, John Dee‘s house at Mortlake, Tycho Brahe’s observatory-statelet on the island of Hven, and the fictional Atlantis of Francis Bacon. (The other two are Nuremberg and Kassel in Germany.)

The Leuven chapter did give me some more insights into our local history – although the Mercator museum is in Sint-Niklaas, it was in Leuven that he did most of his best known work in the 1530s and 1540s, and collaborated closely with the astronomer Gemma Frisius (and John Dee came to visit).

But I wasn’t totally convinced that the organisation of the book around geography really helps the reader’s understanding all that much. In the end, the history of ideas is a history of people, and the stories are stories of humans rather than of places, and it gets a bit confusing when the same person pops up non-chronologically in different chapters.

Also for us locals, it would have been nice to be more specific about the street addresses where these various individuals lived and worked, in case there is anything left to see today.

But I can’t complain too much; it’s a clearly written book which takes us from point A to point B efficiently, and certainly fills in a lot of blanks which I had not even realised were blank. show less

De manier waarop in [[Moller - Map of Knowledge]] de astrologie wordt behandeld is nog fair vergeleken met allerlei andere wat meer populair wetenschappelijke boeken. Op diverse plaatsen wordt gesteld at astrologie belangrijk was. Hoewel, dat gebeurt in feite alleen bij de behandeling van de Arabische cultuur (P.72). Het feit dat de Almagest van Ptolemaeus slechts het eerste - astronomische - deel is van een tweedelig werk waarvan het tweede deel de astrologie betreft, wordt nergens genoemd, show more de titel van het tweede deel komt in het hele boek niet voor.
Toch kun je als je erop let wel hier en daar iets vinden. Zo wordt van Gerard van Cremona niet expliciet gezegd dat hij (ook) in astrologie was geïnteresseerd, maar wel in een voetnoot dat hij een lezing gaf over 'een belangrijk' Arabisch astrologisch werk.
Ook elders heeft Moller het over de vertaling van 'belangrijke astrologische werken'.
Toch komt de maatschappelijke rol van de astrologie alleen enigszins aan de orde als het over Bagdad en de Dar al islam gaat. Maar niet concreet, dat bijvoorbeeld het observatorium dat al Mam'un liet bouwen, voor een belangrijk deel door astrologische interesse moet zijn gemotiveerd. Dat hetzelfde voor mensen als Gerard van Cremona en vele anderen moet hebben gegolden, ook nog na 1500, komt nergens aan bod.
Nergens wordt erkend dat astronomie lange tijd slechts een hulpwetenschap was voor de astrologie. Niet helemaal natuurlijk, maar er werd erg veel waarde gehecht aan de waarzeggerij rond astrologie. Als iets het kleine vlammetje van de astronomie levend heeft gehouden, dan was dat de astrologie. show less

A sweeping survey of where, how and why the centers of knowledge continually migrated from city to city during the 1000 years after the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance to places as far apart as Toledo and Baghdad. Each time a city 'fell' or, in the case of Spain, evicted whole groups of people, much knowledge was lost, although some were saved but removed to a new 'safer' city. The main point is that the role the Islamic Empire played in this dance of preservation has been show more understated in our Western culture. ****

read for my bookgroup show less