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

“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.

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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