A slap against knowledge

Last May one Violet Moller put out The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found. This purports to relate the transfer of classical Greek lore to our day, as told through seven cities. Moller's order: Alexandria, Baghdad, Córdoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo, and Venice.

The sequence alone worried me. This looked like the self-satisfied Gibbonian reading of those ignorant Christians burning down libraries, because we all know how much we hate books, thus forcing Science to pass through the Moslem world before finally being rediscovered by "Renaissance" Italy.

And... so it is.

This book's take on the "library of Alexandria" is - literally - a quote from Catherine Nixey; there is no curiosity into Nixey's own (mis)use of sources. We do read of how Rome and Constantinople looted Alexandria for manuscripts and thinkers, but to read Moller that's all they did - there is no dedicated chapter to Rome or Constantinople in here (where's Greek fire?). Also missing is a chapter on Syrian Christians and the immense work they achieved under the later Umayyads. They're waved off in the Baghdad section. Jack Boulos Victor Tannous has had his thesis on the Internet free of charge for the last nine years (pdf). You'd think that someone could condense its 650+ pages into a largish-print 20 page chapter including pictures. There's no excuse for not even looking at it!

Then comes the Córdoba chapter... oh man. Moller viciously cracks at the Visigothic kingdom as "Invisigoths" (she says, based on "some historians", without naming any) who retarded Spanish development. But this bleak period... ended when the Arabs and Berbers invaded and immediately set up a bunch of libraries. Or maybe not immediately. Waves of new settlers arrived and made it chaotic. They required strong, direct leadership, finally provided by "Rahman" (sic). Seems to me that one presumably "bleak" period was replaced by another. Also seems to me that Moller hadn't read anything about how the Visigothic kings were working to get their own house in order - like writing that lawcode - nor about the challenges they faced in their last generations over the 600s AD as the Mediterranean had turned into a warzone.

That's as much as I'm going to read; I've wasted too much time on other worthless anti-European books to be going further with this one as well.

Moller is a lazy hack masquerading as a historian, to deliver the conventional-wisdom of the post-Christian university to another generation of suckers. If there's good news to be had, Moller is an "independent", like "Emmet Scott" on the other side; she's not speaking for the academy - as arguably Nixey might, as an ex-classics prof. Unfortunately in the popular press the reviews are on Moller's side. Included in the roll of shame are the Telegraph, the Times, and Publishers Weekly. (And Kirkus if you count them. Plus Nixey herself of course.)

I hope that the university presses get on this case soon whilst this thing is still in the major bookstores. Because as long as Respectable Historians won't present us with the facts, readers will keep turning to likes of Moller... or worse. Or, if you like: do you want more Emmet Scott and Darío Fernández-Morera? because this is how you will get more Emmet Scott and Darío Fernández-Morera.