ALIVE, THRILLING AND COOL - APRIL 4 - 5.57PM - 2019
Violet Moller - How Classical Ideas were Lost and Found - 4.00pm
This was cracking.
With a very Indiana Jones style title: ‘The Map of Knowledge’.
And it didn’t once disappoint.
A riveting journey through seven cities and across more than a thousand years from 6th Century Alexandria through to 9th Century Baghdad, Muslim Córdoba, Catholic Toledo, Salerno’s medieval medical school and Palermo to Venice, historian Violet Moller’s breathless delivery was infectious.
What’s so fascinating about the way in which history is written and taught today is the sense of immediacy it lends to subjects thousands of years old. It may have happened millennia ago but the energy and verve with which today’s historians translate these events allow us all to engage immediately with the personalities and zeitgeist of those times.
Let’s hope Moller is allowed to transfer this gift to television.