Welcome to ScribbleWiki (Themes)

Research pertaining to my latest novel, The Mapmaker.

ScribbleWiki's central theme is the rise of Europe, which is subdivided into 9 subthemes:

The Mapmaker introduces the theme of knowledge and power in 1148, through a group of characters who represent different aspects of political and intellectual authority of the time.
 

THE MAPMAKER: Research Item #72

Even at my most forgiving, I’m impolitely ambivalent about the idea of the canonical. On a bad day, I’m openly hostile. Foucault did right when he went to town on notions associated with ‘the canon’, in the first chapter of his The Archaeology of Knowledge: e.g. ‘tradition’, ‘influence’ — discursive strategies aimed at defining a group of texts as crucial to a field of knowledge. To comprehensively make sense of a text’s cultural meaning, the who, what, when and why of it’s “canonization” is probably just as important as what it says. There’s far more to knowledge than facts and opinions.

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THE MAPMAKER: Research Item #72  

In the epilogue to his Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (London: Yale University Press, 2007), Michael Alexander expresses the opinion that “for more than a century, mass civilization and minority culture have pulled apart…” (p.265) and “…the future of high culture, outside its own elites, is precarious…” (p.266) I’m interested in the similarities and differences between this apparent state of affairs, and the fate of intellectual elites in the Islamic middle period — the setting my hope2be novel, The Mapmaker. Are they comparable? What are the differences?

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