About the book, from the publisher:
A dazzling intellectual history of the West served up with verve and insight by two brilliant young historians.Among the acclaim for Reinventing Knowledge:
Here is an intellectual entertainment, a sweeping history of the key institutions that have organized knowledge in the West from the classical period onward. With elegance and wit, this exhilarating history alights at the pivotal points of cultural transformation. The motivating question throughout: How does history help us understand the vast changes we are now experiencing in the landscape of knowledge?
Beginning in Alexandria and its great center of Hellenistic learning and imperial power, we then see the monastery in the wilderness of a collapsed civilization, the rambunctious universities of the late medieval cities, and the thick social networks of the Enlightenment republic of letters. The development of science and the laboratory as a dominant knowledge institution brings us to the present, seeking patterns in the new digital networks of knowledge.
"[Reinventing Knowledge] has the power to wrench familiar aspects of history into new and surprising shapes. "Learn more about Reinventing Knowledge at the publisher's website.
--Laura Miller, Salon.com
"An intelligent, provocative history of institutions that preserve and disseminate information.... Stimulating and witty--intellectual entertainment at its best."
--Kirkus
"Reinventing Knowledge tells an impressively cohesive story that really is full of delightful characters and fascinating details."
--Tim Warden, Austin Chronicle
Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton are Associate Professors in the Department of History at the University of Oregon.
The Page 99 Test: Reinventing Knowledge.
--Marshal Zeringue
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