Newfound Ignorance: Attitudes Towards Greeks and Arabs and the Origins of the Medieval Translation Movement in Southern Italy

CML Videoseminar by John Mulhall (Harvard University)

John Mulhall is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard. John received a B.A. in Ancient Greek from the College of William and Mary, and then received the Lionel Pearson Fellowship, which funded his M.St. in Ancient History from Oxford University. John’s interests span the intellectual traditions of the Ancient, Late Antique, and Medieval Mediterranean. His dissertation examines the cultural upheaval wrought by the phenomenon known as the medieval translation movement, when hundreds of new scientific and philosophic texts were translated from Greek and Arabic into Latin. Additionally, John works on Medical history in the Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Syriac traditions, and has a particular interest in uniting his textual research with new advances in microbiology, genetics, and archaeoscience generally.