THE BEGINNINGS OF MEDIEVAL INFORMATION VISUALIZATION - Information Visualisation: Techniques, Usability and Evaluation - page 3

perspective of the history of information visualization. Beginning with a
review of the historical context underlying early medieval scholarship, the
chapter focuses on texts available for study during the Carolingian
Renaissance. This is the earliest period with manuscripts containing the
visualizations discussed here. Subsequent sections describe contributions
to information visualization by the early medieval authors Macrobius,
Boëthius, and Isidore of Seville. A final discussion concerning the origins
of these visualizations closes the chapter.
Background
The decline of the Roman Empire throughout Western Europe and its
disintegration in the fifth century engendered a loss of classical knowledge
linked to the long tradition of Hellenistic scholarship communicated
through the ancient Greek language. Although Greece had been under
Roman rule as early as 146 BCE, and formally annexed by Augustus in 27
BCE, Greek remained the recognized language of the Eastern
Mediterranean and the language of Roman erudition. A nearly complete
disengagement with Greece meant that by about 450 CE the majority of
classical texts available to scholars were either written in the original Latin
or translated from the Greek into Latin. In the latter case, few translations
existed from classical Rome largely because the educated Roman elite
were trained to read Greek, and saw little reason to translate these works
[3, chap. 7].
The available Roman manuscripts with the greatest impact on early
medieval authors and scholars were written by Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE),
historian, naturalist, natural philosopher, and author of Natural History , a
comprehensive encyclopedia of the natural world; Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
(d. 15 BCE), architect and engineer, who wrote De Architectura (On
Architecture); Martianus Capella (c. 410-439 CE), writer of On the
Marriage of Philology and Mercury , an encyclopaedic work posed as an
allegory that encompassed the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric,
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), that became a major
influence on Medieval education; and finally Macrobius Ambrosius
Theodosius (c. 395-423 CE), commonly called Macrobius, writer of
Commentary on the Dream of Scipio ( Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis ) ,
which laid out a comprehensive philosophy of nature covering arithmetic,
astronomy, and cosmology.
Works in Latin that were available included the Vulgate Bible,
translated by St. Jerome in the late fourth century; Plato's Timeus,
translated into Latin first by Cicero (106-43 BCE), and later by Calcidius