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From Ptolemy to Pilgrimage: Images of Late Antiquity in Geography, Travel & Cartography

3,511 views · Published 27 January 2012 · 59:35 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Library of Congress · 2012 · Education

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A survey of Greek and Latin geographical tradition during Late Antiquity (c. 200-600 CE), when various genres of travel narrative rose to prominence. Scott Johnson links this mode of writing to the transition from a pagan/Greco-Roman world to a Christian one as new ways of explaining the known world mixed the classical inheritance with biblical and early Christian history. This mixture was to influence directly the new institution of Christian pilgrimage, while setting a foundation of religious practice for Byzantium, Islam and the western Middle Ages.

Speaker Biography: Scott Johnson received his doctorate in classics from the University of Oxford in 2005. He is a postdoctoral teaching Fellow in Byzantine Greek at Georgetown University and Dumbarton Oaks. He has been a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2004-07), a fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (2009-10), and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (2010-11). His current research project, "All the World's Knowledge: Geographical Thought in Late Antiquity and Byzantium," is designed to form the basis of his next book.

For transcript, captions, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5241.

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