Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe (BRILL'S STUDIES IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, 25)

From the medieval period to the present, there is a continuity to the western study of Arabic texts which pivots crucially on the European Renaissance. Inheriting much from the medieval translators in the way of motivations and subject orientations, it was by forming Arabic manuscript collections and by providing didactic tools that a few adventurous scholars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries surpassed their famous predecessors and brought critical, text-based Arabic studies as we know them today to parts of Europe that had never known sustained contact with Arab-Islamic culture. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished sources, this book explores three aspects of this achievement: manuscript acquisition, as a deliberate search for texts within an expanding bibliographical framework and as a fortuitous event in the aftermath of war and piracy; scholarly collaboration between Europeans and Arabs, whether Muslims or Christian, or Arabic-educated Turks; and the formation of a self-conscious European Arab grammatical tradition.