Volume 5, Issue 1 -

This article intends to revise the still unrivalled opinion in Medieval Studies according to which knowledge of the Qur’ān in the early medieval Latin West is almost completely missing. For this purpose, it revises the current state of the art, enriches this panorama with some new findings in rarely studied or unknown sources and tries to assess a new profile of Latin reception of the Muslims’ central religious book. The study can show that authors of the early medieval Latin world ventured first, yet still polemical and apologetic approaches to the new religious phenomenon ‘Islam’ that produced not only superficial, hearsay-based, but first detailed knowledge of the Qur’ān.

This paper explores the vocabulary of the Qur’ān in texts composed in Latin and Arabic by Christians in al-Andalus in the period up to the end of the ninth century. The main focus of the paper is a comparison between the Arabic translation of Orosius’ Seven books of history against the pagans and the History attributed to Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 853). Both are works of universal history showing the hand of God at work in the history of humankind. The Qur’ān was crucially important for Ibn Ḥabīb in conveying this message. Did this translate into Christian universal history in Arabic?

This paper will reflect on how Pahlavi texts after the Islamic conquest conceptualize conflicts between Islamic norms and Zoroastrian rules, in particular those concerning purity. The paper will therefore be concerned with the representation of Islam and Islamic practices within the Mazdean community. For this reason, the issue of the reception of the Holy Qur’ān within Pahlavi literature will also need to be addressed. The paper will formulate some hypotheses on what goals the Mazdean intellectual elites (in this case, essentially their clergy) tried to achieve through their representation of Islam. It will also discuss how this representation connected with the economic and social transformation that this community underwent with the end of the Sasanian Empire, in particular with the changes in landholding that had been among the main sources of wealth and power for the Sasanian aristocracy.

This essay studies the translations of the Qur’ān into Romance languages in anti-Islamic treatises written by Christians in the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century. It compares three such works (here called Antialcoranes or ‘anti-Qur’āns’) that contain citations of the Qur’ān in Arabic, either in Arabic script or in transliteration, or both. These include the Confusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán (1515) of Juan Andrés, the Lumbre de fe contra la secta mahometana y el alcorán (1521) by Martín de Figuerola and the Confutación del alcorán y secta mahometana (1555) by Lope de Obregón. It also considers glosses found in the Latin Qur’ān made at the behest of the Italian cardinal Egidio (Giles) da Viterbo (1518). We argue that these works merit detailed study, along with more studied Latin translations, as part of a history of the translation of the Qur’ān in the early modern period.

Most scholars working on the concept of transculturality consider it a modern phenomenon, but we can discover forms of transculturality already in the Middle Ages, and this in terms of political, scholarly, artistic, medical and literary exchanges. Within the framework of Mediterranean Studies, this article examines the extraordinary case of Rudolf von Ems’ Der guote Gêrhart (ca. 1220 – 1225) which illustrates how much the Mediterranean world proved to be a highly useful backdrop for the description of transcultural exchanges between the protagonist and a Moroccan castellan, Stranmûr. The verse narrative is based on the experiences of a wealthy Cologne merchant who proves to be extraordinarily open to other cultures, languages and religions and encounters an equally minded Muslim lord. We would not be far off by describing the poet’s projections as a case of medieval tolerance.