Johann Michael Wansleben’s Travels in the Levant, 1671–1674 is a hitherto unpublished version of a remarkable description of Egypt and the Levant by the German scholar traveller Wansleben, or Vansleb (as he was known in France). He set out for the East in 1671 to collect manuscripts and antiquities for the French king and also produced the best study of the Copts to have appeared to date. This book recounts his travels in Syria, Turkey and Egypt, his everyday life in Cairo, and his anthropological and archeological discoveries which include the Graeco-Roman Ǧabbārī cemetery in Alexandria, the Roman city of Antinopolis on the Nile, the Coptic monastery of St Anthony on the Red Sea and the Red and White monasteries in Upper Egypt.

Johann Michael Wansleben’s Travels in Turkey, 1673–1676 is a hitherto unpublished version of a remarkable description of Istanbul, Izmir, and Bursa by the German scholar traveller Wansleben.

Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704) and Johann Michael Wansleben (1635-1679), the master and his erstwhile student could not be more different. Ludolf was a celebrated member of the Republic of Letters and the towering authority on Ethiopian studies. Wansleben, himself a brilliant scholar and, unlike Ludolf, a seasoned traveller in the Middle East, converted to Catholicism and eventually died impoverished and marginalized. Both stood at the centre of the burgeoning study of Ethiopia and spent a formative part of their career in middle sized Duchy of Saxe-Gotha which for several years played a pivotal role in Ethiopian-European encounters. This volume offers in-depth studies of the remarkable life and work of these two scholars in a broader intellectual, political, and confessional context.

Scholarship between Europe and the Levantis a collection of essays in honour of Professor Alastair Hamilton. The contributions discuss scholarly, artistic and religious encounters between Europe and the Islamic world between the sixteenth and the late nineteenth century.

A Commerce of Knowledge tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Millsinvestigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modernOrientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between the seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England backto a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire.Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, Mills shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the internationalstruggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. He argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.

In this collected volume, members of the Kalīla and Dimna project discuss, from different perspectives, a core aspect of their work with this textual tradition: the study of variation and mutability. The aim is to shed light on Kalīla and Dimna’s so-called mouvance and establish typologies of textual mobility and instability across linguistic traditions and historical periods, as well as to develop analytical tools to describe, classify, represent, and interpret these dynamics. As will be shown, the progressive digitalization of philology in the last decades has offered the unique opportunity of putting the concept of mouvance into practice. Contributors: Theodore S. Beers, Jan J. van Ginkel, Beatrice Gründler, Khouloud Khalfallah, Mahmoud Kozae, Rima Redwan, Johannes Stephan, Isabel Toral.

Arabic printing began in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Levant through the association of the scholar and printer Antim the Iberian, later a metropolitan of Wallachia, and Athanasios III Dabbās, twice patriarch of Antioch, when the latter, as metropolitan of Aleppo, was sojourning in Bucharest. This partnership resulted in the first Greek and Arabic editions of the Book of the Divine Liturgies (Snagov, 1701) and the Horologion (Bucharest, 1702). With the tools and expertise that he acquired in Wallachia, Dabbās established in Aleppo in 1705 the first Arabic-type press in the Ottoman Empire. After the Church of Antioch divided into separate Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic Patriarchates in 1724, a new press was opened for Arabic-speaking Greek Catholics by ʻAbdallāh Zāḫir in Ḫinšāra (Ḍūr al-Šuwayr), Lebanon. Likewise, in 1752-1753, a press active at the Church of Saint George in Beirut printed Orthodox books that preserved elements of the Aleppo editions and were reprinted for decades. This book tells the story of the first Arabic-type presses in the Ottoman Empire which provided church books to the Arabic-speaking Christians, irrespective of their confession, through the efforts of ecclesiastical leaders such as the patriarchs Silvester of Antioch and Sofronios II of Constantinople and financial support from East European rulers like prince Constantin Brâncoveanu and hetman Ivan Mazepa.

Arabs and Arabists contains nineteen selected articles by Alastair Hamilton on the Western acquisition of knowledge of the Arab and Ottoman world in the early modern period. The first essays are on Arabs who visited Europe and gave instruction to Western Arabists, and on Europeans who either visited the Arab (or the Ottoman) world in search of manuscripts and information or who, like Franciscus Raphelengius, Isaac Casaubon and Adriaen Reland, studied it at a distance and remained in the West. These are followed by a section on the actual study of the Arabic language in Europe, and above all the creation of the first Arabic-Latin dictionaries, and another on the European study of Islam and Western translations of the Qur’an.

This book explores the position of the Dakhla and Kharga oases within Ottoman Egypt as well as the whole empire. It intends to contribute to the reflection on the characteristics and limits of Ottomanity as seen by the inhabitants of a region which, from Cairo, seemed remote and isolated. It is based on several sets of private archives, largely unpublished, supplemented by travelogues and by modern literature. Despite their remoteness from the Nile Valley and a unique environment, the Oases were integrated in the same administrative and judicial frame as the rest of Egypt. Taxation was specific as were the primarily agricultural resources. Because of the threat of Beduin raids, the Oases housed a large garrison. The book studies the impact of this military presence upon the Oasian society from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the gradual erasure of Ottoman peculiarities, then of their memory during the nineteenth century.