Scholarship between Europe and the Levant is a collection of essays in honour of Professor Alastair Hamilton. His pioneering research into the history of European Oriental studies has deeply enhanced our understanding of the dynamics and processes of cultural and religious exchange between Christian Europe and the Islamic world. Written by students, friends and colleagues, the contributions in this volume pay tribute to Alastair Hamilton’s work and legacy. They discuss and celebrate intellectual, artistic and religious encounters between Europe and the cultural area stretching from Northern Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, and spanning the period from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Contributors: Asaph Ben-Tov, Alexander Bevilacqua, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Charles Burnett, Ziad Elmarsafy, Mordechai Feingold, Aurélien Girard, Bernard Heyberger, Robert Irwin, Tarif Khalidi, J.M.I. Klaver, Noel Malcolm, Martin Mulsow, Francis Richard, G. J. Toomer, Arnoud Vrolijk, Nicholas Warner, Joanna Weinberg, and Jan Just Witkam.

Early modern Protestant scholars closely engaged with Islamic thought in more ways than is usually recognized. Among Protestants, Lutheran scholars distinguished themselves as the most invested in the study of Islam and Muslim culture. Mehmet Karabela brings the neglected voices of post-Reformation theologians, primarily German Lutherans, into focus and reveals their rigorous engagement with Islamic thought. Inspired by a global history approach to religious thought, Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes offers new sources to broaden the conventional interpretation of the Reformation beyond a solely European Christian phenomenon. Based on previously unstudied dissertations, disputations, and academic works written in Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karabela analyzes three themes: Islam as theology and religion; Islamic philosophy and liberal arts; and Muslim sects (Sunni and Shi‘a). This book provides analyses and translations of the Latin texts as well as brief biographies of the authors. These texts offer insight into the Protestant perception of Islamic thought for scholars of religious studies and Islamic studies as well as for general readers. Examining the influence of Islamic thought on the construction of the Protestant identity after the Reformation helps us to understand the role of Islam in the evolution of Christianity.

This volume offers a wide-ranging overview of the 16th-18th century disputation culture in various European regions. Its focus is on printed disputations as a polyvalent media form which brings together many of the elements that contributed to the cultural and scientific changes during the early modern period.

The present case studies on early modern travelers, dispersed often by unintended consequences of war, curiosity, economic or political reasons in the Mediterranean, the Americas and Japan, ask for what ́power(s) ́ and agency they still had, perhaps counterintuitively, abroad.

Despite its relevance to the subsequent development of Western Islamic studies, the intellectual contribution of early modern Catholicism is still an under-researched area. The aim of this volume is to fill this gap, offering a series of essays dealing with the study of the Qur’an and Arabic language in early modern Catholic Europe. Focusing on the circulation of manuscripts, translations and printed books, the essays highlight how Catholic Orientalism contributed to the birth and spread of Western Islamic studies, although sometimes it was still directed towards religious polemics. Among the protagonists of this period of Islamic studies, the volume will focus on Catholic priests, missionaries, religious orders (Jesuits, Franciscans, Carmelites) Eastern Christians, converts, and other prominent figures in the Catholic culture of the time. Special attention will be given to the work of Ludovico Marracci, author of a fundamental edition of the Arabic text and Latin translation of the Qur’an with an introduction, notes, refutations and religious and linguistic insights. The volume is of interest to an audience of specialists and non-specialists interested both in Islamic and Qur'anic studies and in the history of modern Catholicism, missions, and Orientalism

This biography of Johann Ernst Gerhard (1621-1668) studies of the richly documented life and work of a lesser-known seventeenth-century orientalist, setting them within the broader intellectual, confessional, and institutional contexts of his day.

In Richard Pococke’s Letters from the East (1737-1740), Rachel Finnegan provides edited transcripts of the full run of correspondence from Richard Pococke’s famous eastern voyage from 1737-41. In this new volume, Finnegan combines updated biographical accounts of the traveller and his correspondents (his mother, Elizabeth Pococke and his uncle and patron, Bishop Thomas Milles) from vol. 1 of the original edition of Letters from Abroad (2011) with transcriptions of the letters from vol. 3 of the series (2013), together with new material that has hitherto been unpublished. Thus, in a single volume, she sets the context of the life and times of the traveller and his family against the background of this voluminous corpus of fascinating correspondence, which can be read in conjunction with Pococke’s own published account of his travels, A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1743-45).

The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar. This book offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the power of this collection of tales that penetrates so many cultures and appeals to such a variety of predilections and tastes. It also explores areas that were left untouched, like the decolonization of the Arabian Nights, and its archaeologies. Unique in its excavation into inroads of perception and reception, Muhsin J. al-Musawi's book unearths means of connection with common publics and learned societies. Al-Musawi shows, as never before, how the Arabian Nights has been translated, appropriated, and authenticated or abused over time, and how its reach is so expansive as to draw the attention of poets, painters, illustrators, translators, editors, musicians, political scientists like Leo Strauss, and novelists like Michel Butor, James Joyce and Marcel Proust amongst others. Making use of documentaries, films, paintings, novels and novellas, poetry, digital forums and political jargon, this book offers nuanced understanding of the perennial charm and power of this collection.

A history of the continent-spanning Armenian print tradition in the early modern period Early Modernity and Mobility explores the disparate yet connected histories of Armenian printing establishments in early modern Europe and Asia. From 1512, when the first Armenian printed codex appeared in Venice, to the end of the early modern period in 1800, Armenian presses operated in nineteen locations across the Armenian diaspora. Linking far-flung locations in Amsterdam, Livorno, Marseille, Saint Petersburg, and Astrakhan to New Julfa, Madras, and Calcutta, Armenian presses published a thousand editions with more than half a million printed volumes in Armenian script. Drawing on extensive archival research, Sebouh David Aslanian explores why certain books were published at certain times, how books were sold across the diaspora, who read them, and how the printed word helped fashion a new collective identity for early modern Armenians. In examining the Armenian print tradition Aslanian tells a larger story about the making of the diaspora itself. Arguing that "confessionalism" and the hardening of boundaries between the Armenian and Roman churches was the "driving engine" of Armenian book history, Aslanian makes a revisionist contribution to the early modern origins of Armenian nationalism.

Travis Zadeh revives the work of the thirteenth-century Persian scholar Qazwīnī, whose Wonders and Rarities was for centuries one of the most influential natural histories in the world. Inviting us to embrace anew Qazwīnī’s rationalized study of nature and magic, Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the history of Islamic thought.