The Qurʾān was a best seller in medieval and early modern Europe. Like the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital, texts that were read by all sorts of non- and anti- and pro-communist inhabitants of the Western democracies during the Cold War, the Qurʾān was a book that, because of the way it informed a vast, competing, dangerous, and deeply attractive civilization, demanded to be read by Christian Europeans across the whole period from the mid-twelfth to the mid-sixteenth century. It was translated into Latin at least three times in this period—four times if we count a partial...

In taking up their task, Latin-Christian Quг͗ān translators had to find a way to make the Latin language utter the meaning of what is, as Quг͗ānic verse 12:2 declares, a self-consciously Arabic book: “We have revealed it as an Arabic Quг͗ān so that you perhaps will understand.”¹ And not just Arabic, but “clear Arabic” (16:103) miraculously spoken by God through Gabriel directly to Muhammad. But while the Quг͗ān’s Arabic seemed miraculous to Muslims—both then and now—it was not miraculously clear in any simple way. Like all great holy books, the Quг͗ān is, in fact, quite a difficult book...

There is no clearer sign of the potential difficulties for the Quг͗ān’s translators than the existence in the Islamic world of a whole genre of lexicons of the so-called “strange” or “foreign” words in the Quг͗ān. For as Muslims realized early on, there were a number of words in their sacred text that were not part of ordinary Arabic discourse, some of them deriving from rare Arabic or Semitic roots, some of them traceable to even more exotic languages, such as Persian.¹ For a medieval Latin translator such “strange” Quг͗ānic terms must have been maddening. What was one to do,...

The oldest physical form in which Robert of Ketton’s Latin Quг͗ān and the rest of Peter the Venerable’s anthology of Islamic works survives is a mid-twelfth-century codex now part of the National Library of France (MS Arsenal 1162). Browsing through the pages of Robert’s translation as it appears here, what strikes one is not so much the text itself, as all the stuff that surrounds it. Abundant notes, written in a careful hand, litter the margins of many folios. They thunder with hostility: their favorite noun seems to be mendax(“liar”), the preferred adjective stultissimus (“extremely stupid”). In place of the...

Robert’s translation had entered circulation in its original, twelfth-century, form, as we have just seen, framed by a complex system of both polemical and philological glosses, hostile surah titles, and largely anti-Islamic accompanying works meant both to illuminate this difficult text and to control how Christians understood it. It became something of a best seller. The surviving twenty-four manuscripts and two sixteenth-century printed editions attest a wide readership—much wider, at any rate, than the circulation of the other Latin translations combined.¹ If we try now to understand how Robert’s Latin Quг͗ān was read, by examining how the frames in...

Compared with the twenty-four manuscripts of Robert of Ketton’s Lex Mahumet, there are relatively few surviving manuscripts of any other Latin version of the Quг͗ān—in fact, only fifteen manuscripts survive for the other three combined—and none of these versions found its way into print, either abridged or in its entirety.¹ Yet in these fifteen manuscripts, we have evidence, as we will see in this and the next chapter, of a broader range of reading practices and attitudes than we saw in the codices of Robert’s Latin version. Some of what we see here will be familiar: Mark of...

Where Mithridates’ ambition to create a multilingual Quг͗ān achieved only partial (and rather flawed) fruition, Egidio da Viterbo managed to have a bilingual Quг͗ān produced in 1518 that substantially accomplished many of the goals that Mithridates at least claimed for his work. Here, in parallel columns, the reader found the Arabic Quг͗ān, a new Latin translation, exegetical notes, and something we have not seen before: the Arabic text transliterated into Latin. While Egidio’s motivations in commissioning this new Quг͗ān edition are not clear, the final product was one that served the interests of philological Quг͗ān readers in remarkable, indeed unprecedented,...

There were times—after the fall of Acre in 1291, for example, or in the years after Constantinople’s conquest by the Turks in 1453—when Islam became an especially pressing problem for Latin intellectuals.¹ It is with the reaction of one Latin scholar to the latter calamity that I want to bring this book to a close. For in the aftermath of the loss of that great Christian city, what Juan de Segovia, a leading Latin churchman, did was to read the Quг͗ān—though “read” is really too mild a verb: he studied it, he grappled with it, tirelessly, intensively,...