Ludovico Marracci at Work: The Evolution of His Latin Translation of the Qur'an in the Light of His Newly Discovered Manuscripts. With an Edition and a Comparative Linguistic Analysis of Sura 18.

• Author: Burman, Thomas E.
• Position: Book review

Ludovico Marracci at Work: The Evolution of His Latin Translation of the Qur'an in the Light of His Newly Discovered Manuscripts. With an Edition and a Comparative Linguistic Analysis of Sura 18. By REINHOLD F. GLEI and ROBERTO TOTTOLI. Corpus Islamo-Christianum, Arabica-Latina, vol. 1. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2016. Pp. 188. [euro]48.

In 1698 Ludovico Marracci, a brilliant Arabist and scholar of Islam in Rome, published his Alcorani textus universus, a gigantic achievement in the history of European scholarship on Islam and its holy text: a painstaking edition of the Arabic text of the Quran together with a literal translation into Latin, accompanied by ample notes based on wide reading in the Arabic tradition of Quran exegesis. It was intended, to be sure, as a tool for attacking Islam--its first massive volume was called Prodromus ad refutationem Alcorani and abundant further polemical content appears as notes to the Latin translation in volume two. Yet as a scholarly accomplishment it is none the less staggering. Though European scholars had intently studied the Quran and had translated all or portions of it into Latin intermittently since the mid-twelfth century, nothing remotely like this had been published (for more on the historical context of this translation, see Thomas E. Burman, "European Qur'an Translations, 1500-1700," in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 6: Western Europe (1500-1600) [Leiden: Brill, 2014], 25-38).

It was, in fact, the product of forty years of effort (Marracci died just two years after its publication), and, as anyone who has opened these volumes can attest, the effort was Herculean: Marracci presents the Quranic text in successive, short sections of a page or two in length, each of which is followed immediately by a painstaking literal translation into Latin; the translation in turn is followed by explanatory notae that discuss philological and interpretive issues arising in the passage; these notes in turn are followed by the refutationes or refutata mentioned above. At every turn, moreover, Marracci's work is informed by years of studying Muslim commentators: al-Suyuti, al-Baydawi, al-Zamakhshari, and, especially in the initial stages of his work, the Andalusi Ibn Abi Zamanln.

Remarkably enough, a trove of materials recently came to light in the library of Marracci's religious order in Rome (Ordine dei chierici regolari della madre di Dio) that sheds enormous light on how Marracci...