For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  33. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose, pp. 101–2.

  34. Southern, Western Views of Islam, pp. 104–7.

  35. Errol F. Rhodes, ‘Polyglot Bibles’, in Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. 2. Coogan (eds), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York and Oxford, 1993), pp. 601–3.

  36. Rhodes, ‘Polyglot Bibles’, pp. 601–2; Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence, pp. 61–6.

  37. Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence, pp. 65–6.

  38. Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 57, 63–4; Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence, pp. 71–6, 79–87; De Nave, Philologia Arabica, pp. 124–36; Toomer, Eastern Wisdome, pp. 41–2; Jones, Learning Arabic, pp. 185–6; Balagna, L’Imprimerie arabe, pp. 41–3.

  39. On the Medici Press, see Jones, Learning Arabic, pp. 85–90, 167, 169–83; John Robert Jones, The Medici Oriental Press (Rome 1584–1614) and Renaissance Arabic Studies, Exhibition Leaflet at SOAS, London, 1983; Jones, ‘The Medici Oriental Press (Rome 1584–1614) and the Impact of its Arabic Publications on Europe’, in Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest, pp. 88–108; Balagna, L’Imprimerie arabe, pp. 34–41, 51; Hamilton, Europe and the Arab World, pp. 58–63; Toomer, Eastern Wisdome, pp. 22–4; De Nave, Philologia Arabica, pp. 73–5.

  40. Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven and London, 2001), pp. 214–26.

  41. On the life and works of Scaliger, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 47–53; Dannenfeldt, ‘Renaissance Humanists’, p. 112; Jones, Learning Arabic, pp. 184–5; Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols (Oxford, 1983 and 1993); De Nave, Philologia arabica, pp. 116–22; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 42–3; Alastair Hamilton, William Bedwell, the Arabist, 1563–1632 (Leiden, 1985), pp. 83–5; Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, p. 199.

  42. Hamilton, William Bedwell, p. 84.

  43. On the life and works of Casaubon, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004), s.v.; Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 60–61; Dannenfeldt, ‘Renaissance Humanists’, p. 112; Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon (Oxford, 1892); Hamilton, William Bedwell, passim.

  4 The Holiness of Oriental Studies

  1. On the pervasiveness of a Latinate culture in the early modern period, see H. von Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, History of Classical Scholarship, translated by Alan Harris (London, 1982); John Edwyn Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1908); Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford, 1976); Françoise Waquet, Latin or the Empire of a Sign from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London, 2001); Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue (London, 1990), pp. 58, 128–9.

  2. David C. Douglas, English Scholars (London, 1939), p. 352.

  3. Alastair Hamilton, William Bedwell, the Arabist, 1563–1632 (Leiden, 1985), p. 79.

  4. Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 76.

  5. For the life and works of Bedwell, see Alastair Hamilton’s exemplary study, William Bedwell; cf. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB], edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004) s.v.; G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), pp. 56–64.

  6. On the life and works of Andrewes, see John Aubrey, Brief Lives, edited by John Buchanan-Brown (London, 2000), pp. 6–8; T. S. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modern (London, 1936), pp. 11–29; Robert L. Otley, Lancelot Andrewes (London, 1894); ODNB, s.v.; G. Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester, 1983), p. 147.

  7. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 55–6.

  8. On Laud’s career and his Oriental interests, see H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud 1573–1645 (London, 1940); ODNB, s.v.; Mordechai Feingold, ‘Patrons and Professors: The Origins and Motives for the Endowment of University Chairs – in Particular the Laudian Chair of Arabic’, in G. A. Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden, 1994), pp. 109–27. On the Laudian Chair, see also Mordechai Feingold, ‘Oriental Studies’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, The Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1997), pp. 449–503, esp. pp. 487–8.

  9. Alastair Hamilton, ‘An Egyptian Traveller in the Republic of Letters: Joseph Barbatus or Abudacnus the Copt’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 57 (1994), pp. 123–50.

  10. On Pasor, see Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 98–101; Feingold, ‘Patrons and Professors’, in Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest, pp. 120–21.

  11. Mordechai Feingold, ‘Decline and Fall: Arabic Science in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science Held at the University of Oklahoma, edited by F. Jamil Ragep and Sally Ragep with Steven Livesey (Leiden, 1996), pp. 442–3; cf. Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 87.

  12. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, pp. 280–82; ODNB, s.v.; G. H. Martin and J. R. L. Highfield, A History of Merton College (Oxford, 1997), pp. 159–98; Feingold, ‘Patrons and Professors’, in Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest, pp. 110–17.

  13. On John Greaves, see ODNB, s.v.; Martin and Highfield, A History of Merton College, pp. 204–7; Geoffrey Roper, ‘Arabic Printing and Publishing in England before 1820’, British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin, 12 (1985), pp. 15–16.

  14. On the life and works of Pococke, ODNB, s.v.; Johann Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1955), pp. 85–90; Peter Holt, ‘An Oxford Arabist: Edward Pococke’, in Holt, Studies in the History of the Near East, (London, 1973), pp. 1–26; Holt, ‘The Study of Arabic Historians in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Studies in the History of the Near East, pp. 27–49; Feingold, ‘Patrons and Professors’, pp. 123–5; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 116–26, 131–6, 155–67, 212–26; G. A. Russell, ‘The Impact of Philosophus Autodidactus: Pococke, John Locke and the Society of Friends’, in Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest, pp. 224–66; John B. Pearson, A Biographical Sketch of the Chaplains to the Levant Company Maintained at Constantinople, Aleppo and Smyrna 1611–76 (Cambridge, 1883), pp. 19–21.

  15. Errol Rogers, ‘Polyglot Bibles’, in Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (eds), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York and Oxford, 1993), pp. 602–3; Henry John Todd, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Rev. Brian Walton, vol. 1 (London, 1821); Holt, ‘An Oxford Arabist’, pp. 14–16; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 202–10.

  16. H. T. Norris, ‘Edmund Castell (1606–86) and his Lexicon Heptaglotton’ (1669)’, in Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest, pp. 70–71.

  17. On coffee, see Matar, Islam in Britain, pp. 110–17; Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York, 1937), pp. 183–6, 407; Alexandrine N. St Clair, The Image of the Turk in Europe (New York, 1973), pp. 16–17.

  18. Norris, ‘Edmund Castell’, p. 78.

  19. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, p. 89. On the life and works of Wheelocke in general, see Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 86–93; ODNB, s.v.

  20. On Castell’s sad career, see ODNB, s.v.; Norris, ‘Edmund Castell’, pp. 70–87; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 255–65; Roper, ‘Arabic Printing’, p. 19.

  21. Feingold, ‘Oriental Studies’, p. 495. On the life of Hyde more generally, see ODNB, s.v.; P. J. Marshall, ‘Oriental Studies’, in L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), pp. 556–8; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 248–50, 295–8; Roper, ‘Arabic Printing’, p. 17; P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of the Enlightenment (London, 1982), pp. 11–12, 17, 102–3. See also Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, ‘The Study of Persian in Oxford in the Seventeenth Century’, forthcoming in Ada Adamova, Bert Fra
gner and Michael Rogers (eds), The Study of Persian Culture in the West: Sixteenth to Early Twentieth Century (London, 2006).

  22. On the life and works of Prideaux, see ODNB, s.v.; Peter Holt, ‘The Treatment of Arab History by Prideaux, Ockley and Sale’, in Holt, Studies in the History of the Near East, pp. 50–54; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 289–92.

  23. Prideaux quoted in Holt, ‘The Treatment of Arab History’, p. 51.

  24. On the life and works of Raphelengius, see Alastair Hamilton, ‘“Nam Tirones Sumus”: Franciscus Raphelengius’ Lexicon Arabico–Latinum (Leiden, 1613)’, in Marcus de Schepper and Francine de Nave (eds), Ex Officina Plantiniana. Studia in memoriam Christophori Plantini (ca. 1520–1589) (Antwerp, 1989), pp. 557–89; Alastair Hamilton, ‘Arabic Studies in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Francine de Nave (ed.), Philologia Arabica: Arabische Studién en drukken Nederlanden in 16de en 17de eeuw (Antwerp, 1986), pp. xcvii–xcviii and De Nave, Philologia Arabica, pp. 124–35; Alastair Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence in Antwerp’s Golden Age (Oxford, 2001); Josée Balagna, L’Imprimerie arabe en occident (XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1984), pp. 41–3; J. Brugman and F. Schröder, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1979), p. 4.

  25. On Erpenius, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 59–73; John Robert Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe (1505–1624), Ph.D. thesis (School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, July 1988), pp. 13–14, 187–212; Brugman and Schröder, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands, pp. 4–10, 12–13, 16; Balagna, L’Imprimerie arabe en occident, pp. 53–4, 58; Hamilton, ‘Arabic Studies in the Netherlands’, pp. xcix–ciii; De Nave, Philologia Arabica, pp. 139–69; Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence, pp. 87, 94.

  26. On Golius, see Fück, Die Arabischen Studien, pp. 79–84; Brugman and Schröder, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands, pp. 10, 13–14, 17–20; Hamilton, ‘Arabic Studies in the Netherlands’, pp. ciii–cv; De Nave, Philologia Arabica, pp. 169–80; Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence, pp. 91, 94.

  27. On Maronite scholarship in Italy, see Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, pp. 15, 30–31, 76; Balagna, L’Imprimerie arabe en occident, pp. 33, 34. On Western interest in Eastern Christians more generally, see Alastair Hamilton, ‘The English Interest in Arabic-Speaking Christians’, in Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest, pp. 30–53.

  28. Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, 2004).

  29. On Marracci, see E. Dennison Ross, ‘Ludovico Marracci’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, 2 (1921), pp. 117–23; Hamilton, Europe and the Arab World, pp. 104–5; Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer, pp. 97–103, 105–6.

  30. On Kircher, see Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (London, 1979); Daniel Stolzenberg, The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher (Fiesole, 2001); Brian L. Merrill (ed.), Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) Jesuit Scholar. An Exhibition of His Works in the Harold B. Lee Library Collections at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah, 1989); Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs (Princeton, NJ, 1961), pp. 92–102; Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (London, 1997), pp. 83–5, 154–65; David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (London, 1966), pp. 864, 904–5; Enrichetta Leospo, ‘Athanasius Kircher und das Museo Kircheriano’, in Gereon Sieverich and Hendrik Budde (eds), Europa und der Orient 800–1900 (Berlin, 1989), pp. 56–71; Paula Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (London, 2004). For Kircher’s lost Arabic translation, see Stolzenberg, The Great Art of Knowing, p. 20.

  31. On seventeenth-century Egyptology, see Iversen, The Myth of Egypt, pp. 88–102; Alberto Silotti, Egypt Lost and Found: Explorers and Travellers on the Nile (London, 1998), pp. 26–35.

  32. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London, 1987); for (mostly hostile) responses to Bernal’s thesis, see Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York, 1996); Lefkowitz and Guy Maclean Rogers (eds), Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Matar, Islam in Britain, p. 88.

  5 Enlightenment of a Sort

  1. Knolles quoted in Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (London, 2004), p. 115. More generally, on the Turkish threat to Vienna and Europe as a whole, see Richard Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent (1453–1517) (Nieuwkoop, 1967); Dorothy M. Vaughan, Europe and the Turk: A Pattern of Alliances 1350–1700 (Liverpool, 1954); Paul Coles, The Ottoman Impact on Europe (London, 1968); Halil Inalcik, ‘Ottoman Methods of Conquest’, Studia Islamica, 3 (1954), pp. 103–29.

  2. Busbecq, The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople 1554–1562, translated by Edward Seymour Forster (Oxford, 1927), p. 112; cf. p. 40.

  3. Thévenot quoted in Alastair Hamilton, Europe and the Arab World (Oxford, 1994), p. 82.

  4. Harold Bowen, British Contributions to Turkish Studies (London, 1945).

  5. Bernard Lewis, ‘From Babel to Dragomans’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 101 (1998), pp. 37–54; reprinted in Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, pp. 18–32.

  6. On the Levant Company, see A. C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London, 1964); John B. Pearson, A Biographical Sketch of the Chaplains to the Levant Company (London, 1964); Ralph Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square: English Traders in the Levant in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1967).

  7. B. B. Misra, The Central Administration of the East India Company 1773–1834 (Manchester, 1959), pp. 387–400.

  8. On d’Herbelot and the Bibliothèque orientale, see Henri Laurens, Aux Sources de l’orientalisme: La Bibliothèque orientale de Barthélémi d’Herbelot (Paris, 1978); Ahmad Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-Century Writings (London, 1996), pp. 45–54. On Gibbon’s aversion to alphabetical order, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols, edited by David Womersley (London, 1994), vol. 3, p. 238n; cf. Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge (London, 2000), p. 185.

  9. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 3, p. 238n.

  10. Hajji Khalifa, Bibliographicum et Encyclopaedicum = Kashf al-zunun ‘an asami al-kutub wa-al-funun, edited and translated by Gustav Flugel, 7 vols (London and Leipzig, 1853–8); cf. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, s.v. ‘Katib Celebi’; Mohamed Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland: sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1964), pp. 76, 163–5; Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-Century Writings, pp. 44, 47.

  11. On Galland’s life and work, see, above all, Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland. See also Georges May, Les Mille et une nuits d’Antoine Galland (Paris, 1986); Raymond Schwab, L’Auteur des Mille et Une Nuits. Vie d’ Antoine Galland (Paris, 1964); Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 14–19; Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-Century Writings, pp. 37–47; Ulrich Marzolph and Richard Van Leeuwen (eds), Encyclopaedia of the Arabian Nights (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2004), vol. 2, pp. 556–60.

  12. Byron Porter Smith, Islam in English Literature, 2nd edn (New York, 1975), pp. 79–81; Ahmad Gunny, Perceptions of Islam in European Writings (Markfield, Leicestershire, 2004), pp. 62–7.

  13. Smith, Islam in English Literature, pp. 102–4; Gunny, Images of Islam, pp. 132–62.

  14. On the soporific tenor of scholarship in Oxford, see G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), pp. 306, 313. For the study of Arabic and Islam there, see P. J. Marshall, ‘Oriental Studies’, in L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), pp. 551–63.

  15. Edward Gibbon, Autobiography, edited by Lord Sheffield (London, 1907), pp. 36–42. For Gibbon’s enthusiasm for Oriental matters, see Smith, Islam in English Literature, pp. 114–18; Bernard Lewis, ‘Gibbon on Muhammad’, in Islam
and the West (New York and Oxford), pp. 85–98; D. O. Morgan, ‘Edward Gibbon and the East’, Iran, 33 (1995), pp. 85–92.

  16. John Sparrow, Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University (Cambridge, 1967), p. 67.

  17. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB], edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004), s.v.; Alastair Hamilton, ‘Western Attitudes to Islam in the Enlightenment’, Middle Eastern Lectures, 3 (1999), p. 81; Gunny, Images of Islam, pp. 81–2, 145–7; Marshall, ‘Oriental Studies’, pp. 553, 560.

  18. For the life and works of Ockley, see A. J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (London, 1960), pp. 13–47; P. M. Holt, ‘The Treatment of Arabic History by Prideaux, Ockley and Sale’, in Peter Holt, Studies in the History of the Near East (London, 1973), pp. 54–7; ODNB, s.v.; Paul Hazard, The European Mind (London, 1953), p. 32–3; Smith, Islam in English Literature, pp. 37, 64–8; P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind (London, 1982), pp. 71–2; Gunny, Images of Islam, pp. 57–63; Isaac Disraeli, The Curiosities of Literature (London, 1867), pp. 12–13.

  19. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 3, p. 248n.

  20. Ibid., p. 173n. On Sale more generally, ODNB, s.v.; Johann Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20 Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1955), pp. 104–5; Smith, Islam in English Literature, pp. 68–71; Holt, ‘The Treatment of Arabic History’, pp. 57–60; Gunny, Images of Islam, pp. 134–5; Alastair Hamilton, Europe and the Arab World: Five Centuries of books by European scholars and travellers from the libraries of the Arcadian Group (Oxford, 1994), pp. 9–10, 106–7.

  21. On the Russells, see Smith, Islam in English Literature, pp. 108–10; Hamilton, Europe and the Arab World, p. 132.