In 1621, the Scottish scholar David Colville copied a Latin translation of the Qur’an from a manuscript held in the library of El Escorial (Spain) and brought the copy with him to Milan where it is still preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (MS D 100 Inf). In 2002, Thomas Burman identified a second but incomplete copy of the same translation dating from the first half of the sixteenth century in the Cambridge University Library (MS Mm. v. 26). The story of this translation is essentially the following. In 1518, Pope Leo X nominated cardinal-bishop Gilles of Viterbo legate to Emperor Charles V. While in Spain, Giles of Viterbo, the Hebraist, Arabist, Cabalist, and enthusiastic patron of Oriental studies, commissioned a translation of the Qur’an to Juan Gabriel of Teruel (formerly Alí Alayzar). Juan Gabriel was a Muslim convert to Christianity who collaborated with Catholic polemicists active in early sixteenth-century Aragon, such as Martín García (ca 1441–1521) and Martín Figuerola (ca 1457–1532). Once the cardinal brought the manuscript back to Italy, Leo Africanus, Gilles of Viterbo's godson and teacher of Arabic, corrected and interpolated Juan Gabriel's text in 1525.
Colville even wrote a three-folio prologue to his copy of the text, providing us with a great deal of information about the layout of the original translation, its division in four books, and the people involved in its production. This short preface, now available in English, provides readers with much information about the translating and reading practice of the Qur'an in early modern Iberia and beyond. According to Colville, the original text was divided into four columns. The layout of the Cambridge manuscript suggests that the four columns were arranged in two folios from left to right—that is, from the verso of the first folio to the recto of the second. In the first column there was the Arabic text, in the second was the Arabic text transliterated into Latin alphabet, in the third was Juan Gabriel's translation (later corrected and interpolated by Leo Africanus), and in the fourth were some marginal notes on the translation of the Qur’an by Juan Gabriel.
In this ponderous and useful book, Dr. Starczewska provides readers with both the critical edition and a detailed preliminary study of this Latin translation of the Qur'an produced across Spain and Italy between 1518 and 1525. The critical edition is based on the Cambridge manuscript and, in the absence of the Cambridge manuscript, on the translation preserved in the main body of the Ambrosiana manuscript. The critical apparatus collects the variants, annotations, and interpolations preserved on the same folios as the Latin translation. The appendix includes the glosses listed in the fourth column (777–813). The long preliminary study reconstructs the genesis of the translation of the Qur’an and its reception among early modern European scholars and philologists—namely, David Colville himself and the French Protestant Arabist Isaac Causabon. In particular, Starczewska stresses the Iberian origins of the translation and studies the context in which it was first produced.
In the last twenty years, scholars of medieval and early modern Iberia have been extremely active in rethinking the role of Islam in medieval and early modern Europe. Latin philologists based in Spain edited and studied medieval and early modern Latin translations of the Qur'an. Starczewska's edition follows Óscar de la Cruz Palma's edition of the early seventeenth-century Latin translation of the Qur'an by Ciril Lucaris (2006) and García Masegosa's edition of the seventeenth-century Latin translation by Dominicus Germanus of Silesia (2009), as well as Nàdia Petrus Pons's edition of the early thirteen-century Latin translation by Mark of Toledo (2016). Starczewska's edition and study of this early sixteenth-century translation of the Qur’an illustrates the importance that Iberian Muslim traditions had in the formation of the intellectual history of Europe. Above all, it makes the text of the Latin translation available, allowing for further comparative research on the appropriation of the Qur’an in early modern Europe.
