The 2001-2002 Sawyer Seminar at the University of Chicago
	From Medieval to Modern in the Islamic World
Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Thomas E. Burman

Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1540

(Draft: not for citation or quotation)¹

Soon after the last of the Crusader states had been destroyed by the Mamluks in the last decade of the 13th century, Riccoldo da Monte di Croce penned a series of meditations on Christian-Muslim relations entitled Five Letters on the Fall of Acre.² Now Riccoldo was both one of the most learned scholars of Islam in Latin Christendom and the author of one of the most widely read anti-Islamic tracts, his Contra legem saracenorum. He was a Dominican friar much of whose career had been dedicated to trying to convert Muslims to Islam, and in earlier years he, like many of contemporaries, had been remarkably optimistic about that project. If Christian missionaries used the right sort of arguments, it was widely thought, Muslims­especially the learned among them­would begin entering the Christian flock en masse, and Islam would soon disappear.³

But with the coming of the end of the century and the loss of the Christian foothold in the east, and, more importantly, the failure of the missionary efforts of Riccoldo and his learned colleagues, Riccoldo da Monte di Croce had become much less optimistic, and his remarkable five letters give full expression to his discouragement. One of their most striking passages occurs in the first of the letters where Riccoldo tries to understand why God has permitted, and even seemed to condone, the wide desemination of the Qur'an. In his frustration with God, Riccoldo tells us, he did a very surprising thing: "As you know," he says, addressing God, "frequently as I read the Qur'an in Arabic, with great grief and impatience in my heart, I would place this book on Your altar, before the image of You and your holy mother and say: `Read! Read what Muhammad says!' And it seemed to me that You did not want to Read."4

I know of no stranger account of a pre-modern Christian coming to grips with the Qur'an than this one. That a Christian priest known for his anti-Islamic zeal should place the Qur'an itself on the eucharistic altar, a place where no book besides the Bible is normally laid, and that he should ask God (and, perhaps the Virgin too) to examine it, and that his appeal to God should be couched in language that itself is oddly reminiscent of the Qur'an­the command to "Read/Recite" ("Iqra") stands at the beginning of countless Qur'anic passages­seems, on the surface at least, bizarre.⁵ I would like to suggest in this paper, however, that, peculiar as this account is, it comes much closer to capturing the typical attitude of medieval and early-modern Qur'an readers toward that text than any other pre-modern anecdote and­more to the point­than any of the modern scholarly accounts of the Latin-Christian encounter with the Qur'an.

For whatever else it does­and I suspect that there are many layers of meaning in this narrative that are worth careful examination­this picture of Riccoldo placing Islam's holy book on that holiest of Christian tables communicates a painfully complex, even ambivalent attitude toward the Qur'an. Riccoldo both grieves over what he sees as the gross errors of the Qur'an and yet still feels somehow compelled to place it on the very spot where only the Bible and the eucharistic elements can be placed. He both deplores the Qur'an and somehow seems to grant it the stature of the Bible. He calls on his Christian God to examine the Qur'an's errors, but does so in partially Qur'anic language.

The complexity of attitude that this vignette captures, I propose to argue here, is actually typical of medieval and early-modern Qur'an reading in Europe. Though no one else that I know of expressed this reaction as strikingly as Riccoldo, many European readers engaged the Qur'anic text in surprisingly complex, and even ambivalent ways: they found the Qur'an both scandalous and intriguing; they were inclined to shout at it one moment and analyse it carefully the next; they saw it as a fraudulent revelation and a prestigious book at the same time.⁶

This is not, however, the way earlier scholars of medieval Christian-Muslim relations have viewed this matter. Though there is no single article or book that directly addresses the issue of how European Christians read the Qur'an in this period, several scholars have addressed the issue at least tangentially. Norman Daniel's views in his justly acclaimed Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (rev. ed., Oxford, 1993) are typical. For Daniel, Latin Christians were incapable of shaking off­even temporarily--a profound "communal hostility"toward Islam. When it came to reading the Qur'an, this collective fear and distrust meant that no Christian was capable of engaging that text in any but a polemical/apologetic mode: they fixated entirely, that is, on the parts of that Qur'an that were at odds with Christianity and the Bible or on the parts of it that confirmed the Christian view of things, or (usually­and for Daniel incomprehensibly) both. The parts of the Qur'anic text that had no relevance to this polemical and apologetic enterprise, the great majority of it, that is, were simply ignored by European readers. A further hallmark of this mode of reading was, according to Daniel, that Latin Christian readers never consulted­were in fact, incapable of consulting--Muslim authorities about the meaning of their own book.

In some ways it is difficult to quarrel with this view. Daniel's familiarity with a range of sources relevant to this question was unmatched, and his famous and beautifully written book is still deeply persuasive more than forty years after its original publication. Yet there are at least two reasons why we should be somewhat suspicious of his conclusions, at least as they relate specifically to how Latin Christians read the Qur'an. The first is that Latin Christendom in general had a complex, even ambivalent reaction to the the Islamic world. It would be surprising­though not, I suppose, impossible­for that same civilization to have a narrow, uncomplicated reaction to Islam's holy book. The second reason is that the sources that Daniel and other scholars have used to understand how Latin Christians read the Qur'an are inherently distorting in ways that have direct bearing on the issue at hand. Both these points require elaboration.

There is little doubt first of all that medieval Christendom as a whole viewed the Arab-Islamic world in a complex, often ambivalent way. On the one hand Arab-Muslim political and military power was feared, and Muslims were often portrayed as being essentially warlike. This bellicosity was accompanied, it was often asserted, by impiety and immorality. Bizarre assertions that Muslims were polytheists flourished in western Europe despite the fact that most informed thinkers recognized that Islam was profoundly monotheistic; just as Muhammad was portrayed as sexually promiscuous, so were Muslims in general often depicted as given over to uncurbed lustfulness. Negative stereotypes of Arab Muslims abounded­as everyone knows--throughout this period in the Latin West.⁷

Less often discussed, though nearly as plentiful, are the signs of Latin Christendom's outright admiration for the Arab-Islamic world. The best example is the massive translation movement begun in the late 11th century and lasting well into the 14th that saw a vast library of Arabic scientific and philosophical treatises transformed into Latin and vernacular versions after which these works became essential reading for scholastic thinkers and their heirs all the way down to at least the 17th century. This passionate search for Arabic texts on natural philosophy was itself simply an outgrowth of the deep sense that the Arab philosophers were, as Adelard of Bath implied in the twelfth century, the great teachers of the use of reason in the Mediterranean basin. ⁸ Adelard's contemporary, the Jewish convert to Christianity, Petrus Alfonsi, underscored this belief in his immensely widely read Disciplina clericalis or Clerical discipline. This was a thin book of advice for scholars and intellectuals, consisting of proverbial statements and instructive tales, much of it based on Arabic courtly literature. It is remarkable how often the sagely figures referred to by Alfonsi are specifically identified as Arabs. "An Arab said to his son, `If you see someone overwhelmed by his evil deeds, do not interfere; for harm comes to the man who releases the trap.'"<sup>9</sup> In this work, in fact, "Arab" ("Arabs" in Latin) functions almost as a synonym for "philosopher" and "teacher" ("philosophus" and "magister" respectively). Alfonsi even portrays these wise Arabs giving advice on religious matters: "An Arabic poet said, `You disobey God; you pretend, nevertheless, to love Him, which is incredible; for if you truly loved Him, you would obey Him; for he who loves, obeys."¹⁰ In later centuries countless scholastic thinkers underscored the great wisdom and learning of Arab thinkers when they repeatedly referred to the great Arab Muslim philospher Ibn Rushd­Averroes to them­as simply The Commentator as they cited his massive commentaries on Aristotle, commentaries that were essential reading for philosophers and theologians in this period.

But medieval Christians did not just admire Arab philosophy and wisdom, they also admired­especially in the later Middle Ages--the Arabic language itself, which was seen to be one of the great classical languages worthy of careful study. In 1516 Augustino Guistiniano published the first polyglot version of the Psalms; he underscored the high status of Arabic in Latin Christendom by choosing it as one of the five languages in which he presented the Psalter.¹¹ Less than a decade later, an English humanist named Robert Wakefield urged his fellow scholars to take up the study of Arabic in a his Oration on the Praises of and the Utility of the Three Languages, Arabic, Chaldeean, and Hebrew.¹² It was a commonplace among 16th century scholars that Arabic stood alongside Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as one of the ancient languages deserving of humanist inquiry.¹³

Many other aspects of Christendom's admiration for things Arabic and Islamic might be mentioned here­the widespread admiration for Saladin, for example, and the relatively common assertion that Muslims, despite the misguidedness of their religion, were often models of piety that Christians might usefully emulate. Latin Christendom in the period from the mid-twelfth to the mid-sixteenth century, therefore, must be seen as generally but profoundly ambivalent about the Arab-Islamic world. That world was the principal geo-political and religious rival of Latin Christendom, but it was also the home of the outside civilization that Europeans most admired and most wanted to learn from and emulate. This fact by itself requires us at least to wonder whether Latin-Christian Qur'an reading was not more complicated than the one-dimensional view of it advanced by Norman Daniel.

Second, the nature of the sources that Daniel and other scholars have used demands such a reconsideration in even more compelling ways. Those sources consist almost entirely of overtly polemical works written in order to refute Islam and defend Christianity. As a genre, religious disputation forces those engaged in it to adopt stark positions, and to seek out the most damaging arguments against their opponents. All the messy complexity of the paradoxical and even contradictory attitudes that most of us carry about in our heads is passed over in the narrowly conceived literature of religious polemic. One will never find anything but polemic in polemical literature.

What I want to suggest in the remainder of this paper is that if we look at a different set of sources that can tell us something about Latin-Christian reactions to the Qur'an, we find that, while a narrow polemical and apologetic approach to the Qur'an was indeed ubiquitous in medieval and early-modern Europe, it is by no means the only response to Islam's Holy Book. There were, in fact, a range of possible ways of reading the Qur'an extending from hostile polemic to rather dry philology, and these different ways of reading the text often coexisted in the same readers. Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom between the mid-eleventh and the mid-sixteenth century, therefore, did not just mean being outraged by the parts of the Qur'an that contradicted Christianity or being disingenuously intrigued by the parts that confirmed it. It also often meant struggling with textual problems that had little to do with polemic; it could mean puzzling over Arabic syntax and usage; it frequently meant turning to Arabic Qur'an commentaries to make sense of anachronistic language or elliptical formulation; it sometimes meant reading carefully through the whole of the text to gain a global understanding of what it contained; it could even mean expressing honest admiration for the Qur'an. While writing polemical treatises against Islam was certainly the fruit of a very narrow tradition of polemical and apologetic interpretation of the Qur'an, the act of reading the Qur'an itself was usually much more complicated than this.

These other sources that I want to focus on are ones that allow us to watch Latin Christians in this complicated act of reading the Qur'an at times when they are not actively writing polemic against it or Islam. There are three closely related groups of them. First, there were at least three complete and two partial translations of the Qur'an into Latin between 1140 and 1520. Close reading of these translations side by side with the Arabic original allows us to gain a very detailed understanding of how at least a handful of Christian Europeans responded to the Qur'anic text. The other two varieties of sources are found in the manuscripts of these self-same translations and in Arabic Qur'ans that circulated in Western Europe in this period. For the majority of the extant copies of the Qur'an that we know to have circulated in the west in this period contain (often extensive) marginal and interlinear notes, and these comprise a second major category of sources that allow us to capture some of the immediate and often unformed reactions of Christians to the Qur'an. Finally, some of the manuscripts of the Latin Qur'ans of this period contain works that might be called Qur'anic study aids written for Latin readers by Latin readers: tables of contents for the Qur'an, for example, and indices. These works make it possible for us to get some idea of what people who read the Qur'an might possibly have been looking for when they opened it up.

Even a cursory examination of these three kinds of sources is enough to make clear first of all that a narrow--and sometimes extremely hostile--polemical and apologetic reading of the Qur'an did flourish throughout the whole period. The copious annotations in the margins of the first manuscript of Robert of Ketton's mid-twelfth-century Latin Qur'an are an early, vivid example.¹⁴ The favorite nouns of the anonymous individual or group who composed them are "fabula" and "mendax," and the favorite adjectives "ridiculus" and "stultissimus." Such comments as "A really stupid fable concerning God and Adam and angels and the devil follows" (Paris, Arsenal, ms. 1162, 26rb, rm) are found throughout this set of marginalia that recurrs so frequently in later manuscripts that it amounts to a Latin-Christian glossa ordinaria on the Qur'an. Much the same attitude generated a brief index to the same Qur'an translation extant today in a thirteenth-century manuscript in Paris (BNF, ms. lat. 3668). Composed almost certainly by a mendicant scholar, this index is really little more than an alphabetical list of the loci classici of anti-Islamic disputation. The last entry, for example, is "Zeit uxorem accepit Machmet" ("Muhammad took the wife of Zayd"--fol. 156v), with a reference to the folio where verse 37 of surah 33 could be found. This Qur'anic verse relating how Muhammad fell in love with Zayd's wife Zaynab was cited in nearly every medieval Christian polemical work ever written against Islam,¹⁵ Christian authors seizing upon it with puerile zeal as evidence of Muhammad's--and Islam's--supposed lustfulness, and nearly every other entry in this index is of the same sort: they allow the polemically inclined reader to find quickly the passages of the Qur'an generally thought to be most useful for that purpose.

But attacking Islam was only half this narrow polemical and apologetic reading: the other half was focusing on passages that seemed to confirm Christian belief and practice, and there is plenty evidence of this in these sources as well. Nicholas of Cusa heavily annotated his copy of Robert of Ketton's Qur'an translation as he read it, and most of this notes represent the thoughts of a Christian reading the Qur'an, as Cusa himself put it, by "pia interpretatione," finding in it, in other words, the passages that support Christian beliefs. Beside one of the many verses that tell how the Qur'an affirms the earlier revelation to Moses, he writes "alchoran confirmat pentateucum" (Bernkastel-Kues, ms.108, fol. 95vb, bm, at Q. 46:30), and elsewhere he draws attention to a passage (35:25) that describes the Bible as a "clear book" (fol. 88ra, bm). Here Cusa was gathering evidence for an argument that he would later make at length in his Cribatio alkorani that, properly understood, the Qur'an actually teaches that the Christian Bible in its extant form is completely authoritative, and Muslims, therefore, ought to heed their own scripture and embrace the Bible.¹⁶ Much the same approach shows up in the extensive marginal notes composed anonymously in about 1462 in a Vatican manuscript of the same translation (BA, ms. lat. 4071). This anonymous reader appears to have been planning some sort of written defense of Christian beliefs on the basis of the Qur'an, and reminded himself at verse 2:154 of the Qur'an, which asserts that those who are killed in the way of God do not die but live, that he should "apply [this belief] to Christ" (fol. 27v, lm). The frequent late-thirteenth-century Latin translations of passages of the Qur'an that appear in the margins of a Baghdadi manuscript of the Arabic Qur'an now in Paris (BNF, Ar. 384) likewise seem to be the work of a prospective Christian apologist: most often the passages translated are those commonly used in this way, such as verse 2:187 which describes how Muslims have to fast during the day, but may eat and drink and enjoy sexual intercourse during the night (fol. **).

Examples of this polemical and apologetic mode of Qur'an reading could be piled up almost endlessly; it was an approach to the Qur'an that was attractive throughout the whole period, and it was rarely far from the mind of any Christian Qur'an reader. Yet narrow polemic and apologetic--as widespread as they were--were by no means the only reactions that Latin-Christian readers showed to the Qur'anic text. Angelo Michele Piemontese has recently drawn attention to a remarkable Arabic manuscript of the Qur'an written in Hebrew characters and preserved in the Vatican Library (BA Ebr. 357). Abundant Latin notes from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries litter every folio of this volume, notes written by a Christian scholar or scholars with extensive knowledge of the Qur'anic exegetical tradition. In fact, it is quite clear that Arabic Qur'anic commentaries are the sources of perhaps the majority of these notes. At verse 19 of the 22nd surah (Surat al-hajj), for example, where the Qur'an tells of "The two adversaries" who "are opponents who contend concerning their lord," we find an interlinear gloss above the word khasman, ("two adversaries"). Just who or what these two adversaries--khasman--were is not at all clear in the Qur'anic text, and Medieval Arabic Qur'an commentaries regularly addressed this problem, normally asserting that these two adversaries are to be understood, as al-Tabari put it, as "all the believers" on the one hand, and "all the unbelievers of whatever sort" on the other.¹⁷ The Latin gloss here simply reproduces this view, identifying the khasman as "scilicet fideles [et] increduli" ("manifestly the faithful and the unbelievers"--fol. *, l. 14). Not only are the majority of these notes based on the Qur'anic exegetical tradition, however, but they are remarkably unpreoccupied with the standard polemical and apologetic concerns: we find few tirades against the fabulae of the Qur'an or the mendacity of Muhammad, little apologetic fascination with the Qur'anic verses that talk of God having a Word and Spirit. Rather what these notes embody is an intense interest in Arabic philology, Arab and Islamic history, Islamic doctrine, and Muslim Qur'anic exegesis.¹⁸

It is not at all surprising to learn that this particular manuscript and the philological reading of the Qur'an that it incarnates were the work of Italian humanists who, by the late 15th century, were becoming increasingly interested in Arabic as an adjunct to their other linguistic studies. And other Qur'an manuscripts contain evidence that a similar philological reading flourished elsewhere in late medieval Europe. For example, the Cambridge University Library possesses an early 16th-century manuscript of the Qur'an which, quite innovatively, contains the Arabic version and a new Latin translation in facing columns (Cambridge, Mm. V. 26), a format that inherently privileges philological investigation. As it happens, this manuscript is one of two extant exemplars--the other is in Milan--of a project initiated by the humanist Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo who, during a journey to Spain in 1517, commissioned this new Latin translation, which in its original (and now lost) form, contained the Arabic version of the Qur'an, a Latin transliteration of the text, the new Latin translation, and a set of notes based on Arabic commentaries all set out in four parallel columns. The two extant manuscripts have reduced these four parallel columns to two columns, but they nevertheless preserve the original project's philological orientation, not only in being dual-language codices, but in containing an extensive number of philological and historical notes, which, like the Latin marginalia in the Vatican Qur'an that I just described, have little interest in raditional polemic and apologetic. Though a product of Italian humanism, moreover, this Cambridge manuscript circulated in England, and was probably the property of one William Tyndale whose name appears in it--strikingly enough--in Arabic transliteration, and who is very likely responsible for a second set of marginal and interlinear notes that show up in its pages, and which are largely concerned with philological issues.¹⁹

These examples of what I am calling a philological reading of the Qur'an are drawn from the humanist period, and, in the case of Tyndale's bi-lingual Qur'an, specifically from the circles of the great Biblical philologists and translators of the late 15th and early 16th centuries among whom it was fairly common to study Arabic in conjunction with Hebrew.²⁰ But we should not imagine that this is a mode of Qur'an reading that was absent from Latin Europe in earlier periods. The linguistic and textual interests of Petrarch and his heirs were not the only force that could impell Latin readers to wrestle with a range of grammatical, syntactical, and exegetical issues that the Qur'an posed for its readers. The Qur'an is, after all--like all sacred scriptures--a very difficult book in many ways: it is filled with anachronistic language, elliptical constructions, and recondite allusions. Qur'anic readers who had neither much (nor any) sympathy with Islam nor the humanist's professional commitment to philological study, readers whose eventual goal was precisely the sort of polemic and apologetic that I described at the outset, still often found themselves necessarily puzzling over abstruse points of Qur'anic grammar and exegesis. Polemic, it turns out, could lead its practioners into philology.

It is the first two medieval Qur'an translations themselves that most clearly manifest this process. Both Robert of Ketton, the twelfth-century scientific translator whom Peter the Venerable hired to produce the first Western Qur'an \translation in 1142-43, and Mark of Toledo, a native Spaniard with similar interests whom Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada hired seventy years later to produce the second, were personally quite hostile to Islam as a religion, and their patrons were both actively engaged in polemical and apologetic programs that their Qur'an translations were to serve. Yet both men, when engaged in the difficult business of making the Arabic Qur'an speak in Latin, were perfectly willing to turn to standard Muslim Arabic Qur'an commentaries to help them understand the text they were translating.²¹

At the beginning of Surah 51, for example, both translators were confronted with one of the highly compact and allusive "south-sayer" passages. In Arabic we have "Wa-al-dhariyat dharwan/ fa-al-hamilat wiqran/ fa-al-jariyat yusran/ fa-al-muqassimat amran," which literally translated reads: "By those that scatter with a scattering, and those that carry a burden, and those that flow with ease, and those that distribute by command." Now this is all very vivid language, but to what did it refer? What were the "scatterers that scatter" and the things that "flow with ease"? These were questions that had troubled Muslim exegetes from an early period, and the Arabic Qur'an commentators typically devoted considerable space toanswering them. The view that became standard long before the lives of these two Latin translators was that the scatterers were winds, the carriers of a burden, clouds, the flow-ers with ease, ships, and the distributors by command, angels.²² Both Latin translators simply took this traditional Muslim exegesis of these verses and incorporated it into their translations. Robert's, for example, reads, "Per ventos sufflantes, attractasque nubes ponderosas, et naues equore currentes angelosque nuntios" ("By blowing winds, and burdened clouds drawn forth, and ships sailing quickly on the sea, and angels who announce"­Paris, Arsenal 1162, fol. 123va), and Mark's is quite similar.²³ This is something, moreover, that we find both translators doing throughout their Latin versions of the Qur'an: turning to Muslim Qur'an exegesis to help clarify the text, and then shaping their translations accordingly. And indeed, as anyone familiar with Qur'anic translation in general can attest, this has been the standard translation practice throughout history: most twentieth-century translations of the Qur'an, for example, render these verses in much the same way.

So the polemical uses to which these translations were eventually to be put did not at all rule out an extensive philological engagement with the text on the part of the translators themselves. And this sort of linkage between polemical/apologetic reading and philological reading can be witnessed elsewhere in the pre-humanist period. I've already described the caustic anti-Islamic notes that are so common in the marginalia of the first manuscript of Robert of Ketton's translation. But hostility is not the only theme of these glosses. John Tolan has quite rightly argued that these marginalia were intended to instruct uninitiated Latin readers on where to be shocked and horrified by the Qur'an,²⁴ but in order to accomplish this goal, they also had to make the difficult parts understandable. Robert translated the 73rd verse of Surah 2, for example, as follows: "When someone, at God's bidding and with his approval, will have desired to bring to light an unknown murderer, let him touch the dead man with some small part of the cow; thus revived, [the dead man] will give information about what really happened." This compact passage describes God intervening to bring to light the identity of a murderer by having the corpse struck with a piece of a dead cow. Robert of Ketton's translation--which had already been shaped in crucial ways by the Islamic exegetical tradition²⁵--leaves one, rather abstruse, question unanswered: what part of the cow was to be used? As it turns out, this is a question that the Qur'anic text itself did not answer, but which Muslim exegetes had long asked, and to which they proposed various answers: some said it was the tail, for example, some a piece of the shoulder, some said part of the leg. Now the annotators of this manuscript, who on the same folio had, in good polemic fashion, hostilely decried what they saw as a "ridiculum mendacium" in the Qur'anic text, at this point momentarily embraced philology: interlinearly above the phrase "let him touch the dead man with a small piece of the cow" they wrote "that is, with the tail according to some, with the leg according to others" (Paris, Arsenal, 1162, 27rb, bottom). So here are passionately anti-Islamic readers who are able and willing to consult Qur'anic commentaries to help explain the very text they are attacking, and this is by no means an isolated example: these marginalia contain a number of further instances of philological investigation.

So philological reading of the Qur'an existed in the twelfth century long before the humanist period, even if it was philology as hand-maiden to polemic and apologetic, and we find examples of this in later periods--in Nicholas of Cusa's occasional corrections of his own manuscript of Ketton's translation based on careful collations with other manuscripts,²⁶ or in the notes in a fifteenth-century Paris manuscript of Mark of Toledo's translation that supply the Arabic original of key terms from time to time (Paris, Bib. Mazarine, 780, 6rb).

Although it is closely related to philological reading, the concern to read carefully through the whole Qur'anic text that several readers demonstrate is worth singling out in particular. For some the motivation to read the Qur'an in this way was the mundane imperative of making sure the text has been copied correctly. Several Latin Qur'an manuscripts contain evidence of careful checking and emendation of this sort (including the earliest ms, Paris, Arsenal, 1162, but see also Dresden, Sächsiche Landesbibliothek, A120b, and Turin, Bib. Nazionale, H. II. 33). A late medieval European student of Arabic exemplified a similar interest in reading the whole Qur'an in his careful transcription of the entire Arabic text, the manuscript of which resides today in the Cambridge University library (Kk. 2. 17).

Others were interested in a comprehensive understanding of the Qur'an for reasons that we cannot really be sure of. A sixteenth-century Dresden manuscript prefaces Robert of Ketton's Latin translation with what can only be described as an enormous analytical table of contents to the Qur'an fully one quarter the length of the Qur'anic text itself. While some of the polemical and apologetic commonplaces of the Qur'an are highlighted in this anonyomous work, the great majority of passages summarized here have nothing to do with argument for or against Islam. The organizing principle is, rather, comprehensiveness: the compiler of this study aid--which appears in other manuscripts as well--tried to get across a complete overview of the contents of the Qur'an, the polemical and all the rest, as a guide for readers that he assumed would have similarly broad interests (Dresden, ms. cit., fols. 37-73).

Polemic/apologetic and philology were the most common approaches to Qur'an reading, but there were other approaches that do not fit in either category. Some readers, for example, had eccentric interests. A fourteenth-century manuscript of Ketton's Latin Qur'an in Merton College (ms. 313), Oxford contains a modest number of typical apologetic and polemical notes, but also not a few notes that seem concerned largely with Qur'anic exotica--unusual flora and fauna mentioned in the text, or rare personages, and the like. At verse 20 of surah 27, for example, where Soloman is quoted as saying "How is it that I see not the hoopoe, or is he among the absent?" this annotator has taken the time to write uppupa, "hoopoe" in the margin, apparently to remind himself where this sole mention of that bird in the Qur'anic text could be found.

Reading the Qur'an, finally, could also be­if only occasionally or subliminally­the experience of engaging a text that was viewed, despite its widely decried errors, as somehow also truly, though imperfectly, authoritative and admirable. Nothing suggests this so vividly as the mise-en-page, or page lay-out, of many of the Latin Qur'an manuscripts. As medievalists have long known, and as scholars of the history of reading, such as Roger Chartier have recently begun to insist,²⁷ the way in which a book is designed as a physical object tells us many things about how it was read. What is striking to note in this case is how often the manuscripts of Robert of Ketton's Latin Qur'an­the most widely read version­imitate, in their physical characteristics, precisely contemporary manuscripts of the Vulgate Bible and other high-status, authoritative Latin books. Consider the earliest manuscript of this version, Paris, Arsenal, 1162. This is a relatively expensively produced book written in a beautiful, disciplined minuscule. At the beginning of each surah is a title in brilliant red ink. Important initials are in alternating blue and red. Not only have each of the two columns on each page been carefully ruled so that the text can be copied in perfectly straight lines, but even the margins have been ruled where marginal glosses are to be copied, so that they too will appear with rectilinear perfection. If we compare this layout with the Glossed Bible in Princeton University Library that is only a decade or two older (Grenville Kane Collection, ms. 2), the similarities are striking. While the glossed Bible has one column rather than two, in other respects, we could be looking at nearly the same book, in a similarly beautiful minuscule, with ruled texted, ruled margins for glosses, elegant initials, and even the same combination of marginal and interlinear glosses on the same text (a particular characteristic of glossed Bibles).²⁸ And this is by no means a unique case: at least half a dozen further manuscripts of this version reproduce the high "production values" of this earliest manuscript. The Qur'an was a fradulent book, as the very glosses in these copies made very clear, but it was also a book that deserved an expensive, authoritative physical form.

It is perhaps this same tendency to attribute to the Qur'an subliminal authoritativeness that accounts for one of the least understood aspects of Robert of Ketton's translation. Robert has been attacked ever since at least the 15th century for his paraphrasing approach to the Qur'an. While I have argued that his supposed sins as a paraphraser ought to be partially forgiven because of his extensive reliance on Muslim Qur'an exegesis as he translated, even this avoids addressing the central problem posed by his paraphrase: why did he go to so much trouble to do it?²⁹ For it must be emphasized that his paraphrasing approach did not make his task as translator easier. Far simpler would have been the adoption of Mark of Toledo's approach seventy years later­translating the Arabic nearly word for word, an approach that Robert adopted in other translations. Rather what Robert did in his Latin Qur'an was an elaborate and difficult recasting of the Arabic syntax­collapsing many sentences into dependent clauses and participial phrases, abbreviating here, elaborating there (often in reliance on Qur'anic commentaries), the result taking the form of the complex, Ciceronian Latin favored by twelfth-century intellectuals such as John of Salisbury. Rather than presenting the Qur'an in an awkward, Arabic word order foreign to the nature of Latin, then, Robert, though he was no friend of Islam, presented it in a sophisticated Latin style, a style that, like the manuscript form that his translation would so often take, communicates an implicit assertion of status and authoritativeness.

This generally subliminal admiration of the Qur'an, I should note, occasionally shines forth in black and white explicitness. In one 15th century manuscript of Robert's translation now in Paris (BNF, ms. lat. 3669, fol. 18r, rm) an anonymous reader came across verse 115 of the second surah: "To God belong the East and the West; wherever you turn there is God. In the margin he wrote one word: "Bene," meaning "Well said!" or "Yes indeed!" He added no qualification, no suggestion that this point was to be used later for apologetic purposes, no caustic comment to the effect that Muhammad placed this passage in his fraudulent text the better to attract people into his fraudulent sect. In this moment, at least, this Christian reader was pointing out a Qur'anic passage that he genuinely agreed with.

Anthony Grafton has recently argued that there was no single way that early-modern readers engaged the texts --especially the classical Greek and Latin texts--that so preoccupied them. "Radically different styles of reading," he writes, "both competed and coexisted, in the same library and even in the same intellectual."³⁰ The evidence that I have been describing here argues for the same conclusion with respect to medieval and early modern Qur'an readers. Different styles of reading flourished here as well, polemic and philology frequently alternating in the mind of the same reader, whose manuscript of the Latin Qur'an often expressed an implicit valorization of that text in both its physical form and style of translation. The sort of anxious ambivalence about the Qur'an that Riccoldo da Monte di Croce expressed, therefore, was not nearly as odd as it seems. Far from being a one-dimensional experience, Latin-Christian Qur'an reading during this four hundred year period was typically a complex act whose capacity to produce anxiety should probably not surprise us.

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Notes

1. Apologies for the incomplete notes.
2. Published in the Archives de l'Orient Latin, II, pp. *-*.
3. On this attitude see, among other works, Robert I. Burns' famous article, "Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West: The Thirteenth-Century Dream of Conversion," American Historical Review, 76 (1971):1386-1434.
4. Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, Epistola II de commentoriae de perditione Acconis, AOL II, p. *.
6. Gilbert Dahan has argued for a similar Latin-Christian ambivalence about Jews as well. See his Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen age (Paris, 1990), pp. 584-85.
7. See Daniel, Islam and the West, passim, but also John Tolan's forthcoming Sarracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (Columbia University Press).
8. See E. Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 70.
9. Petrus Alfonsi, Disciplina Clericalis, ed. A. Hilka and W. Söderhjelm, Heidleberg, 1911, p. **
10. Ibid., p. **
11. On this work see most recently, J. Pelikan, The Reformation of the Bible; The Bible of the Reformation (Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 111-113.
12. Robert Wakefield, Oratio de laudibus et utilitate trium linguarum, Arabicae, Chaldaicae et Hebraicae, ed. G. Lloyd Jones in On the Three Languages (Binghampton, NY, 1989).
13. Karl H. Dannefeldt, "The Renaissance Humanists and the Knowledge of Arabic," Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955): 96-111, but see also Debra Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 33-34.
14. On these annotations see my Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050-1200, (Leiden, 1994), pp. 84-89, and John Tolan, "Peter the Venerable on the `Diabolic Heresy of the Saracens," in The Devil, Heresy, and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Burton Russell, ed. A. Ferreiro (Leiden, 1998), pp. 345-67.
15. See Daniel, Islam and the West, pp. 119-20.
16. Nicholas Cusanus, Cribatio alkorani, ed. L. Hagemann (Nicolai de Cusa opera omnia, iussu et auctoritate academiae litterarum Heidelbergensis, vol. 8), Hamburg, 1986, passim; see also, L. Hagemann, Der Kur'an in Verständnis und Kritik bei Nikolaus von Kues (Frankfurt, 1976), pp.**.
17. Al-Tabari, Jami` al-bayan, on 22:19, (Beirut, 1993), vol. 11, pp. 18-19.
18. Angelo Michele Piemontese, "Il Corano latino di Ficino e i Corani arabi di Pico e Monchates," Rinasimento: Rivista dell'Instituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 2nd series, 36 (1996), pp. 264-72.
19. I have discussed all this at length in "Cambridge University Library MS Mm. v. 26 and the History of the Study of the Qur'an in Medieval and Early Modern Europe," in T. Burman, L. Shopkow, and M. Meyerson, Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of J. N. Hillgarth (Toronto, 2002), pp. 336-64.
20. See Dannefeldt, art. cit., passim, and Piemontese, art. cit., passim.
21. I make this case at length in my Tafsir and Translation: Traditional Arabic Qur'an Exegesis and the Latin Qur'ans of Robert of Ketton and Mark of Toledo," Speculum, 73 (1998):703-32.
22. See al-Tabari on 51:1-4; 17, p. 21.
23. "Per ventos afferentes pluuiam et nubes eam concipientes et naues currentes et angelos sanctos . . ." Turin, Biblioteca Universitaria, F. v. 35, fol. 71rb.
24. See Tolan, art. cit., p. *.
25. See Burman, "Tafsir and Translation," pp. 714-16.
26. See James Biechler, "The Manuscripts on Islam from the Library of Nicholas of Cusa," Manuscripta 27 (1983):96.
27. See, among his many relevant works, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. L. Cochrane (Stanford, 1994).
28. See Christopher de Hamel, Glossed books of the Bible and the origins of the Paris booktrade (Woodbridge, Suffolk : D.S. Brewer ; Totowa, NJ: 1984).
29. See Burman, "Tafsir and Translation."
30. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, (Univ. of Michigan: 1997) p.225.