How an Italian Friar Read His Arabic Qur’an

Abstract

no one has undertaken any serious study of Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS Arabe 384, is a sign of how far the discipline of medieval studies is from exploring even the most remarkable sources surviving from the Middle Ages. This manuscript, a handsome though hardly ornate copy of the Qur'an in Arabic, apparently produced in Egypt or Syria in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, has been part of what is now France's national library since 1622 and has been well cataloged since late in the nineteenth century. The remarkable fact which will preoccupy us here that it has dozens of marginal notes in Medieval Latin, written, according to a nineteenth-century scholar, by a Roman Catholic cleric who possessed a perfect knowledge of the Qur'an and of the Arabic Language has been known just as long.1 Indeed, Francois Deroche has recently reiterated this point in his excellent catalog of Arabic manuscripts at the Bibliotheque nationale, making clear that there are actually two Latin hands to be found in the margins, both dating from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries.2 By any interpretation, this Qur'an manuscript is an important, perhaps even seminal, source for understanding how Latin Christian scholars interacted with the holy book of Islam. Yet references to it in studies on these topics can be counted on one hand.3 What follows are the results of my initial examination of this precious manuscript. I have focused here on the question that struck me the first time I looked at this Arabic Qur'an and its Latin marginalia ten years ago: who were these medieval Latin scholars who had such an advanced knowledge of the Qur'an and the Arabic language? As it happens, my