Download PDF | Scholarship Between Europe And The Levant Essays In Honour Of Alastair Hamilton. 8 Brill (2020)
412 Pages
A Polyglot Traveller in the Republic of Letters
Jan Loop
I first met Alastair Hamilton in September 2006 at the Warburg Institute during the presentation of his course for new students, ‘Sin and Sanctity in the Reformation’. I had arrived in London with a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to work on Protestant Oriental Studies under Alastair’s supervision. I was not expecting much from this one-year stay. Isolated in my field and frustrated by precarious job prospects, I felt that I was on my way out of academia. But enrolling at the Warburg Institute and meeting Alastair entirely changed my perspective. Here was an environment which nurtured a form of scholarship that was deeply aligned to my values.
It was independent, source based, interdisciplinary, often arcane and démodé, but always devoted to truth and objectivity. And here was a scholar who combined this scholarly tradition with elegance and intellectual clarity and whose work crossed linguistic, cultural and religious boundaries with an ease that cannot but impress and inspire. In the early days of our acquaintance I must have asked him how many languages he spoke.
I can work in six’ was his answer— which meant that he is able to publish or to lecture without notes in English, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish and German. But, as we all know, he also reads numerous other European and Scandinavian languages, can tackle difficult texts in Latin and Arabic, and has taken up other languages such as Coptic, Hebrew and Syriac in order to further his research. It was at the University of Urbino as Professor of English Literature between 1977 and 1988 that he mastered the ability to lecture without notes in order to hold the attention of students who, as he once said, tended to be ‘very young and easily distracted’.
As for scholarly publications, his first work, The Appeal of Fascism, appeared in 1971. He was thirty years old and later came to regard the book as a youthful indiscretion. In the mid-1970s, his interest shifted to the early modern period and to the study of religious groups at the fringes of the established, mainstream churches. He developed a particular interest in spiritualist movements of the sixteenth-century in Spain and the Low Countries and contributed pioneering studies to a better understanding of this elusive phenomenon.
In addition to a number of articles on Spanish mysticism, Alastair published, in Spanish in 1979, the records of the Inquisition trials of Rodrigo de Bivar and, in 1992, his monograph, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados. He also started to produce shorter studies on the The Family of Love, a spiritualist movement in the Low Countries, founded by Hendrik Niclaes, along with a group of defectors, the ‘Hiélists’, who followed the path of Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt (Hiél). Their relationship and divisions, as well as the primary individuals involved in this spiritual group, are discussed in a captivating essay from 1977, ‘Hiél and the Hiélists: The Doctrine and Followers of Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt. Four years later, in 1981, The Family of Love appeared, a now classic study of this tolerant movement that reached out to members of all denominations and religions—even to Jews and Muslims.
The book ‘has the warmth of a bright, clear summer day’, wrote Geoffrey Nuttal in his review. ‘Gossamer is about and some of it sticks; much drifts on, but either way one is happy. The opportunities for daisy chains seem endless.’ And so the daisy chains grew and grew, and interest in this movement has followed Alastair over the rest of his career, leading to a number of shorter essays and two major bibliographical works for the Bibliotheca Dissidentium.
These publications show the characteristics that we all admire so much in Alastair’s work—the use not only of printed but also unpublished sources, not restricted by any linguistic or geographical limits, an uncompromising sense both of style and historical accuracy, a distaste for the fashionable, and an aversion to method and theory. He uncovers the ways in which intellectual, religious and ideological movements are developed, passed on and preserved in the work of individual actors and so brings microhistory, the history of religious ideas and the history of scholarship into an eloquent dialogue.
Alastair’s early academic publications already revolve around some of the leading protagonists and themes of his later work—religious diversity and tolerance, the Christian interest in Near Eastern religious history, early modern printing of Hebrew and Arabic, and the production of polyglot bibles. Christophe Plantin, Jan Moretus, Franciscus Raphelengius, Benito Arias Montano and others played key roles in the Family of Love, as did those vibrant centres of early modern intellectual and religious thinking, Antwerp and Leiden. It was in 1985 at Leiden University that Alastair became the first occupant of the Dr C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute chair in the History of Ideas (1985-2005). Having limited teaching obligations, he spent much of his time doing research and travelling between his homes in London, Leiden and Urbino. Two years later he was also appointed Professor of the History of the Radical Reformation (Anabaptistica) at the University of Amsterdam (1987-2001).
The move to the Netherlands coincided with the beginning of what was to become Alastair’s main field of research, the history of Oriental and Arabic studies in Europe. At Leiden, and in the figure of Frans Raphelengius, son-inlaw of the ‘Hiélist’ Christophe Plantin, the emerging field of Arabic studies encountered the spiritualist movement that had occupied Alastair for many years. Raphelengius, who was taught and supported by Guillaume Postel, was a founding father of the Leiden school of Arabic studies and the author of an Arabic-Latin dictionary, the first of its kind ever to be printed. The Arabic types with which the Lexicon Arabico-Latinum was printed in 1613 were the envy of the Northern European Republic of Letters.
They brought to Leiden the young William Bedwell, who was looking for ways to print his own dictionary and other Arabic texts. This episode was the subject of Alastair’s first publication on the history of European Arabic studies, the 1985 essay ‘The Victims of Progress: The Raphelengius Arabic Type and Bedwell’s Arabic Lexicon’. It is an innovative study, both of the very beginning of Arabic printing as well as of European Arabic lexicography, to which he would later make many other important contributions. It was followed, in the same year, by his book-length account of the life and work of William Bedwell the Arabist, 1563-1632. The next year he published an early assessment of the history of Arabic studies in the Netherlands: the introduction, in Dutch and English, to the catalogue of an exhibition at the Museum Plantin-Moretus, ‘Arabic Studies in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’.
In the mid-1980s, inspired by Jiirgen C.H. Lebram, who was a colleague at the University of Leiden, Alastair started working on apocalyptic and millenarian ideas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. His contribution to Lebram’s Festschrift from 1986, in which he discusses Arias Montano’s ‘spiritualist’ commentary on the Book of Revelation, connects his earlier studies on Hiél and the Hiélists with this new field of research.
In the following years, this interest took a clear direction: the reception of the second book of Esdras, one of the apocrypha of the Old Testament which formed part of the Western Bible but were excluded from the Jewish canon. In 1999, just in time for the millennium, Alastair’s monograph on the early modern reception of 2 Esdras, with Ezra’s vision of the end of the world and the appearance of the saviour, came out. He showed, in particular, how this text was received among radical reformers and dissidents, Anabaptists, spiritualists, Rosicrucians and chiliastic mystics, and thus presented ‘a very original contribution to the history of changing religious and scholarly attitudes towards biblical texts; a history in which the woof and warp of the rich intellectual texture of dissent and prophecy in early modern times become clearly visible, to the delight of the reader’?
Alastair’s work on the history of Oriental studies has never been restricted to European interest in the Islamic world. From the beginning, he was attracted to the connected histories of Eastern Christianity and early modern Europe. One of the first fruits of these studies is an essay on the contribution of Eastern Christians to Western scholarship in Anthony Grafton’s 1993 exhibition catalogue Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture. It was followed by ‘The English Interest in the Arabic-Speaking Christians’ and a number of other studies on Arabs who journeyed in Europe, the highlight of which is certainly his account of the fortunes of Abudacnus the Copt, ‘An Egyptian Traveller in the Republic of Letters’. Abudacnus is the author of the first History of the Copts (Historia Jacobitarum, seu Coptorum), which was published posthumously in Oxford in 1675 and was for many years a major source of information about the Christian community of Egypt. It was around the time of the publication of this article in the Journal of the Warburg and the Courtauld Institutes that Alastair started to develop a particular interest in the Coptic Church and its relation to the West.
It culminated, in 2006, in his magistral study of the European discovery of the Egyptian Church, The Copts and the West 1439-1822. Even more, perhaps, than his previous publications, this book was the result of years not only of philological, historical and archival work, but also of travels in order to witness places and people with his own eyes, to experience directly and to communicate with people in their own language, and to hear and to read their stories and histories.
Egypt has become, over many years, a regular event in his annual cycle of travels. Lodging with his friends Nicholas Warner and Salima Ikram in Cairo, Alastair developed a rigorous routine, often shared with his wife Cecilia, of visiting the Jesuit, Franciscan and Dominican outposts in the city, seeing a small circle of friends, keeping his colloquial Arabic in shape by reading al-Ahram and watching Arabic TV channels daily, and walking in Zamalek of an evening. Added to this are regular field-trips to Upper Egypt, usually in pursuit of sites described by early travellers. One of these, whose tracks Alastair followed on his own journeys in Egypt, is Johann Michael Wansleben. The recent edition of Wansleben’s Italian travel reports in Egypt and beyond is another testimony to Alastair’s intellectual wanderlust. It was partly written during his tenure of the chair of Coptic Studies at the American University in Cairo in 2016.
While Alastair’s interests continued to be broad, the study of Europe’s relations with the Arabic speaking world occupied the centre of his scholarly work, especially after his move to the Warburg Institute in London in the early 2000s. In 2002, he was appointed to the first S.T. Lee Professorial Fellowship in support of his research on the relations between the Copts and Europe. In 2004, initiated by his old friend Robert Jones and with the active support of the Warbure’s then director, Charles Hope, as well as his predecessor, Nico Mann, he was appointed to the Arcadian Visiting Research Professorship. Alastair has always been a prolific writer, but with his appointment at the Warburg Institute the pace of his scholarly production became awe-inspiring.
The collaboration with Robert Jones and the Arcadian Library proved to be particularly stimulating. The first result of this collaboration, in 1993, had been an exhibition at the ‘Institut du Monde Arabe’ in Paris, for which Alastair wrote the catalogue Europe and the Arab World: Five Centuries of Books by European Scholars and Travellers from the Libraries of the Arcadian Group. The catalogue also appeared in French. His Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence in Antwerp’s Golden Age, written on the occasion of the Arcadian exhibition at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp from 2001 to 2002, was translated into Dutch and Arabic. In 20u, for an exhibition at the Brunei Gallery at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Alastair wrote a descriptive account of the more important titles held by the Arcadian Library, The Bridge of Knowledge. Every page of this tour d’horizon bursts with knowledge and unlocks hidden historical, cultural and intellectual links. With precision and elegance, Alastair turns a list of books into a totally absorbing and interconnected story peopled by a host of characters each one of whom he seems to know intimately.
The book was also issued as the seventh volume in the series ‘Studies in the Arcadian Library’, of which Alastair has been the general editor since its inception. In 2004, the series had been inaugurated with André Du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth Century France, which he wrote together with Francis Richard. Du Ryer was the author of a grammar of Turkish and the translator of Sa‘di’s Gulistan, one of the finest pieces of Persian literature, but he achieved lasting fame in 1647 as the first scholar to publish a vernacular translation of the Qur’an made directly from the Arabic. Alastair had worked on European encounters with Islam and its holy book before; however, since his study of du Ryer’s translation, European dealings with this ‘Forbidden Fruit’ have become a key focus of his attention. In a number of contributions, Alastair traces known and unknown translations of the Qur’an and, in painstaking analyses of their content and context, uncovers the linguistic, religious and institutional difficulties faced by its early modern European translators.
Although a reluctant participant at conferences, it was on his initiative that two international conferences were held at the Warburg Institute, in 2012 and 2014. They each dealt with with different aspects of the long history of European attempts to translate the Qur'an; and both conferences were very well received. Impatient when forced to sit through long-winded and uninspiring papers, Alastair clearly warmed to these highly specialized gatherings that brought together like-minded colleagues and friends. While avoiding the conference circuit, he has always enjoyed giving lectures, and everybody who has been lucky enough to attend one of his legendary talks, knows that he has raised this form of scholarly communication to new heights—without notes, he turns the history of ideas into captivating narratives and holds the audience in the palm of his hand. In recent years, he was a regular lecturer at the American University in Cairo, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the All Souls seminar series, the University of St Andrews and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He also gave public lectures, among others, at NyU Abu Dhabi, the Freie Universitat Berlin, the University of Geneva and, in 2007, at the Hadassah and Daniel Khalili Memorial Lecture.
When Alastair started to study the work of European Orientalists in the 1980s, he entered a field that, up to then, had received only limited attention. In the last decades, however, inspired by his work, generations of young researchers have followed in his footsteps, enhancing our understanding of the dynamics and processes of cultural and religious exchanges between Christian Europe and the Islamic world. Today, the history of European Oriental studies is an established field, its relevance recognized by numerous publications and international and national grants and research projects.
The editors and contributors hope that this collection of essays is a fitting tribute to Alastair Hamilton’s scholarly work and legacy to date.
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