Biography

Simon Mills is an early modern historian with interests in the history of Christianity, biblical and Oriental studies, interactions between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and the history of philosophy. He was awarded his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London in 2009, and has held fellowships at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge; the Dahlem Humanities Centre, Freie Universität Berlin; and All Souls College, Oxford. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600–1760 (Oxford University Press, 2020).
 

Project Summary

By the sixteenth century, enterprising philologists in Western Europe had turned their attention beyond the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible and had begun to explore the translations produced in the East during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Among these, the Arabic versions – the work of Jews and Christians in the centuries after the Muslim conquests of Egypt and Syria – exerted a particular fascination. The ‘tongue of Ishmael’ was, for early moderns, inextricably linked to Islam – at best a dangerous heresy, at worst the work of the devil himself. But as the biblical genealogy suggests, Western scholars recognised the proximity between Arabic and Hebrew. They hoped, therefore, that the Arabic translations could aid a better understanding of Scripture. And yet scholarship was also entwined with confessional struggles. As Catholics, and then Protestants, sought to win to their respective causes the Arabic-speaking Christian churches across North Africa and the Ottoman Levant, the Arabic Bible came increasingly to serve competing missionary agendas. ‘The Tongue of Ismael’ will explore the study, production, and printing of the Arabic translations of the Bible in Rome between 1578 and 1671. It will situate Catholic interests in the Arabic Bible in their confessional contexts, emphasizing intra-European competition, the confluence of Eastern and Western traditions of learning, and the global horizons of the Counter-Reformation Church.