Antoine Galland (1646–1715) is best known as the man who, with the Aleppan Maronite Ḥannā Diyāb, fashioned the Arabian Nights for Western readers. Acquiring Arabic has often been thought of as the main goal of European scholars such as Galland in their pursuit of Middle Eastern “Wisedome and Learning” (to echo Gerald Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); but it is increasingly clear that, from the sixteenth century, Arabic was rarely learned in isolation but formed a trio with Persian and Ottoman Turkish (see now Nil Ö. Palabıyık, Silent Teachers. Turkish Books and Oriental Learning in Early Modern Europe, 1544–1669, New York and London: Routledge, 2023). Thanks to the growth of book and manuscript studies and digitization, examining how European scholars annotated and transcribed Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts has made it possible to gain new insights into how, and how well, they learned languages. The materials in question are unpublished, and we are only beginning to take stock of their extent and potential. One example is the draft of a collection of proverbs which Galland compiled and translated in an untitled, undated MS (presumably postdating his Paroles remarquables … Bons mots et … Maximes des Orientaux of 1694, which he cross-refers to in item 57.1). It has some 25 Persian items, 210 Turkish ones and 460 Arabic ones. D'Orient en Occident reproduces the MS and transcribes it on facing pages, with introduction and endnotes. However, although the editors do not mention the fact, since 22/05/2016 it has been available on public access on the Gallica website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b531191957/f1.item.r=Supplement%20turc%201200 ; so it is reasonable to ask what an edition of the MS adds to reading it online.

This is the first time such material has been published in extenso, and the edition raises useful methodological questions. Initially the main goal seems to be to decide whether Galland's famously free translation of the Nights was a stylistic choice or the result of a weak grasp of Arabic. Nevertheless, as well as a rather scathing assessment of his Arabic as displayed in the MS (pp. 49–58), a section of the preamble is devoted to Vatin's positive analysis of his Turkish (pp. 37–48), and a paragraph to Nader Nasiri-Moghadam's estimate of his Persian (p. 59). The MS itself is placed in the context of the seventeenth-century European taste for anthologies of proverbs, maxims, etc., the use of proverbs in the standard Arabic teaching tools of Erpenius and Golius, Galland's own published and unpublished anthologies of Arab and oriental maxims, and his periods at the French embassy in Constantinople absorbing the culture he was eager to present favourably to the French public through the medium of shared moral truths. The editors transcribe Galland's Arabic and Persian text in Arabic typeface, the Ottoman Turkish in modern transliteration, and his French translations, suggesting some corrections, and number the passages on each page. They reproduce the BnF's summary online description of the MS (p. 36) without adding that the folios are numbered and that the versos of all folios are blank with the exception of ff.15v, 35v (written upside down in the original and misnumbered in the edition as 36), 38v and 56v. The transcription of the Arabic and French texts is not diplomatic or altogether consistent, and the photographs of the MS are reduced from the original, which is easier to read online. In other words, the MS as such is treated as secondary to the content, and so are manuscript features that could usefully have been tabulated for purposes of comparison with other scholars of the period, such as Galland's phonetic rendering of names. Galland's Arabic handwriting is not discussed, although it would now be possible to compare it with that of several contemporaries such as Golius, who like Galland wrote a cursive hand, unlike others whose handwriting imitated typeface. Galland cites Golius (four times), Scaliger (four times) and Erpenius (six times) and, fourteen times, an interprète arabe/commentateur arabe whom he associates with Erpenius at 12.1 and Scaliger at 39.5, but few of his references to printed works, or his silent borrowings from them, are traced in the notes, even though we are told that he copied whole pages from Erpenius and Golius, mistakes and all (p. 55). P. 50 discusses the substitution of final ا for ى or ي for ى as one mark of Galland's linguistic weakness, but this was common scribal practice. No attempt seems to have been made to trace among the MSS that entered the Bibliothèque du Roi at this period possible exemplars of passages extracted by Galland. Without referring to specific manuscripts, he names Turkish and Persian authors and works frequently, often adding commentaries to his quotations from, for example (using his spelling), “le poète Iahia” and his Trésor des secrets (cited 24 times), Hamdi, Leila et Megenoun and Yousouf et Zulikha (23 and 10 times respectively), Baki, Fevri, Fozouli, Hilali Roumi, Hilmi, Khalili's Firak nameh, Nabi, Nevai, Nevi, Pitchevi, Scheikhi, Soheïli, Revani, and Cabous nameh (cited 14 times); but he rarely identifies Arabic sources and has few comments on the Arabic passages. The endnotes helpfully identify the authors of lines of Arabic verse, most of whom are not named by Galland, but without referring to editions. There is no index, and the bibliography does not contain all the printed works mentioned by Galland or all the works cited by the editors. Some of these omissions may be due to the book's primary purpose of evaluating Galland as the translator of the Nights, but the material it presents is indirect evidence and needs more contextualizing for those interested in the history of translation more generally. Those interested in Galland as a scholar interacting with both Ottoman and European learning would benefit from a fuller and more consistent apparatus, but will welcome this edition as a starting point.

Picherot's La Langue arabe dans l'Europe humaniste invites comparison with the broader but similar coverage of Robert Jones's now standard Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe (1505–1624) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020). She shares his focus on the mechanics of language acquisition and the creation of tools for learning language, but concentrates on three main figures: the Spaniard Pedro de Alcalà, the Fleming Nicolas Clenardus and the Frenchman Guillaume Postel. Her aim is to show how and why Arabic became an “oriental” language in European scholarship and the part these men played in making it so. Broadly, Picherot's argument runs as follows: despite efforts by such as Pedro de Alcalà to provide the means for Catholic priests to convert Spanish Moors by speaking to them in their own language, Arabic, whether vernacular or literary, was too strongly associated with Islam for Arabic learning to be tolerated in Spain in the long run. Clenardus, self-taught, could make no progress in Arabic during his time in Iberia. Postel, whose publications were to be instrumental in institutionalizing the study of written Arabic, consequently looked to eastern Arabic sources, through the contacts arising from the periods he spent in Constantinople and Italy. Thus, despite its long presence in Europe and continued presence in the western Mediterranean, in European mental geography Arabic became a language of the Levant. Within this outline, Picherot seeks to show what the details of Pedro de Alcalà and Postel's linguistic endeavours reveal about them, and in Postel's case, how his thinking about Arabic fits with his thinking about languages generally, with his own broader intellectual system and with other trends in humanist thought, to which she adds asides on his influence on Montaigne and Rabelais. Political and ideological reactions in western Europe to the growing power of the Ottomans form the final strand of her analysis.

The study of the early modern learning and teaching of Arabic in Europe is a rapidly developing field which is posited on discarding teleological perspectives and concentrating on the concrete what and how and here and now of the scholarly working practices of the period, about which, once again, manuscript notes and annotations, made accessible by digitization, enable modern researchers to discover and share more than has ever been possible before. Nevertheless, the very focus on specific languages, whether Arabic alone or the Arabic–Turkish–Persian triad, imposes a teleology of its own, which Picherot's positioning of the learning of Arabic in the broader projects of humanism is designed to overcome, perhaps, although it is not referred to, in the manner of Anthony Grafton's portrait of a slightly later polymath Arabist, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–93). But it has to be said that this is a frustrating book to use. It frequently repeats itself, incrementally it is true, but this would be more useful if the indexes adequately supported the search for topics that are not fully developed in one place. The combination of a bibliography with multiple, confusing subdivisons, and footnotes in which ibid., op. cit. and ibidem alternate over several pages, makes it difficult to identify the sources of many of the citations, and sometimes references are lacking. The absence of illustrations is another shortcoming, given that descriptions of typography and of systems of transcription or transliteration play a large part in the discussion, and that the modern renderings of the latter are not free from errors of their own.

With both of the books under review, one senses that there is a lack of direct conversation and exchange between scholars working in different academic traditions, and perhaps above all in different languages. One school is Anglophone and is represented by those who feel themselves to be today's heirs of the seventeenth-century founders of Arabic studies in the Low Countries and England, but also Italy. Hispanists are also participants: see the seminal survey, The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), in which interestingly different accounts of Arabic studies in post-Reconquista Spain to that argued by Picherot are given by Spanish scholars. Meanwhile France, despite its central historic role in Arabic and Turkish scholarship and diplomacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, seems to stand somewhat outside the mainstream of current book and manuscript research in the field, at the same time, paradoxically, as the BnF steadily adds to the number of relevant digitized materials that it makes available online. What the publications reviewed or cited here show is that one thing still missing in the reappraisal of the founding periods of Middle East studies in Europe is mutual acknowledgement of the distinctive intellectual starting points from which we investigate them today.