The Qurʾan as Chrestomathy in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

One of the more mystifying aspects of the grammars of ancient and Oriental languages produced in the West during the Renaissance is how students were expected to proceed. They were obviously intended to memorise the tables and there seems to have been an assumption that to advance any further the help of a teacher was essential. But what about the chrestomathies, the texts frequently added to the grammars as linguistic exercises? In his study of early Greek grammars Paul Botley wrote that ‘the language was approached through Greek texts that the pupils already knew by heart in their Latin translations: the Greek Scriptures and the liturgy.’1 In the case of Arabic a similar approach seems to have been adopted, particularly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Lord’s Prayer remained a favourite text, together with Arabic versions of the Psalms. Thanks to the manuscripts which Guillaume Postel had pawned with the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg, the German authors of early Arabic grammars who frequented the Palatine library – Jacob Christmann, Ruthger Spey and Peter Kirsten – could use the Arabic versions of the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles. Otherwise knowledge of Arabic literature was highly limited, and the most obvious text to choose, the one regarded as the perfect expression of the Arabic language, was the Qur’an. Postel, who compiled the first proper grammar of classical Arabic to appear in the West, set a precedent.2 His Grammatica arabica, published in about 1539,3 gave as reading material, in Arabic and Latin, the Lord’s Prayer and the