The Disappearance of Leo Africanus: Rival Repertoires of Historical Scholarship in the Mid-Twentieth Century

This article is about two twentieth-century attempts to produce an edition of the famous Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526) by Johannes Leo Africanus. One attempt was French, colonial, collaboratively authored, presentist and successful; the other was Italian, academic, single-authored, historicist and unsuccessful, in that it never appeared. Drawing primarily on unstudied archival material from several countries, I reconstruct the trajectories of each edition and its author(s), in an effort to understand more broadly the different ways in which scholarship was produced inside and outside universities in the period between the end of the First World War and the early 1960s. In other words, this is a comparative study of two ‘repertoires’, to borrow a term recently introduced by Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli: two institutional praxes embodying different understandings of the world, but also different material resources and codes of personal conduct. But this essay also attempts to say something about the Cosmography itself. One of Leo’s greatest achievements was to reach out beyond his own world to adopt the language, ideas and culture of his Italian readers; this could only be fully grasped after the rediscovery of an early manuscript in 1931, which showed that the supposedly foreign, Italian elements of the book were not added later by others. It was precisely this feature, I argue, that was better reflected by the successful French edition than by the unsuccessful Italian one.