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An engrossing study of Leo Africanus and his famous book, which introduced Africa to European readers Al-Hasan al-Wazzan--born in Granada to a Muslim family that in 1492 went to Morocco, where he traveled extensively on behalf of the sultan of Fez--is known to historians as Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa to be published in Europe (in 1550). He had been captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by the pope, then released, baptized, and allowed a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone. In this fascinating new book, the distinguished historian Natalie Zemon Davis offers a virtuoso study of the fragmentary, partial, and often contradictory traces that al-Hasan al-Wazzan left behind him, and a superb interpretation of his extraordinary life and work. Davis describes all the sectors of her hero's life in rich detail, scrutinizing the evidence of al-Hasan's movement between cultural worlds; the Islamic and Arab traditions, genres, and ideas available to him; and his adventures with Christians and Jews in a European community of learned men and powerful church leaders. In depicting the life of this adventurous border-crosser, Davis suggests the many ways cultural barriers are negotiated and diverging traditions are fused.
- Sales Rank: #1279615 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Hill and Wang
- Published on: 2006-03-21
- Released on: 2006-03-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.51" h x 6.36" w x 9.30" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 448 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre) performs a sterling service in disentangling the twisted threads of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan's fascinating life. Better known in the West as Leo Africanus, he was one of the Renaissance's greatest geographers and the author of a Europe-wide bestseller, The Description of Africa (1550). Born a Muslim in Granada in 1492, al-Hasan al-Wazzan traveled widely as an ambassador and merchant throughout Africa, a continent then a mystery to Europeans, but was captured by Spanish pirates in 1518, presented to Pope Leo X and ostensibly converted to Christianity while explaining Islam to his bewildered audience. Al-Hasan al-Wazzan had the (mis)fortune to live in "interesting times": the Ottomans were on the march, the Habsburgs were on the rise and the Protestants were alarming the pope, yet al-Hasan al-Wazzan managed to flit among a myriad of worlds (including, Davis speculates, taking a formerly Jewish wife). Eventually, he returned to a North Africa riven by turmoil and slaughter, and disappeared from our view. He rose above hard-drawn lines and presented "himself simply as an independent polymath," says Davis, and his life provides a lesson in the "possibility of communication and curiosity in a world divided by violence." 16 pages of b&w illus., 2 maps. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
In 1518, al-Hasan al-Wazzan, a diplomat of the Sultan of Fez, was kidnapped in the Mediterranean by pirates, who brought him to Pope Leo X. Al-Wazzan had travelled extensively in Africa, and was able to provide firsthand intelligence on the geography and politics of the infidel region. Leo Africanus, as he became known, remained in Rome for the next nine years, converted from Islam to Christianity (he was baptized by the Pope himself), and compiled his "Description of Africa," a collection of learning, hearsay, and personal anecdote that shaped European ideas about Africa for centuries. Few facts exist to illuminate Leo's actual life in Rome, but Davis fills us in on the scholars with whom he may have conversed and the social mores to which he would have had to adjust, arriving at a portrait of "a man with a double vision," straddling two warring cultures.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker
From Booklist
The Renaissance geographer known in the West as Leo Africanus, the author of The Description of Africa, the first geography of Africa to be published in Europe, was born al-Hassan al Wazzan in Granada into a Muslim family that moved to Morocco in 1492. He was captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by the pope. When released, he was baptized and lived a life of scholarship under the Christian name of Giovanni Leone. Davis, a history professor, posits that her purpose is to portray his place in the sixteenth-century society of North Africa, peopled by Berbers, Andalusians, Arabs, Jews, and blacks, and with "Europeans eating away at its borders." With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations and 100 pages of notes, Davis has brilliantly re-created the man and his world. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
41 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating but Frustrating
By Sam A. Mawn-Mahlau
This book does its best to wipe the cobwebs off the figure generally known in the West as Leo Africanus, a man raised in Fez by a family displaced from Muslim Spain during the Christian conquest, who travels widely as a diplomat through Africa, and then is brought to Rome as a captive where he authors a number of fascinating books, including a book on Africa and his African travels. This is a meticulously researched book, replete with voluminous footnotes full of both detail and inciteful asides.
However, the book is doomed to fail in its central project from the outset: even after the author's diligent research and careful writing, Leo Africanus remains hidden behind the folds of cleo's gown. The underlying documentation of his life is simply too sparse. Too much of "Trickster" is too speculative. Too little of the book relies on quotations of the subject's own words. Too many threads are started but then reluctantly abandoned by Zemon-Davis because of unavailable or incomplete sources. Most of what survives today of Leo Africanus is simply his work, his books written in Rome, and getting beyond the work to the man himself may simply be beyond the ability of any historian.
However, Zemon-Davis is crystal clear throughout the book as to where she is speculating or supposing and where she has evidence, and what her evidence is, and she does incorporate a number of useful quotations. Every sentance of this book is the work of a truly diligent professional historian.
While failing in its central project, the book succeeds in helping us to visualize and understand key elements of the age, and Zemon-Davis does a great job (particuarly in those wonderful footnotes) of bringing to life both the life of an Andalusian family in Fez and the life of intellectual circles in 16th century Rome. Reading the book, I was struck on page after page with interesting thoughts and questions; the book truly sparked my curiosity. What of all those differing translations of Leo Africanus' work? What might they say about the societies in which they were written? What of all that poetry referenced by Leo Africanus? How did that Arabic poetic sensibility influence the Christian regions it touched? And What of those African civilizations he visited?
I am left wondering if this very good book Zemon-Davis has written might have been a truly great book if its focus shifted just slightly from this fascinating but inscrutable man, perhaps acknowledging and acceding to the limitations of the existing research material. Her title refers to "a sixteenth-century muslim between worlds", but it is the two worlds more than the subject himself that she best elucidates.
And so, despite its flaws, reading this book has been a pleasure, and I can recommend the book to others very highly, though I still suspect that had the author conceived the work as more of a history and less of biography, it just might have been a classic on the same scale as her "Return of Martin Guerre." And so I withhold the fifth star, and give this one a very solid four stars.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing Work by a Distinguished Historian
By Simple Scholar
Natalie Zemon Davis is not the first historian to examine the life al-Wazzan. Her contribution to the study of early modern history comes, rather, from her interpretation of al-Wazzan’s life. She suggests that al-Wazzan’s conversion was not completely genuine. Caught between the tensions and contradictions of the Christian and Islamic worldviews, al-Wazzan, Davis argues, attempted to avoid public conflict and denouncement of either religion. In his writings, he attempted to “build a bridge for himself, one that he could cross in either direction” (114). His writings are, therefore, esoteric. They employ the Arabic concept of hila, or stratagem. On the one hand, his scholarship integrated Arabic storytelling into the Western world, synthesizing Christian and Muslim thought. On the other hand, al-Wazzan wrote his treatises carefully and cautiously, lest Christians or Muslims challenged his orthodoxy. Davis argues convincingly that al-Wazzan’s corpus needs to be examined with his autobiography in mind.
While Davis’ book is engaging, “Trickster Travels” partakes in several of the pitfalls of cultural history. Above all, Davis employs too much conjecture in her book. For example, in her long – and virtually unnecessary – chapter on sex, Davis, drawing on the slang al-Wassan uses in his "Geography," raises the possibility that al-Wazzan frequented the brothels of Rome and Africa and that he may have engaged in homosexual activity or had suppressed homoerotic desires. While he may have had such tendencies, Davis does not provide enough evidence to support this claim. The second pitfall of cultural history present in Davis’ book is that the modern concept of ‘identity’ is imposed on al-Wassan’s life. Although Davis does show that al-Wassan realized that he was caught in between worlds, she does not demonstrate that al-Wassan viewed himself as an ‘individual’ in the modern sense of the word. Al-Wassan seems less concerned with identity politics and more concerned with the more philosophical question of what is truth.
These faults aside, Davis’s book is a fine monograph. Davis’s prose is clear and easy to read. The book, printed by a major publishing house, is accessible to a wide reading audience and could be used in an undergraduate class to introduce students to global history in the sixteenth century. Despite being a work of popular history, the work is an impressive product of world-class scholarship. There are one hundred pages of notes, a small glossary of Arabic words, and an extraordinary bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
6 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
With So Much Gossamer, Really a 2 1/2 Star
By Grey Wolffe
This book starts out with the mention of "King Manuel I of Portugal presenting Pope Leo X with a white elephant from India". I know that Professor Zemon Davis (ZD) didn't intent this as irony but it is. Most of this book, a white elephant in itself, is based on heresy, guesses and flights of fantasy. The only parts of the book that she is truly able to document are the nine years that 'Leo Africanus: Giovanni Leone" spent in Europe, with seven of those being in Italy.
While in Italy he is purported to have written "Description of Africa" which was considered one of the few books written in Europe in the sixteenth century to document the Geography and sociology of North Africa. The book was written in Italian by the slave "Yuhanna al-Asad" who was born in Granada (Spain), brought up in Fez (Morocco) and captured by Christian pirates and given as a gift to Pope Leo X. This is the extent of what is known about our hero.
ZD spends over two hundred and seventy pages telling us this story that could be contained in a paragraph. The rest of the book are her musing on the Roman Catholic Church and the machinasation of the church curia over how to counter Martin Luther and to recapture North Africa and the Holy Land from the Moslems.
If your interested in this book read the Intro and the Chapters on Italy and the Comparison between Islam and Christianity, and skip the rest. As an example of the 'wistfulness' of this book, ZD spends sixteen pages on his 'return' after telling us that nothing is known about what happened to him after he left Italy.
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