Jan Loop, University of Copenhagen
The Qur’an in the Age of Confessionalization. Theodor Bibliander’s Edition of 1543/50 and Its Impact
Theodor Bibliander’s edition of a Medieval Latin Translation of the Qur’an is a milestone in the history of the European Qur’an. Up to this moment, Europeans had only limited access to Qur’an translations either in rare manuscripts or in selected printed passages.
The Basel edition made the Latin translation widely available and was read in Protestant as well as in Catholic Europe, and sometimes even in the Islamic world. The edition had an enormous impact not only on anti-Islamic polemics, but also on a wide range of theological and confessional writings from sermons to church historical accounts and missionary handbooks, as well as on the burgeoning study of Arabic and Islam in scholarly circles.
This lecture will suggest some new perspectives on the historical context of this edition and highlight some stations of its reception from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
Jan Loop is Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Cultures at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at New York University Abu Dhabi and a PI in the ERC Synergy Project ‘The European Qur’an. Islamic Scripture in European Religion and Culture‘.
His teaching and research interests are in the intellectual, religious and cultural history of Europe and the Near East, with a special focus on Western knowledge of the Arab, Ottoman and Persian world between 1450 – 1800. His first book, Auslegungskulturen (2003), is a comparative study of Christian and Islamic hermeneutic concepts in early modern times. His second book, a monograph on the Reformed Church historian and orientalist Johann Heinrich Hottinger (1620-1667) and the significance of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the 17th century, appeared in 2013 in the Oxford-Warburg series.
Together with colleagues at the Universities of Madrid, Nantes and Naples, Jan is leading the ERC Synergy Project ‘The European Qur’an’. The project is funded with €10m over six years (2019-2025). It’s aim is to study the place of the Muslim holy book in European cultural and religious history (c.1150-1850) and to describe how the Qur’an is interpreted, adapted, used, and formed in Christian European contexts – often in close interaction with the Islamic world.
At NYU AD Jan has been involved in developing the research initiative “Recognizing Religions. The Cultural Dynamics of Religious Encounters and Interactions in Historical Perspective”.
Jan Loop is a general editor of Brill’s series ‘History of Oriental Studies’. He published, in this series, a paper collection on ‘The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe‘ (Brill, 2017) (with Alastair Hamilton and Charles Burnett), an essay collection on Scholarship between Europe and the Levant (2020) (with Jill Kraye) and, most recently, Hiob Ludolf and Johann Michael Wansleben. Oriental Studies, Politics, and History between Gotha and Africa, 1650-1700 (2024, with Asaph Ben-Tov and Martin Mulsow).
In 2018 he edited a special issue of the Journal of Qur’anic Studies on ‘The Qur’an in Europe‘.
