The «Mithridates Qur’ān » (ms. Vat. ebr. 357) at the junction of Arabic knowledge in 15th-century Italy

Abstract

The Quranic works of Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada, alias Flavius Mithridates (cerca 1440-1489?), a Jewish-Sicilian convert with a complex background who was professor of Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, have been subjected to judgments that have ranged from impassioned praise to disdain. An analysis of the tasks of collation, translation and commmentary carried out by Moncada (and other hands) on the “Judeo-Arabic” Quran Vat. Ebr. 357 reveals the close link between what are a priori the most striking aspects of «Moncadian» Quranology and its context of linguistic and cultural formation, leading to a re-examination of what is probably the richest archive of Quranic scholarship from late 15^th-century Italy.