Daniel König edits volume on "Latin and Arabic"

As linguistic systems comprising a large variety of written and oral registers, including derivate “languages” and “dialects,” Latin and Arabic have been of paramount importance for the history of the Euromediterranean area since the antiquity. Moreover, due to their long-term functions as languages of administration, intellectual activity, and religion, they are often regarded as cultural markers of the European and the (Arabic-)Islamic sphere, respectively. This volume explores the many dimensions and ramifications of the Latin-Arabic entanglements from both macro-historical and micro-historical perspectives. Visions of history marked by the binary opposition of “Islam” and “the West” tend to ignore these important facets of Euromediterranean entanglement, as do historical studies that explain complex transcultural processes without giving attention to their linguistic dimension.

The volume comprises of two sections. The first one, which includes Konig´s essay “Latin-Arabic Entanglement: a short history,” analyses the relationship between the two idioms in a macro-historical perspective. The second section collects a series of case studies ranging from the Medieval to the contemporary period, and spanning across Europe and the Middle East. Among the contributors is Jan Scholz, former doctoral student at the Cluster "Asia and Europe," who wrote an article on "Cicero and Quintilian in the Arab World? Latin Rhetoric in Modern Arabic Rhetorical and Homiletical Manuals."

The volume is part of the
Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality series in Heidelberg University’s publishing branch,
heiUP. The series is committed to publishing research that investigates the dynamics of transcultural relationships in any region of the globe and includes works positioned both within and across disciplines. You can access the volulme "
Latin and Arabic. Entangled Histories" in an open format.

Daniel König was start-up-professor for the area of historical and philological studies at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. He was also coordinator of the DFG-Network "Transcultural Entanglements in the Medieval Euromediterranean (500-1500).” Trained as a Latin medievalist historian and an arabist, his research at the HCTS focused on the entanglements between the Latin-Christian and the Arabic-Islamic spheres between 650 and 1600 CE. Since 2018, he holds the chair for the history of religions at the
University of Konstanz.

Jan Scholz participated in a research project on Islamic sermons titled "
Islamic Preaching and Rhetorical Theory" at the former Cluster "Asia and Europe." There, he defended his doctoral thesis on Islamic preaching in contemporary Egypt, for which he conducted fieldwork in Egypt between 2011 and 2015.