Samuel Noble – författare

All of the texts chosen for this volume are interesting in their own right, but the collection of these sources into a single volume, with helpful introductions and bibliographies, makes this book an invaluable resource for the study of Arabic Christianity and, indeed, the history of Christianity more broadly. ― Hugoye: Journal of Syriac StudiesArabic was among the first languages in which the Gospel was preached. The Book of Acts mentions Arabs as being present at the first Pentecost in Jerusalem, where they heard the Christian message in their native tongue. Christian literature in Arabic is at least 1,300 years old, the oldest surviving texts dating from the 8th century. Pre-modern Arab Christian literature embraces such diverse genres as Arabic translations of the Bible and the Church Fathers, biblical commentaries, lives of the saints, theological and polemical treatises, devotional poetry, philosophy, medicine, and history. Yet in the Western historiography of Christianity, the Arab Christian Middle East is treated only peripherally, if at all.The first of its kind, this anthology makes accessible in English representative selections from major Arab Christian works written between the eighth and eigtheenth centuries. The translations are idiomatic while preserving the character of the original. The popular assumption is that in the wake of the Islamic conquests, Christianity abandoned the Middle East to flourish elsewhere, leaving its original heartland devoid of an indigenous Christian presence. Until now, several of these important texts have remained unpublished or unavailable in English. Translated by leading scholars, these texts represent the major genres of Orthodox literature in Arabic.Noble and Treiger provide an introduction that helps form a comprehensive history of Christians within the Muslim world. The collection marks an important contribution to the history of medieval Christianity and the history of the medieval Near East.

This first volume of Collected Works of the ERC Project TYPARABIC focuses on the history of printing during the 18th century in the Ottoman Empire and the Romanian Principalities among diverse linguistic and confessional communities. Although "most roads lead to Istanbul," the many pathways of early modern Ottoman printing also connected authors, readers and printers from Central and South-Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Levant. The papers included in this volume are grouped in three sections. The first focuses on the first Turkish-language press in the Ottoman capital, examining the personality and background of its founder, İbrahim Müteferrika, the legal issues it faced, and its context within the multilingual Istanbul printing world. The second section brings together studies of printing and readership in Central and South-East Europe in Romanian, Greek and Arabic. The final section is made up of studies of the Arabic liturgical and biblical texts that were the main focus of Patriarch Athanasios III Dabbās’ efforts in the Romanian Principalities and Aleppo. This volume will be of interest to scholars of the history of printing, Ottoman social history, Christian Arabic literature and Eastern Orthodox liturgy.

This volume is devoted to the wide range of themes explored by the TYPARABIC project team. It includes essays on the religious and scholarly life of the Arabic-speaking Christians in Ottoman Syria and Lebanon in the 18th century, the efforts of Catholic and Protestant missions to distribute theological and liturgical books among Arab Christians, and collections of Oriental printed books in Western Europe, the Romanian Principalities, Georgia, and Ottoman Syria and Lebanon. It examines the transfer of artistic elements from Western to Eastern European presses and between Arab book printing centers, as well as the establishment of the first Arabic press in Aleppo in the early 1700s and the beginnings of the Khinshara press (Mount Lebanon). The volume concludes with a section on the promotion of printing in the Romanian Principalities during the reign of the Phanariot princes.“[…] these books offer new contexts for understanding what print is for and what books can do. [...] They herald a thrilling moment for the expansion of book historical scholarship in ways that redefine the historical record while also offering fuller, more appropriate contexts interpreting it. In doing so, they themselves are bringing about that revolutionary change in book culture.” (Elizabeth Savage, review in: The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 119, nr. 4, 519-522)