Zukunftsphilologie
2011/ 2012

Elisabetta Benigni

Anselm Turmeda/Abdullah b. Abdullah al-Turjuman (1355-1423): Franciscan Friar, Catalonian Poet, Muslim Polemicist, and Turjuman - Conversion and Translation in the Early Modern Mediterranean World

Elisabetta Benigni graduated from the Università La Sapienza in Rome (Faculty of Oriental Studies) in 2004 and received her PhD in Historical and Philological Studies in the Islamic and Arab World from the same university in 2009. Her dissertation, published in 2010, is based on a diachronic analysis of the genre of adab al‐suğūn (prison literature) in Arab literature, with a particular focus on modern and contemporary literary works. Benigni is also interested in the transmission of texts, translations and cross‐influences in early modern and modern Mediterranean contexts.

Anselm Turmeda/Abdullah b. Abdullah al-Turjuman (1355-1423): Franciscan Friar, Catalonian Poet, Muslim Polemicist, and Turjuman - Conversion and Translation in the Early Modern Mediterranean World

As a fellow of Zukunftsphilologie, she will focus her attention on the life, work and legacy of a Mediterranean thinker, known in romance languages as Fra Anselm Turmeda and in Arabic as Abu Muhammad Abdullah b. Abdullah al‐Turjumān al‐Mayūrqī. Benigni''s project seeks to remedy the schizophrenic representation of this fascinating figure by approaching Turmeda’s life not in terms of national, religious or linguistic categories, but by examining carefully the cultural entanglements that informed it within the context of the historical possibilities of the Mediterranean world in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Her study also engages in an ongoing debate about the coherence – or the lack thereof – of the cultural space known as the Mediterranean world. Benigni aims to give special attention to the role of translation and translators in the making of a Mediterranean lingua franca, not only in the sense of a common language but also in the sense of shared semiotics. Moreover, she will stress the role of mutual exchanges and religious conversions in the proliferation and multiplication of identities in the early modern world.