Dimensions
162 x 242 x 36mm
In Search of Leo Africanus, A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds.
From acclaimed historian and novelist Natalie Zemon Davis comes an extraordinary story of a most enigmatic man.
The man whom historians know as Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa, is a celebrated but hitherto elusive figure. Al-Hasan al-Wazzan was born in Granada, and grew up in Morocco. He was captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean in 1518 and imprisioned by the Pope, then released, baptised and allowed a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone. In 'Trickster Travels' the distinguished historian Natalie Zemon Davis offers a virtuoso study of the fragmentary, partial and often contradictory traces that al-Hasan al-Wazzan left behind him.
In her characteristically accessible and engaging way, Davis describes this dramatic life in rich detail, scrutinising the evidence of al-Wazzan's movement between cultural worlds, the Islamic and Arab traditions and ideas available to him, and his adventures with Christians and Jews, in a European community of learned men, powerful church leaders and among its ordinary street life.
