John-Paul Ghobrial
University of Oxford
The Use of Spanish Sources in IIlyās ibn Ḥannā al-Mawṣilī's Account of the New World
In the late seventeenth century, an East Syrian priest travelled to South America and wrote what appears to be the earliest account of the New World in Arabic. Based on the extant manuscripts of this work, this paper will explore how Ilyās ibn Ḥannā al-Mawṣilī worked with a set of oral and written sources—primarily Spanish and Arabic—and it seeks to place the text into a wider context of Arabic literary production in this period, both religious and secular.
John-Paul Ghobrial is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Balliol College. His publications include The Whispers of Cities (2013) and a series of articles on the place of Arabic in the early modern world including, most recently, ‘The Archives of Orientalism and its Keepers: Re-Imagining the Histories of Arabic Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present (2016), and ‘The Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri: An Arabic Teacher in Early Modern Europe’, in Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett (eds.), The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe (2017). From 2015 to 2020, he is the Principal Investigator of an ERC-funded project on ‘Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World’.