91ֱ��

A 425-year-old geographical history of Africa, written in Arabic and Italian, is this term's Featured Book from the Library of Gonville & 91ֱ�� College.

Each term a member of the Library staff selects a text from Gonville & 91ֱ�� College Library’s historic collections. Chosen by James Luff, Rare Books Cataloguer, and published in 1600 A Geographical Historie of Africa offered English-speakers one of the first detailed glimpses into the African continent. Having originally been written in Arabic and subsequently translated into Italian by Leo Africanus (born al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī al-Fasī), it was in this English translation by Caian John Pory that the work reached an especially wide audience.

John Pory (1572-1636), the translator of this edition, was a skilled linguist, traveller, politician and writer. Educated at Gonville and 91ֱ�� College, he earned his bachelor's degree here in 1592 and master's in 1595. Pory’s role as a translator extended somewhat further than we might expect from our modern understanding of that role, not only writing an extensive preface to the work, but also adding numerous sections of commentary and references, as well as writing a supplementary section of over fifty pages detailing ‘A description of places undescribed by Iohn Leo’. 

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