Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

(London: Faber and Faber, 2007) 9780571202560. 8vo; original crimson boards, lettered in cream on spine; laminated pictorial dustwrapper, housed in removable protector; pp. (x) + 435, incl. index and credits; plates; maps. Chip from dustwrapper spine panel at head; backstrip lightly bumped at head. Very good condition. "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 imprisoned by the pope, then released, baptized 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. She scrutinizes 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 and powerful church leaders." .