Juan de segobia and the manuscripts of the qur’ān’s latin translation by robert of ketton

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the close relationship between two of the extant manuscripts of the Qur’ān’s Latin translation by Robert of Ketton (1142-1143), and the figure of Juan de Segobia (1390/5-1458), who from 1437 had studied this version of the Koran until he himself, with the collaboration of a Spanish alfaquí, produced a new translation. After exposing the news that Juan de Segobia offers about the copies of the Latin Qur’ān that he possessed, a general arrangement of the manuscript tradition of the Alchoran by Robert of Ketton is outlined. This is divided into two families, α (that of the older codices) and β (that of the more recent ones, derived from a manuscript brought from Constantinople to Basel by John of Ragusio in 1437). The comparison between the wording offered by a group of manuscripts of family α (in particular that of the codex Paris BNF lat. 3393) with the variants present in the codices of family β and in the edition of Theodor Bibliander itself (1543) allows us to conclude that the codex Paris BNF lat. 3669 is a copy of a manuscript supervised by Juan de Segobia, which offered a revised wording of the Alchoran by Robert of Ketton based on the variants taken from the codex of John of Ragusio.