An Introduction to The Arcadian Library 1 by Dr Robert ... - Wolfsberg

More documents

Recommendations

Info

An Introduction to The Arcadian Library 4 by Dr Robert Jones creative dynamic when East and West resolve or just ignore their differences and join forces to exchange knowledge and bring about positive change and understanding. Looking at Pascal Coste’s beautiful views of the mosques of Cairo, do we really have to regard them as part of a devious conspiracy as some would have us believe 6. The Arcadian Library has exhibited books at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, twice at the Brunei Gallery in London, and in 2001, we mounted a joint exhibition in Antwerp at the Plantin-Moretus Museum. This wonderful museum of printing history is in the 16 th -century house of the printer Christophe Plantin, who was greatly interested in the Arab world and whose son in law, Franciscus Raphelengius, wrote the first Arabic-Latin dictionary to be printed with Arabic type. The title of the exhibition summed up the rich melange of influences: Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence in Antwerp’s Golden Age. 7/8. John Ronayne designed and set up the exhibitions in the Brunei Gallery and here in Wolfsberg. As you see in Antwerp, he completely transformed the Plantin museum with this installation. Just two months after 9/11, the exhibition attracted a large audience and much critical acclaim including the comment by the Financial Times reviewer who wrote: ‘In a sea of contemporary mistrust, [the Arcadian exhibition] is a small, clear plea for understanding.’ Perhaps these words express the most we can expect in terms of relevance from a private library of books. The Arcadian Library is just that: a small, clear plea for understanding. Here in 2011 on the wooded shores of Lake Constance, we are in a quite different milieu to Paris, London or Antwerp. We are just minutes away from the birthplace at Kesswill of one of the 20 th -century’s most original thinkers, Carl Gustav Jung;
An Introduction to The Arcadian Library 5 by Dr Robert Jones 9. and we are just an hour’s drive away from Europe’s greatest monastic library at Sankt Gallen with its inestimable treasure of early medieval manuscripts. In Sankt Gallen of the 9 th and 10 th centuries the production of the scriptorium proceeded regardless of any influence from the Arab world, except perhaps for the anxiety caused by the occasional threat to the Alpine passes emanating from the Arab stronghold at Fraxinet, in the hinterland of St Tropez. And in the later Middle Ages there is only the faintest trace in Sankt Gallen of the Arabic learning that was received in Spain and Sicily and was to have such a profound effect on the mainstream of European learning from the 11th century to the Renaissance. I refer, however, to one manuscript in the Stiftsbibliothek in Sankt Gallen that I had the privilege of inspecting yesterday. 10. Codex 837 is a composite of different texts: it contains an Aristotelian work (not, incidentally, the lost second book of the Poetics made famous in the novel by Umberto Eco!). The manuscript also contains the work of three 9 th -century philosophers, al-Kindi, Qusta ibn Luqa and Isaac ben Salomon Israili, a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, all of whom wrote in Arabic, were translated to Latin, and are preserved thus in the Sankt Gallen manuscript. The significance for European learning of these Arabic texts is precisely the kind of thing that excites us at the Arcadian Library; and Tim Stanley will allude to some of the remarkable manuscript material preserved there. One very direct link that I should mention between Wolfsberg and the history of European interest in Islam is as follows. 11. In the UBS art collection, there are the two portraits of the two reformers, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, from the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Younger. They hang in the main chateau. Jan Loop will be mentioning these reformers in his talk as they both provided prefaces for the first printing of the Qur’an in Latin, issued at Basel in 1543. The Arcadian
Page 1 and 2: An Introduction to The Arcadian Lib
Page 3: An Introduction to The Arcadian Lib
Page 7: An Introduction to The Arcadian Lib

An Introduction to The Arcadian Library 1 by Dr Robert ... - Wolfsberg

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?