Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

Natalie Zemon Davis

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dec 31, 2010 - History - 448 pages

"[A] fascinating tale of a man forced . . . to live between incompatible worlds. Highly recommended." --Library Journal Al-Hasan al-Wazzan--born in Granada to a Muslim family that in 1492 went to Morocco--became famous as the great Renaissance writer Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa to be published in Europe (in 1550). He had been captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by the pope; when he was released and baptized, he lived a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone; by 1527, it is likely that he returned to North Africa and to the language, culture, and faith in which he had been raised. Natalie Zemon Davis offers a virtuoso study of the fragmentary, partial, and often contradictory traces that al-Hasan al-Wazzan left behind him, and a superb interpretation of his extraordinary life and work.

What people are saying

Review: Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

User Review  - Karen - Goodreads

What became clear to me as I was reading this is that there is very little in the way of hard facts concerning the man called Leo Africanus. Davis attempts to analyze his writings and other materials ...

Review: Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

User Review  - Tariq Mahmood - Goodreads

Found this book tough going as it is a proper history book of a Muslim traveller living in Rome for nine years. I was fascinated to read how much literary endeavours were undertaken by the Muslim ...

About the author

Natalie Zemon Davis is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emerita at Princeton University. Her books include Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision and Woman on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
• Author: Natalie Zemon Davis
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
• ISBN: 0374706662, 9780374706661
• Length: 448 pages
• Subjects: History / General