Al-Mawsil fi al-qarn al-thamin ‘ashar hasab mudhakkirat duminiku Lanza. [English cover-title:] Mosul in the 18th Century According to the Memoir of Domenico Lanza.
LANZA Domenico.; BIDAWID Rev. Raphael translator (1953.)
£375.00
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A Dominican Priest's Memoir of Mosul
Second edition. Arabic text. 8vo. Original terracotta printed wrappers, stapled; extremities worn with loss (text fully intact), some sections of wrappers pasted down, paper browned. A good copy of an extremely fragile publication. 101, [1]blank pp. Mosul, The Eastern Press,
A rare Arabic translation of Lanza’s manuscript account of his time at the Dominican Mission in Mosul. As one of the few eighteenth-century European sources on the city (and wider region), it is an important record of Mosul’s population, geography and historical events. The first Arabic edition, published in 1951, was the first printed version of any part of the original text.
Lanza (1718-1782) spent two periods in Mosul, firstly from January 1754 to March 1761 and then from March 1764 to May 1770. The preface states that he composed two accounts, a lost manuscript on the history of the Mission and a surviving record of his travels, titled Compendiosa relazione istorica dei viaggi fatti dal Padre Domenico Lanza dell’Ordine dei Predicatori da Roma in Oriente dall’anno 1753 al 1771 (Archivum Generale Ordinis Praedicatorum, S. Sabina, Roma, Ms. XIII, 07.2000). Having learnt of the travelogue, Rev. Raphael Bidawid made a copy of the original manuscript in Rome, which he subsequently gifted to the Convent of the Dominican Fathers in Mosul. The present Arabic translation followed, opening the text up to a wider readership among the local population.
“As a priest and a physician, Lanza contacted a large number of notables in Mosul. He could describe society and the life of the town with first-hand information, even though his apostolate was aimed at composing the differences between the Catholic Church and the Nestorian dissenters. For this activity Lanza is now considered the forerunner of ecumenism in Mosul.” (Galetti, Kurdistan and its Christians).
Rare. The second edition is considerably rarer than the first, with no copies in LibraryHub and just two located by OCLC, at Columbia and Harvard.
Reference: Mirella Galetti, Kurdistan and its Christians, https://www.institutkurde.org/en/conferences/kurdish_studies_irbil_2006/Mirella+GALLETTI.html (accessed 20 August 2022).
Stock Code: 246410
