Family Name: Marracci
First Name: Luigi
Birth Date: Fri, Oct 05, 1612
Birth Place: Torcigliano di Camaiore (Lucca)
Death Date: Thu, Feb 04, 1700
Death Place: Rome
Main places of activity:
Place From To
Rome 1628 1637
Place From To
Lucca 1637 1644
Place From To
Rome 1644 1699
Personal info:
Education

Marracci was the son of Antonio and Margherita di Michele.

His education as a priest began at the Congregation of the Clerics Regular of the Mother of God in Lucca in 1627, where he also performed different teaching and administrative duties very early.

From 1629 to 1638, Marracci joined the Saint Mary college in Rome to increase his knowledge of classical Greek and Hebrew. During his stay, he became proficient in the ancient Syriac and Chaldean languages.

According to Marracci himself, it was after meeting  Maronite clerics that he decided to teach himself Arabic, a language he eventually mastered with the initial help of Levantine prelates.
Career

Marracci's career was spent in service of the Catholic church.

After teaching rhetoric and grammar in Lucca for a few years, he was summoned to Rome by Innocent X to take part in the collective translation of the Bible in Arabic, a long stranded project that had been revived by Propaganda Fide in the 1640s.

Marracci moved smoothly within the circles of Roman aristocracy, quickly becoming the confessor of the duchess Camilla Savelli Farnese and of cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi. When Odescalchi was elected Pope Innocent XI in 1676, Marracci moved to the Vatican and dramatically increased his influence on the Roman Church's policies, also accumulating different official roles: he was a consultor for several congregations: the Congregation for Indulgences and Sacred Relics, the Sacred Congregation of the Index and the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.

In 1656, Marracci was appointed chair of the Arabic language at the Sapienza university, which he held until his death.
Financial Situation

As a professor of Arabic, Marracci earned the considerable sum of 200 scudi a year.
Translations Other Works

translations activities

Marracci's greatest achievement is undoubtedly his bilingual version of the Qur'an, issued in 1698.

Together with the Arabic text and its Latin translation, Marracci provided his readers with an extensive commentary and a theological rebuttal of Islam. In his Praefatio, he declared the controversialist nature of his translation, rallying other Christian scholars in the refutation of Islam by showing its inconsistencies, 'armis suis hostes aggredior' (I attack the enemies with their own weapons). In itself, this approach already constituted a significant break with the tradition of European anti-Muslim polemicists, usually relying on Christian sources for their theological battles.

Besides its flagrant confessional nature, Marracci's translation is the result of his rigorous work as a scholar and as a translator, which brought him to an unprecedented engagement with the Islamic tradition. Both Marracci's version of the Qur'an and the apparatus attached to it draw from an impressively wide variety of sources: from the Muslim manuscript and printed commentaries and glosses he could access in the Vatican libraries to talmudic and rabbinic texts, to previous translations, some of which were by Protestant scholars.

By his own admission, Marracci did not seek to produce a pleasant Latin prose, but was rather concerned with the literal sense of his translation, reconstructing the traditional Sunni interpretation of the text. Nevertheless, his version instilled new life into the studies of the Qur'an and constituted both a turning point and the source of most vernacular translations published until the end of the eighteenth century, meeting a huge success in the United Provinces, Germany, England and France (see Hamilton 2018).

secondary bibliography references

Massimo Rizzi, Le prime traduzioni del Corano in Italia. Contesto storico e attitudine dei traduttori; Ludovico Marracci (1612-1700) e la lettura critica del commentario coranico di al-Zamahsari (1075-1144), L'Harmattan, 2007.

Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam, Oneworld, 2009.

Alexander Bevilacqua, 'The Qur'an Translations of Marracci and Sale', in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 76 (2013), 93-130.

Gianluca D'Errico, Il Corano e il Pontefice: Ludovico Marracci fra cultural islamica e Curia papale, Carocci, 2015.

Reinhold L. Glei and Roberto Tottoli, Ludovico Marracci at work: the evolution of his Latin translation of the Qur'an in the light of his newly discovered manuscripts: with an edition and a comparative linguistic analysis, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016.

Alastair Hamilton, 'After Marracci: The Reception of Ludovico Marracci’s Edition of The Qur’an in Northern Europe from the Late Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries', Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 20, n°3 (2018),175-92.

Translations

  • Bible

  • Translation Title: Biblia sacra Arabica Sacræ Congregationis de Propaganda Fide ivssv edita ad vsum Ecclesiarum Orientalium
  • Original Author:
  • Original title: Bible
  • lang: Hebrew
  • Translation: Biblia sacra Arabica Sacræ Congregationis de Propaganda Fide ivssv edita ad vsum Ecclesiarum Orientalium
  • Publisher: Sacræ Congregat. de Propaganda Fide
  • Pub. Place: Rome
  • Pub. Date: 1671
  • Lang: Latin and Arabic
  • Note:

    Marracci was responsible for the corrections and revisions on the first draft of the translation.

    Although ready in 1650, this bilingual bible was not published until 1671, due to a controversy regarding its sources: a party inside the committee appointed to prepare the Arabic version supported the usage of the official Vulgate of the text, while other members insisted that the traditional Arabic versions already known to Levantine Christians should constitute the basis of some passages (Bevilacqua 2013).

  • Qur'an

  • Translation Title: Alcorani textus universus ex correctioribus Arabum exemplaribus
  • Original title: Qur'an
  • lang: Arabic
  • Translation: Alcorani textus universus ex correctioribus Arabum exemplaribus
  • Publisher: Typographia Seminaria
  • Pub. Place: Padua
  • Pub. Date: 1698
  • Lang: Latin
  • Note:

    Marracci's

    Qur'an

    includes the

    Prodromus ad refutationem Alcorani

    (separately printed in 1691 in Rome) as its first volume, and the

    Refutatio Alcorani

    , a second volume containing the Latin translation with the parallel Arabic text, together with Marracci's commentaries and notes.


    Although Marracci had finished his translation by 1682, he was denied the permission to use the Arabic press of the Propaganda Fide, given the congregation's recenty history with banned publications related to Islam.

    Eventually, Marracci managed to use the Oriental press established in the seminary of Padua by Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo, after gathering the fonts from all across Italy (Bevilacqua, 2013).

calamaio

By:

  • Giovanni Lista