Alastair Hamilton is Professor Emeritus of the History of the Radical Reformation at the University of Amsterdam, the C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute Professor of the History of Ideas at Leiden University, and the Arcadian Visiting Research Professor at the School of Advanced Study, London University, attached to the Warburg Institute.

Maurits van den Boogert is researcher at Leiden University, and is currently working on Ottoman miscellaneous manuscripts.

Bart Westerweel is Professor Emeritus of Early Modern English Literature at Leiden University.

The eleven articles in this book seek to document the interest in the Levant that prevailed in the Republic of Letters from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century. The emphasis is on those collectors of manuscripts and antiquaries who either travelled in the Middle East (the Vecchietti brothers, John Greaves and Patrick Russell) or who, remaining in Europe, acted through agents and correspondents – scholars such as Peiresc, John Selden and Robert Boyle. But themes such as the discussion prompted by European translations of the Quran and by scholarly enterprises in the East (such as the Mutaferrika printing press in Istanbul) also come to the fore in a volume which contributes to the history of oriental studies in early modern Europe.

Contributors include: Maurits H. van den Boogert, Alastair Hamilton, Charles G.D. Littleton, Peter N. Miller, Hannah Neudecker, Francis Richard, Jan Schmidt, Zur Shalev, and G.J. Toomer.