An Interview with Alastair Hamilton

Abstract

Alastair Hamilton has transformed the study of how early modern Europe came to know—and misread—the Christian East and Islam. After influential work on the Radical Reformation, he turned to European Arabic learning and to the Christian communities of the Arabic-speaking world, tracing the traffic of ideas between Europe and the Middle East through translation, confessional polemic, and collecting. His books, including The Copts and the West, 1439–1822 (2006) and Arabs and Arabists (2021), reconstruct the worlds of Arabists and Eastern Christians where scholarship, devotion, and rivalry were entangled. Across these studies he examines how sources are weighed, apocrypha and forgeries sifted, and enduring illusions produced. Hamilton has taught at Urbino, Leiden, Amsterdam, London and Cairo, spent many years at the Warburg Institute, and edits Brill’s series ‘The History of Oriental Studies’. He is currently completing a book on Western Christians and mosques.